Wictor Wilen

We have been doing a lot of work, on our product, with dynamic updates of web pages - you know the AJAX stuff. Most of the server side results are returned as XML and are delivered from different Web Services. Since I really like optimizations and like good and nice looking code I have been going back and forth in decision of how to return data to the client; XML or JSON. JSON are in some cases more effective but when the object model it tries to represent gets more complex you neither get nice looking code nor saves that much bytes.

Here comes yet another update to the msfeedicon utility, version 1.4. The msfeedicon utility is a free notification icon for the Windows RSS platform, that comes with Internet Explorer 7. The utility will show whenever one of your feeds have been updated and gives you easy access to view the feed. All this so you do not have to waste space on your screen with the Internet Explorer 7 Feeds task pane or some Windows Vista Sidebar gadget.

LiveSide reports that MSN is trying to get back in the business, taking back whatever they have lost to Windows Live. The first battle looks like it’s going to happen on the mobile arena. In the first corner we have the mobile version of www.live.com - mobile.live.com. And in the other corner the mobile MSN version - beta.mobile.msn.com. At a first glance, for me, the winner is live.com since when logging in you have instant access to the feeds, mail, gadgets and other personalization you have done in the rich live.com. The mobile MSN of course contains the classic MSNBC news, FOX sports and other types of content. So if you are interested in that maybe MSN will be the winner. Content vs. customisation?

The Domain-Specific Languages for Visual Studio 2005 Redistributable Components are now available from Microsoft Downloads. You can now use the DSL designer in Visual Studio 2005 Standard (and above), sorry you can’t use these extensions in the Express versions, without having the complete Visual Studio 2005 SDK installed.

The XML Reference Guide is a great site containing everything you need to know on XML standards, from the Document Object Model to RSS to AJAX. Each topic contains in-depth descriptions and samples wich allows you to easily read up on a technology or just have it as a reference whenever you need to. Bookmark this and save for future use.

I have been trying to setup my HTC TyTN to get the synchronization to work over the air using 3G or Wifi so I’m really connected to work 24/7 :-) After setting up the Exchange 2003 servers using the excellent step-by-step guide on TechNet for this purpose I was ready to test it all. But I ran into trouble directly and the ActiveSync reported an error: 0x80072F0D - invalid certificate. No problem, just install it to the trusted certificate store on the Windows Mobile phone…I thought. But the problem is that it’s not that easy done. After some googling I ran into Ant Drewery’s entry Windows Mobile 5.0 & ActiveSync which discussed this problem. I used his method to install the certificate into the Windows Mobile phone and it worked fine, after some initial trouble. I made the mistake first and tried to install the certificate that you get from the padlock icon, which will not work. You have to get it from the Trusted Root Certificate Store or from your administrator (which should have a backup of the original certificate installed on the OWA IIS).

The IEBlog announced that the IE Developer Toolbar Beta 3 is available now. It contains some nice updates such as new interface with an icon in the command bar for easy access to the DOM Explorer and finally a great HTML source viewer. Time will also tell if the R-character hijack bug is still left, I have not noticed it yet… Note: You have to uninstall previous betas of the IE Developer Toolbar, otherwise you will have some nice crashes of Internet Explorer when trying to access the toolbar.

When trying to install the latest NVIDIA ForceWare (97.46) drivers for Windows Vista RTM I ran into some troubles. First of all I downloaded English version which should be installed on a english Windows Vista Ultimate. This did not work at all. The setup exited and said nothing has changed - do you want to reboot? Then Windows Vista popped up an error dialog stating that I needed to download a fix for Age of Empires - duh!

Finally, NVIDIA WHQL ForceWare Release 95, version 97.46, is available for Windows Vista RTM (build 6000). It’s available for download at the NVIDIA website (x86 and x64). I have not yet tested it but the Release Notes states that support for overscan/underscan is not implemented in this release - not good, this is what I was expecting from this release, there are multiple things in the control panel not yet implemented (as they were in Windows XP). There are some bugs fixed and I hope the flickering when switching from the Desktop to Media Center is gone.