Nigel Parker's Outside Line : ie8

FTW IE6, IE7, IE8, Chrome and Firefox running together on Windows 7 in Windows XP Mode

nparker — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 04:56:00 GMT

When you buy Windows 7 (pro or ultimate) you get Windows XP "virtualized" for free.

What this means that if you are web developer you can finally have IE6, IE7, IE8 all running alongside each other as hardware supported virtual applications.

Take a trip to the Virtual PC site to read the hardware requirements and install Virtual XP Mode.

Check out the quick screen cast that I made to show how all the bits work together.

Donavon West has also done a good blog post on how to get this setup.

To aid with XP Mode we have recently launched http://protectmypc.co.nz a new website that provides more details of our new security offerings including the new free Microsoft Security Essentials that guards you against viruses, spyware and other malicious software on your virtual image.

Use this along with the free version of Expression SuperPreview or fork out the small upgrade price to Expression Web 3 and you get the the full version of SuperPreview, Expression Encoder 3, Screen Capture and Expression Design 3 thrown in as well.

Remember also to check out Giorgio’s MSDN Unplugged video on IE8 developer tools, it has already had an amazing 25,000 views!

Giorgio Sardo's NZ IE8 Road Trip + Web Application Toolkits

nparker — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 02:29:48 GMT

I really enjoyed hosting Giorgio in New Zealand during Tech.Ed and for a couple of days after the event.

There have been a few interesting updates overnight and as part of the Microsoft WebsiteSpark launch, we have released 7 Web Application Toolkits, together with an introduction to the Web Application Toolkits video on Channel9. The scenarios were selected based on feedback from community developers and include:

Giorgio introduced the release of a Web Application Toolkit for Internet Explorer 8 that makes it easy to leverage the new features in Internet Explorer 8 (Web Slices, Accelerators and Visual Search Providers) through a set of ASP.NET controls. The sample in the toolkit is based around an auction site scenario.

There is a 10 minute video overview of the IE8 toolkit on Channel 9

All in all Giorgio presented 11 times during the three days that he was in New Zealand!

I have also uploaded Giorgio’s Microsoft Unplugged presentation from Wellington last week to Channel 9

A highlight of the week was the Web Meetup in which more than 200 web developers attended. I organised the meetup with Giorgio and the guys from Mozilla as it had been a while since we all got together so I thought it was timely to re-enter the discussion about standards HTML5 and future browser developments.

It was a fun night and I particularly liked the discussion during the panel that I had with Chris Double on the H.264 video standard.

I see Darko shared similar opinions to me on the issues.

Also Phil’s post helped put things in perspective for me.

While I went in as a sceptical developer expecting to hear the usual rhetoric around some misguided enthusiasm about a new feature set that other browsers have been doing for years, I came out highly surprised and impressed with some of the tools that are bundled as part of the embattled browser.

Anselm also did a good job of summarizing the session.

I have a little bit more video to share from Giorgio’s roadtrip and will post it here once it is edited in the coming couple of week.

In the meantime if you were at Tech.Ed NZ take a look at the videos posted from the event - one of Giorgio’s sessions has been posted for attendees to view.

Building the MSN Silverlight "Wall of Fashion" for Air New Zealand Fashion Week

nparker — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 01:37:00 GMT

Anyone that has been reading my blog for a while will know that I have been working with DeepZoom for some time now.

I have been very keen to get Silverlight onto MSN.co.nz for a while. An opportunity presented itself for me to build a DeepZoom viewer and purchase 700 photos from Michael Ng (the official event photographer for Air New Zealand Fashion Week). MSN came to the party by featuring the “Wall of Fashion” and promoting it from their homepage and Fashion Week mini site.

The challenge that I faced was two-fold.

1) I needed to bypass the MSN CMS system due to the share number of files required to publish a large DeepZoom.

2) I needed a system that could handle large demand and be updated in a timely fashion throughout the week.

What I came up with is not completely automated like DeepZoomPix but does leverage a number of open source projects and stores the tiles on Windows Azure.

Given that Windows Azure is becoming commercially available at PDC (17-19 Nov) in 21 countries including New Zealand I thought I’d run the stats to see what a project like this would actually cost (the service is free until launch).

