Andy Burns’ SharePoint Blog

Well, Google has launched the next broadside in the battle between Redmond and the Googleplex – their own ‘Chrome‘ Browser. Creating a browser makes a lot of sense for Google, really – IE7 had ‘Windows Live’ as the default search provider for the Search box, so Microsoft were clearly starting to try and leverage their ownership of the desktop, and the browser on it (which, of course, is leveraging their ownership of the operating system – though having a web browser integral to the OS seems bloody stupid to me!) And yes, you can add Google as a provider, and set it as the default (I always do) – but it’s effort, and a bit scary for my granny, you know?

Anyway, I found myself wondering – how does SharePoint work with Chrome? We know Chrome is based on Firefox and Safari and other bits – but how well would it perform. The short answer – not bad…

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Tags: Chrome

Hmm. One of our salesmen called up today with an interesting problem. We’d published some PowerPoint presentations as slide shows (.pps files). If you open one of these, it should just launch PowerPoint into the presentation. However, he was opening them from our website and they were opening as a normal PowerPoint (.ppt) file. That is they were opening ready for editing, not in presentation mode. Weird.

I remembered having seen this before, but a bit of poking around showed that my fix was still in place. Curious. When I clicked on the link to the presentation I got the ‘Download or Open’ dialog thingy:

First off I noticed that the file extension was .pps – good. I tried opening the file – and it opened it as if it were a .ppt file. Weird. So then I tried the other option – I saved it to my local machine and opened it locally. This time it opened correctly – it opened as a slideshow.

Hmm. So, they’re the same file, but something different is happening when they open. I wondered if it was to do with the HTTP headers, but the same difference occurs when the file is being served with the application/vnd.ms-pps or just text/html (we run MCMS 2002 on a IIS webserver but publish as static content to an Apache server. They serve the file as different mime types, but have the same result – Open opens the file for editing and Save and open shows the slideshow).

Next up, I tried the same experiment using Firefox. If you choose to Open the file rather than save it, it opens the slideshow – correctly! And if you save it, well, it saves the .pps file which, again, opens correctly.

So it looks like Internet Explorer will not open a .pps file as a slideshow irrespective of the mime type sent by the server and the .pps extension (and it’s file association in windows). However, if you save the file locally, it will. Weird.

The only thing that I can think is that this is some sort of security feature, but it’s a bit odd – after all, shouldn’t Firefox do this then?

Tags: PowerPoint

A table of SharePoint feature compatibility with different browsers. Most aren’t very surprising, and performance is pretty even – although Safari doesn’t do very well (surprise, surprise).

Curious problem – I kept getting an error message “Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.” whenever I tried to open a document from our internal MOSS system. Strange.

Eventually figured it out from Geekette’s Blogette, and kbAlertz 833714.

We use Project 2003 still. This means two version of the owssupp.dll, apparently, under c:\program files\Microsoft Office\office11 and \office12

I followed the advice from the MS Knowledgebase article, but got the same error as all the folks at kbAlertz. In the end I tried just uninstalling MS Project Professional 2003 support – and low, Internet Explorer started letting me open documents from MOSS again. And, much to my surprise, Project 2003 web access works just fine – I guess it doesn’t use that dll.

So, I use Google’s Firefox plugin to synchronise my bookmarks between work and home. It worked well – or used to until I started using Firefox 2 at home. Anyway, for no apparent reason, yesterday it trashed my bookmarks at home. And then today, at work, it decided it would synchronise after all, and trashed my bookmarks at work to.

I guess the lesson is to always maintain redundancy. Fortunately, the guys writing Firefox (presumably ‘cos they had problems with the bookmarks too) took to storing backups of the bookmark file – and that has worked nicely in this instance.

Anyway, it’s enough to put me off – I shall be looking for something else. I gather that Delicious (insert your own dots) has a good Firefox plugin, and works by tagging, which is good also. I’m just a wee bit worried as I really want to have a heirarchy too – so I can drill down, rather than just getting a ‘pool’ of matching tags.

Hmm. So, IE7 Beta 2 is out. Some of the guys at work have been having a look. So, it has tabs. It has integrated searching. It has RSS feeds. A native XMLHTTPRequest object. Well, damn, doesn’t that sound another browser? Yup, IE7 – proving Firefox got it right.

So, who will win? Well, Microsoft clearly have an advantage as they’ll be shipping IE7 with their next OS – whenever that is. To be honest, though, the thing that interests me most is if this stimulates better standards across browsers. I just had a fight with aligning an image with a line of text – and I had to hack it to fix it – so here’s to hoping.

Personally, though, I’ll stick with Firefox for now.

A good article for on MSDN. With the whole advent of ‘Ajax’ and richer, JavaScript enabled user interfaces, memory leaks like this will become a much bigger issue. I know some people will say ‘memory is cheap’ and that there is a lot of it, but that really isn’t adequate. So, worth a read.

Here’s an interesting attribute in CSS I didn’t know about
-moz-border-radius
The style below is :
font-size: 12px; background-color: #ffffff; -moz-border-radius: 8px;
border: 2px solid #3366cc; padding: 7px;

A box with a border! Of course, this only works in Mozilla

Another box with a border!

Tags: CSS, Rounded Corners

Venkman Javascript Debugger – All sorts of useful things, like breakpoints and watches. I like it!

Vertical Text

CSS seems to lack an real control over text direction – it should, but of course the reality is different.

What I found was a way of making vertical in IE using some of those pointless filters, and the support IE has for top to bottom, right to left languages. It’s a bit sneaky in doing this – but it works in IE, at least. I haven’t found a way of doing it in Mozilla.
<div style="{ writing-mode:tb-rl;
filter: flipv fliph;
white-space: nowrap;}">