Andy Edinborough

This truly is “embarrassing”.  The Mozilla team really pulled a “Windows ME” with their latest release of Firefox.  After being open for 5 minutes, Firefox with only the “embarrassing” tab open has 26 MB more memory usage than IE8 running for hours with 3 tabs open (including a Bing Map).

LAME!  And what happened to Firebug?!  When I try to inspect a page, the CSS gets completely hosed.  I know the Firebug team has rewritten it to use JetPack, but it looks like they had to rush to get a v3.5 compatible version out in time for Mozilla’s release.

I’m not one to rollback software.  I’m a software junkie—I NEED the latest version.  It is with a heart that I uninstall Firefox v3.5.  I’m slighted enough that I’ll probably go back to v2.0 until this whole mess gets straightened out <weeps bitterly />.

Update:  Firefox v3.5.1 is no better

I… Read More →

The lack of late-binding in C# has been one of my biggest gripes about C#.  Finally, in the .NET Framework v4.0, the dynamic keyword has been introduced (it could be argued that it is too loose—allowing for variant types).  But until it is released, the need still exists, and even then, not all clients will immediately support it.  So, in a bind, I wrote a simple class to allow access to objects via late-binding in C#. 

The trick to figuring out how to write the code came from using Reflector to decompile some VB.NET code… (I love reverse-engineering :]).  The answer is that the VB compiler makes use of an area of the .NET Framework within the Microsoft.VisualBasic assembly that is marked with the attribute [EditorBrowsable(EditorBrowsableState.Never)] to prevent people from discovering it.

Here’s an example that uses my Late-Binding code to open an Excel Spreadsheet and convert it to a… Read More →

A recent article at Slashdot that has now been propagated to TechRepublic, claims that Firefox's biggest vulernability this year is Microsoft.  For those who have not heard, as part of the .NET Framework v3.5 SP1, Microsoft added an extension to Firefox to support Click-Once application deployment.  The claim by Slashdot is that this is Internet Explorer's biggest vulernability and that Microsoft has forced it onto Firefox users.

Having done extensive development in the area, Click-Once deployment does not give the “ability for websites to easily and quietly install software on your PC”.  Click-Once must always be initiated by the user, always displays a dialog, and always requires the user to agree to install the software.  Microsoft didn’t do anything that Firefox doesn’t allow or encourage.  Click-Once is actually very similar to Firefox’s own method for downloading and installing Extensions.

The interesting thing is that the article claims this is… Read More →

As my first post on my new blog, I'm pleased to say that Microsoft has finally released Bing, a "decision engine" that offers Google real competition.  But did they seriously just release a search-engine product with no Search Provider add-in for Internet Explorer?  Seriously?  This is a huge disappointment; I actually really like Bing.

Ironically, I was able to add Bing as my default search provider to Chrome, and Firefox very easily, but my only option for IE was to set it as my homepage.  I don't want to change my homepage.  I just want to set it as my default search provider...  I could write my own, but I've got to honest, I'm lazy and that sounds like a lot of work.

--- UPDATE ---
I received a tweet back from @bing saying that they're working on it.  I'm sure they want to do something fancy, but something that works… Read More →