The End of an Era

As you may have heard by now, the DHTML Editing Control is not shipping as a part of the Windows Vista operating system.  You can read the announcement here.  I know a lot of people are going to be impacted by this change, and I'll help to the extent possible.

While we've made a version of the non-safe-for-scripting control, or the DHTML Editing Control for Applications, available for Windows Vista, it is not a part of the operating system and must be shipped with your products.  Furthermore, the safe-for-scripting version of the control will not be made available for Windows Vista, and there are plans to kill-bit it in XP at some unspecified future date.  (Kill-bitting means that IE will not load the control under any circumstances.)  Web applications using the control will need to be modified.

The download of the Windows Vista version is here, and a white paper with some helpful information is here.  Let me know if you have any questions about the white paper or related topics.  I'll try to provide help here for people who need to implement changes to adapt to the loss of the control.

Published 24 August 06 12:46 by vank

Comments

# PatriotB said on August 24, 2006 10:26 PM:
Wow, that is one in-depth white paper!

One comment I have... the user agent parsing code doesn't look future-safe.  That is, it won't handle NT7+ or IE8+ properly (which is a common problem in user agent parsing -- lots of web sites mis-parse IE7's user agent string tell you you're using an old, unsupported browser).
# vank said on August 28, 2006 1:15 AM:
Good point!  The agent parsing is version specific.
I'll see if I can find a decent example for classic ASP which is not; those skills are fading.  The ASP.Net should be simpler, but not as terse.
Thanks for the comments.
# mplate said on August 30, 2006 3:39 AM:
What about IE7 on Windows XP? This article:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/06/27/648850.aspx

saids

"In the near future, we will also killbit the Safe for Scripting control in IE7 in Windows XP so that it will not get instantiated from the browser."

I'm not sure what "killbit" means? I'm running IE7 RC1 (7.0.5700.6) and after two confirmations that installs and runs the control, the control is running fine in the browser (which is enough for us until Vista arrives). Can I except this behavior to remain when IE7 on Windows XP is released?
# vank said on August 30, 2006 12:27 PM:
Yes, the control will continue to work fine with the final release of IE7 on XP.
"Kill Bit" means that a table entry is made in IE which says "never instantiate this control in IE.  When this is done, the control is no longer available in IE, and this is planned for some future date in XP, but there's no plan for exactly when.  Ideally, the lack of the control in Vista will eventually move everyone off the control and onto other technology; at this point it would be straight-forward to kill bit the control.  Reality isn't ideal, and when this is done it will probably cause some problems, but the idea is to reduce the number of those problems as much as possible before the control is completely unavailable.
I got a report this morning that the unsafe version of the control (the version of the DHTML Editing Control you'd use in applications rather than web pages) did not work for one customer in IE7 RC1.  We're currently investigating.  If others experience this problem, I'd like to hear about it.
# vank said on August 30, 2006 7:39 PM:
I'm not lazy, but I am pretty busy.  I've searched for an example that I could modify which would provide the future-safety for user agent parsing that PatriotB asked for.  I've come up empty.  While I could code it from scratch, I don't really have time to test it adequately, which would make for pretty poor example code.
Does anyone have a pointer to a good starting point?
Thanks!
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