We are half way through the event and I have already published 380 photos, 98,922 files (1.67 GB) into the Windows Azure Blog Storage.

Take the stats from the first day before the official launch 582 people spent on average 1:09 mins on the gallery. This served ~34MB per person or about 19GB of content downloaded.

On current preliminary Windows Azure pricing this first day of activity would have cost.

Storage – 1.67 GB @ $0.15USD / GB / month - 0.25 USD

Bandwidth in - 1.67 GB @ $0.10USD / GB - 0.167 USD

Bandwidth out – ~19GB @ $0.15USD / GB - 2.85 USD

Storage Transactions – ~1,455,000 @ $0.01 / 10K – 1.46 USD

Total ~ 4.73 USD or <1c per user.

What I Built:

First of all I looked at the eventr project on Codeplex, built by Jordan from Readify who was over for Tech.Ed NZ last week to deliver some killer Silverlight sessions.

Eventr is a Silverlight deep zoom reference application. The interesting bits are implemented in the SuperDeepZoom control, which may be either dropped straight in to your project (turnkey) or you can open it up and see what makes it tick.

I did end up using the DeepZoom Collection Creator from eventr to slice new images as they arrive on our FTP server but I didn’t leverage the rest of the code base.

Although it was excellently written an leverages an MVC pattern, eventr just wasn’t suitable for static blob hosting on Windows Azure. To host eventr on Windows Azure both Services and Compute would be required thus increasing the overall cost of hosting the solution.

Secondly I looked at the SpaceBlock project on Codeplex this is what Michael used for the Sydney Mardi Gras project.

Also check out this great post on Hosting Silverlight Applications in Azure Blob Storage.

In the end I actually chose to extend a project that I had created previously in Nov 2008 that was based on Wilfred Pinto’s previous work.

The source code is wrapped up and available (minus the images) at http://kiwi.blob.core.windows.net/code/FashionWeek.zip

Also I can’t forget the legal bit (This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. )

I have added a rudimentary Silverlight Tag Cloud for the filter on the right based on Mark Monster’s work. Again there is a much better Silverlight Tag Cloud project on codeplex but it uses WCF services and therefore couldn’t live in Azure Blob Storage alone.

I first presented the player during the Tech.Ed NZ Keynote last week on stage with Chris Liddell.

And published it on the Tech.Ed NZ website to take it for a test run before fashion week.

During this test I realised that it is not easy to publish additional images after the fact if they are not named in descending order.

To achieve this I wrote a c# app some time ago that renames photos based on timedate info in the EXIF tags. You can grab this from http://kiwi.blob.core.windows.net/code/PhotoSorta.zip

Also I can’t forget the legal bit (This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. )

Running this before slicing the images meant that ordering in the metadata remained chronological

I have also been asked why there is a slight leather texture behind the images. This is an agreement I made with the photographer. The photos that we are posting from Air New Zealand Fashion Week are highest quality available. The way DeepZoom works is that each image is sliced into thousands of small jpgs at a range of different zoom levels and is reconstructed on the fly making it impossible for people to access high resolution images from their browser cache. That it this doesn’t stop people zooming and taking screen captures to copy images. This is where the subtle texture comes in so that we (and the photographer) can tell if an image is posted elsewhere that has been taken from our site.

All in all to round things off I wanted to add some enhancements to the player.

The first is a feature of Silverlight 3 that enables the user to launch the player “Out of Browser” either right click and install or click the select designer tab and the download icon in the bottom left.

This then enables you to launch the viewer from the start menu on your PC or Mac.

Also in the same location I have added the option for IE8 users to add the viewer as a Web Slice, this way as new photos are added each day users can be notified and access the slide show directly from their favourites bar without leaving their current web page. Giorgio has a detailed post on building a webslice for the Imagine Cup. Incidentally 4.5% of the traffic (16% of IE users) to the site is now coming via the WebSlice and the average time spent in the viewer is 3:22 mins (almost triple that on the viewers that hit the site directly!).

I had fun putting this all together and I hope by sharing the code and the opportunity with Windows Azure you may consider doing something similar for the next large event you are asked to cover.

