Tony Schreiner's Blog

I'm not sure when the changes happened, so this could be really old news, but I was pleasantly surprised when I visited http://my.msn.com today. It's always been configurable, but now it's pretty slick. You can easily add and remove content modules...

One interesting change I discovered in XP SP2 was that Subspace Continuum -- the first and (by far) best massively multiplayer online game -- now runs on XP without entering an infinite loop trying to launch the process. This only repro'd under certain...

In a response to my first blog entry on IE in XP SP2, Tom Gilder notices another new security prompt on downloaded files for XP SP2: Also, whilst on the subject of XP SP2, if you download a signed EXE to the desktop and run it, it gives you a security...

Omar Shahine links to a notepad replacement , including instructions for bypassing System File Protection to replace the notepad.exe binary. As a hardcore emacs user I've never bothered to replace notepad, but this would be very useful on test machines...

Many of the security features I've mentioned in previous entries are opt-in, so if you have a custom application that hosts the web browser control you won't automatically be impacted by them. But what about the many great applications that host the web...

First, congratulations to everybody who contributed to the successful launch of the space shuttle Discovery this evening. I watched online via. NASA TV and it's been a long time since I've watched a "live" liftoff. In some recent meetings people have...

On Friday I talked about some of the problems with unbalanced CoInitialize() and CoUninitialize() calls and how to debug an unbalanced CoUninitialize inside IE7. At the end I mentioned that using IInitializeSpy in an extension to "fix" an unbalanced init...

One thing that amused me as I mindlessly surfed the web while stuck in my parents house due to the snowstorm in Colorado was the number of sites that still attempt to show pop-up advertisements -- sites like cnn.com and weather.com, not just shady sites...

A while back I started getting tired of the default Outlook reply colors (yeah, I was bored...). The font picker under Options/Mail Format/Fonts doesn't let you choose colors outside the standard 16, and I didn't want to use the Stationery option, so...

In the past I’ve found debugging walkthroughs useful for picking up new techniques. In that spirit here’s a quick rundown of a bug I was investigating today that may have some useful tidbits. This was a crash in IE that involved a toolbar that I...

For best performance, you should make sure to break in your cables. Otherwise, you may be getting substandard audio performance and transfer rates - I hear that breaking in your modem cable will let you get 64kbps out of a standard 56k modem!. ;-)

As a developer who specializes in client-side applications, I can't help but be amused and somewhat puzzled by some of the types of web-based applications people come up with. A great example are web sites that help resize and crop digital photos. There...

Yesterday I stumbled across HD View which utilizes the very interesting new HD Photo format plus many other technologies to demonstrate how massive multi-GigaPixel images can be created and hosted on the web. It's a nice viewer reminiscent of Microsoft...

The IE blog has announced the availability of the first public beta for IE7: IE7 Beta 2 Preview . This preview isn't intended to be widely used by the general public, but if you're reading this blog you're probably technical enough to try it. Over...

My coworker Jeff Davis posted about IE7 and the cyclical nature of blogging, especially for those of us working on things that haven't yet been publicly announced. It includes a great ship analogy, and having been on the "critical path" for most of IE7...

In yesterday's post I gave an example of a bug where an attempted micro-optimization combined with a common C++ idiom causes a fairly subtle bug. For those who didn't look long enough to catch it, the flaw was in these two lines: BOOL _fRaining:1; _fRaining...

In a previous post I talked about a subtle bug between IE7 and the Office Handwriting recognition service that we discovered too late into IE7 to ship a work-around for, but described how end-users can fix this on their own. However, a couple users have...

Eric Sink has a good article on the process of triaging bugs. In it he pokes a little bit of fun at the people who don't understand why all good software ships with known bugs and then discusses a process for determining which ones to fix. Determining...

A post from Raymond Chen today reminds me of the first application compatibility issue I debugged (and fixed). At the time I was working on the MSN client and our team was on loan to load balance compatibility bugs for the release of Windows XP. This...

Want to work in one of the best teams at Microsoft? Both the Shell (as in Explorer, not cmd.exe (or Monad)*) and Internet Explorer teams are hiring SDE s and SDET s. Heck, maybe you could be the one who helps implement tabbed browsing, rendering transparent...

Last fall I purchased a digital SLR: the popular (and relatively inexpensive) Canon Rebel XT. I had been dabbling with digital cameras for a few years and was having increasing amounts of fun using the limited manual controls of my Canon S50. As a...

A little rant to prove I'm still alive. :-) Here's a pattern I see every now and then that makes my brain explode. This is a simplification, but the two bools that are named exactly the same except the word "Dont" are real, as is the "partial assert...

Channel9 now has a section dedicated to IE. Jump on in! http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel9.InternetExplorerFeedback

Over the weekend I bought an HP LaserJet 1012, the first printer I've had in years. Good printer at a great deal this week at Staples ($150). I let the driver install with all of the default options. After rebooting (sigh...) I was prompted with the...

The IE blog has an announcement about Tabbed Browsing in IE7. One of the reasons this blog has been so quiet over the past few, uhm, months is that I've been spending a considerable amount of my time working with a few others on the "Browser UI" team...