FYI there are a number approaches to get analytics working for tracking Silverlight applications

I didn’t get time to implement this fully but it does give you some data as long as your users aren't using IE8 InPrivate Filtering to block the prying Googley eyes :)

Yellow Maps

nparker — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 03:12:00 GMT

The dynamics between Google and Yellow is certainly an interesting one to watch as their business models converge into one of healthy “coopertition”.

Check out this article from stuff from earlier this year: Yellow Pages, Google discuss joining forces

An alliance would mean internet users would be able to search for and see the location of 200,000 businesses listed in Yellow Pages by logging on to Google Maps.

Yellow would use Google to provide maps for its yellow.co.nz website, spelling an end to head-on competition between the old and new powerhouses in the business directories market.

Well last Friday the first phase of this was completed by Keith and the team at Marker Studio who have released a beta of the new Yellow Maps site.

Alongside the beta launch I noticed the increased effort to direct people to the Internet Explorer 8 version powered by Yellow in the face of increased competition by MSN and Yahoo NZ to drive users to their IE8 custom versions.

It is great to see that the new Yellow Maps site is deployed on Windows Server 2008 using ASP.NET 3.5 and the URL Rewrite Module for IIS7 to drive positive SEO outcomes. Check out Keith's post on IIS7 Extensionless Urls and Kentico CMS 4.0.

I particularly like the clean url’s for directions e.g. http://maps.yellow.co.nz/map/auckland/#to=Kiosk+Rd|Kari+St

The timing of this is interesting to say the least as Google Local Lures Small Businesses With Their Own Web Dashboard

Google wants more small businesses to claim their listing profiles on Google Local (which is basically listings that pop up in Google Maps and local search results). To entice them, starting tomorrow it will give local businesses in the real world with physical addresses a free dashboard…

Combine this with Google's push to give New Zealand businesses $75 worth of Free AdWords and you have a strong focus by Google to engage the SME business market in New Zealand directly.

I think the opportunity for Yellow is to use the best of everything that is out there and add “greater” value than simply using a “white labelled” Google solution “out of the box”.

Last month I spent a few days with the Marker team in Wellington where they prototyped alternative views for Yellow Maps using Silverlight 3, localised Twitter and Virtual Earth in combination with Google geo-location services and StreetView.

There is no “go live” for Silverlight 3 yet so what I’m going to do next is for “informational/ testing purposes only”. If you are a developer and happen to have either the Silverlight 3 Beta - Windows Developer Runtime or the Silverlight 3 Beta - Mac Developer Runtime installed you can try a Silverlight 3 prototype of Yellow Maps online at http://a.bility.co.nz

This will be an interesting area to keep an eye on especially due to the recent acquisition of wises and finda by Yellow back in February that occurred not long after Trade Me chose to turn off their mapping site Smaps that was based on the ZoomIn engine.

I see that Lance Wiggs has blogged his own opinions of the NZ market for business listings online. IMO the comments below the article are more telling of the opportunities that are left to explore.

Internet Explorer 8 Released, IE6 down 8.8% in NZ in 8 Months.

nparker — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 04:35:00 GMT

Do you remember what you were doing when the planes hit the buildings in New York, September 11th 2001?

Did you know that two weeks before that event IE6 was released to the web?

What else was happening around that time?

Trade Me had less than 30,000 customers
The first generation 5GB ipod was released
The PS1 had been for sale for almost a year
Gladiator was named Best Picture
Russell Crowe won best actor
A patent describing the Google PageRank mechanism was granted.

It seems like ages ago doesn’t it? Seven and a half years after IE6 we have released Internet Explorer 8!

I previous blogged about the custom version of IE8 that Yellow created for their customers.

Since then Keith at markerstudio has shared a bit more info about the project. Of particular interest to me are these two comments:

The launch has been very successful with over 10,000 downloads of the Yellow IE8 browser in the first 2 days!

I would like people to note that the Live Search apis were superior [to Google] in terms of the range of ways one could consume search services, and relevance in my book is very comparable between the two.

It is a shame technical capability doesn’t = customer brand perception in relation to search but I guess that it is simply a commercial reality.

Who else has released a custom version of IE8 in the New Zealand market?

Like Yellow, YahooXtra has a targeted promotion of their custom version of IE8 on the front page of their site. Interestingly they have chosen not to created a 64-bit version, I guess not that many of their target users have >= 4GB of RAM on their machines.

That leads me to msn.co.nz who are disappointingly absent with their custom version today. Australia has their version out but NZ is still two weeks away from launch due to last minute adjustments to ensure local relevance.

~~Visiting the~~ ~~msn NZ custom version page~~ ~~gives you a “coming soon” message.~~

Update: The MSN New Zealand custom version of IE8 is now available for 32 Bit Vista and XP users by visiting http://tr.im/msnie8.

If you are interested in publishing add-ons for Internet Explorer you can do so by creating an account at http://ieaddons.com and clicking on your account to upload. Unfortunately there isn’t a market specifically for NZ so you will need to choose US or UK to publish your work to.

I noticed that Yellow Search (from their custom IE8 version) is now published and available in the gallery.

Touching on the brand perception of Google for search in New Zealand the same is true for Internet Explorer when it comes to using the Internet. Many New Zealander’s still think of the Internet as a “blue e on their desktop”, the particular version is somewhat irrelevant to most. The problem here is that if users don’t upgrade web developers around the world spend more and more time hitting their heads against the wall.

Over the last few months web developers at some of New Zealand's largest corporates tell me that their IT departments still deploy new desktop computers with standardised builds of Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6! This continues to concern me and I am talking with Microsoft account managers to see how we can change this.

Eight months ago we started our process to Get rid of IE6 in New Zealand, now it is time to once again check in on how we are doing?

The good news is that we removed 8.76% of Internet Explorer 6 from New Zealand forever! The bad news is that IE6 still makes up 13.6% of New Zealand web users.

Further more we are now making it far easier to test your web applications on IE6 without actually needing to have IE6 installed.

At MIX09 last we we announced “SuperPreview”

Expression Web SuperPreview for Internet Explorer is a visual debugging tool that makes it easier to migrate your Web sites from Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 7 or 8.

Below is a list of all of the MIX09 sessions on Internet Explorer:

Yellow, BLACKCAPS First to Build and Deploy on IE8 in New Zealand.

nparker — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 01:39:00 GMT

Back in November I blogged about “Customising IE8 To Drive Users to Your Website”. Despite the final version of IE8 not yet being released both Yellow and the BLACKCAPS have deployed their customisations.

Back in July last year I sought feedback on an action plan on “How we can rid NZ of IE6”, since then page gates targeting IE6 users on microsoft.co.nz and msn.co.nz have seen large conversion rates. Yellow has gone one better and this morning taken the bold move to launch a page gate to upgrade not only IE6 but also IE7 users who visit their website to a Yellow customised version of the IE8 Release Candidate.

If you click to download you get an installer for your operating system if it is supported (they have chosen to support Windows XP, Vista 32bit & 64bit versions). Yellow also has deployed a page to provide their customers with more information about why they should install IE8.

After installing you will notice a few customisations.

The title bar of the browser reads “Windows Internet Explorer provided by Yellow.co.nz”
There are three home page tabs.
1. The new Yellow search site http://search.yellow.co.nz
2. http://yellow.co.nz
3. Your existing homepage before upgrade.
Default search is set to “Yellow Search”, a customised Google Search with callout yellow listings and Google AdSense. Of course I would have preferred to see Live Search used here but working with customised search API’s is the smart thing to do to “add value” to your own search offerings and drive additional search revenue for your business.
The Yellow Search is also included as an accelerator along with a “coming soon” Map with Yellow Maps accelerator. This enables users to select some text and then click the accelerator link to search the highlighted term.

The http://search.yellow.co.nz site was built by Keith Patton, Jon Beattie and Darren Wood over at Marker Studio. They chose to build it in ASP.NET on Windows Server 2008 where the existing http://yellow.co.nz is JSP on Apache proving the advantage of a website implementing an API when working cross platform.

The other IE8 project to launch recently is a live scoring web slice for New Zealand cricket. Back in 2005 Christchurch based Gus Pickering and the team at NV Interactive (formally Lupo Data Concepts) built a .NET client scoring application that powers http://cricinfo.com (the world's leading cricket website, ranked number one in all of its major markets) read the case study about that development.

Earlier this year the same team built the new BLACKCAPS website. The site is hosted on Windows Server 2008 and uses the latest version of ASP.NET. The site introduced live scoring for all domestic cricket matches in New Zealand. Data is collected by a client scoring application and WCF services are used to deliver updates which are rendered via AJAX on the client website. When you visit the site you get presented with a list of current games that you can subscribe to the scoring for. Read more about the project on the NV Interactive website.

In the 4-month period of 1 October 08 to 27 January 09, the new site racked up 6,251,531 page impressions. This traffic figure does not even include Live Scoring visitors.

Sam Langley a web designer at NV added the mark-up to expose these live games as web slices in IE8 without writing any browser specific loops or code.

NV Interactive worked with New Zealand Cricket to deliver an exciting new website in time for the 2009 season. The site includes live scoring for all domestic and international games that the BLACKCAPS are involved in. Because of the way that that NV developed the scoring system, it was very easy to provide IE8 users with a premium experience via a web slice without creating any browser specific code.

Matt Pickering – Managing Director NV Interactive

Over the weekend there was a new video released comparing IE8 performance against other browsers which is also worth a look.

There is a lot happening with Microsoft Web Technologies this week with the MIX event kicking off in Las Vegas. Unfortunately I didn't make the conference this year but if you are an early bird you can watch the keynotes live at http://live.visitmix.com kicking of 5AM (NZ Time) on Thursday and Friday mornings. Dean Hachamovitch GM of IE is presenting during the keynote on the second day and you can check a full list of MIX09 speakers (including NZ's own Chris Auld) over here.

Customising IE8 to Drive Users to Your Website

nparker — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 07:05:00 GMT

I have been running IE8 as my default browser since Beta 2 was released a few months ago and I have been enjoying the experience.

As many of you know already IE8 ships with a brand new standards based rendering engine that is nothing like IE7 or IE6. It is great to see some large NZ websites (airnz, TVNZ) ready to go with the IE8 release already. If you want to learn more about what you need to do for your sites to get ready please read about IE8 compatibility on Mike’s blog or from the IE Team.

Previous I have also discussed now prevalent IE6 is in the NZ market and our plans to get rid of it. A couple of weeks ago Kris from our web team implemented a page gate strategy on the popular Your Digital Life consumer site and I am happy to report a 14% conversion rate amongst IE6 users visiting the site in the first two weeks!

If you are interest in using the script (no warranties included) grab it

and follow the 3 easy steps below.

1. Upload the files to a ‘detectie6’ folder on the website

2. Include the following line just before the closing </body> tag (eg in a footer include)


3. File and replace any path references in the include (as highlighted above), and in the detectie6.aspx, detectie6.js, detectie6.css files.

I learnt a lot during the IE8NZ road trip in September when we had Matt Heller out from the IE team (check out the video of the session) and have recently had a chance to play around with some of the new customisation opportunities that IE8 provides web developers.

I think there is a real opportunity to innovate on top of IE8 and provide your innovations packaged up to your customers next year when IE8 is launched.

Please now sit back and join me for the next 45 minutes while I go end-to-end on customising IE8!

Download the video (188MB)

What I showed:

IE8 Visual Search

IE Team - Get started
Note my demo’s are hosted on a “demo” server in the US. A service like this can easily be used by millions of users which means that it needs to be very robust and stable. Alexander Strauss does a great job of describing a more robust architecture for building visual search with WCF.
My Demos:
- Try NZ Herald Open Search xml
- Try Stuff Open Search xml
- Try Flickr Visual Search xml

Try Channel 9 Visual Search xml

IE8 Accelerators
- IE8 Developer Center Documentation
- My Demos:
  - Try Channel9 Accelerator xml
IE8 Web Slices

Video template from Expression Encoder 2 SP1
My Demos:
- Try TVNZ Web Slice (hover over Recent TVNZ News to add)
- Try Black Caps Live Scoring Slice (hover over CANTERBURY WIZARDS vs AUCKLAND ACES)
IEAK8 Beta
- Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Images
- TechNet Screen cast

Vista 64 bit outputs from my IEAK8 test

XP 32 bit outputs from my IEAK8 test

There are still some bugs to iron out with the IEAK8 that I found in my travels but hopefully I have wet your appetite here to get building and try some of these things for yourself.

Tags: IE8, IEAK8

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.