I hate configuring a new dev machine. You know you’re going to have to kill a few hours downloading and installing components and getting things working nice with each other.

I always wished there was a tool where I could click one button and get IIS, SQL, Visual Studio and the .Net Frameworks installed and running.

Of course, now I don’t have to build dev machines and write code every day for a living… along comes a tool that does just that!

The Web Platform Installer is pretty much the answer to my prayers! It allows you to take a default build or customize exactly what gets installed (including out-of-band features like bit rate throttling, URL Rewrite and Web Playlists and some unexpected extras like the SQL Server Drivers for PHP – yes, PHP runs really well on IIS7).

It’s currently in beta so now would be a really great time to check it out and use the forums to provide lots of feedback to make it great.

Thanks to Scott for the pointer to this.

Over the last decade I’ve worked on many website projects, but I’ve never been able to answer a fairly simple question: “what’s actually involved in building a site” without the discussions rapidly spiraling off in many different directions as I try to describe the many dependencies and skill sets that somehow come together to deliver the magic.

Now, thanks to the talented folks responsible for A Website Named Desire, I no longer have that problem. I can simply point them to a great visualization which sums up all of the aspects of the job that people sometimes try to describe when they say “designer” or “developer”.

If you want the Javascript that delivers the random image from the poster above feel free to snag it below but make sure you check out the site it all it’s glory for the full effect!

   1:  <script type="text/javascript">

   2:  var v1= Math.round(Math.random() * 4);

   3:  var v2= Math.round(Math.random() * 3);

   4:  var ZoomLevel= 11;

   5:  document.write('<br><a href="http://awebsitenameddesire.com"><img src="http://awebsitenameddesire.com/ClientBin/awebsitenameddesire/GeneratedImages/dzc_output_files/' + ZoomLevel + '/'+ v1 + '_' +v2 + '.png" border="0" alt="A Website Named Desire"></a>');

   6:  </script>

At MIX08 one of the projects I helped along the way was the Hard Rock Memorabilia site developed by Vertigo to show off the Deep Zoom capabilities in Silverlight. These are the guys who also released the great Silverlight Codeplex Slide.Show project that I’ve used a couple of times.

What I discovered recently is that they’ve shared another project on Codeplex to help make your life easier. This one is called BigPicture^tm and it helps by providing a lot of the basic framework for building a Silverlight Deep Zoom app. Now you still need to get your hands dirty with the Deep Zoom Composer and Visual Studio… but this gives you a real headstart.

BTW while we’re on the subject Jon Galloway (also from Vertigo) has written a great breakdown on how Deep Zoom compares to some other solutions and fellow evangelists Laurence Moroney and Jaime Rodriguez (both far cleverer than I) have posted some great write-ups on how to develop Deep Zoom apps in Silverlight.

If you build (or know of) a cool Deep Zoom sample please share it in the comments here.

A while ago I posted about BrowserHawk adding support for Silverlight detection and for a while, apart from writing your own code, that had been it.

The good news is that as Silverlight is getting more popular the options are improving… I got a comment on the post to let me know that BrowserObject now also supports Silverlight detection in the same way as other plug ins.

The free version doesn’t detect plugins, but does give you some basic information for very little effort. The upscale product works for both .Net and PHP infrastructure and comes with some easy getting started samples to make you productive.

Good to see the eco-system growing.

IE7 has been available for a couple of years, and IE8 has just gone into beta. Firefox 2 is getting on nicely with v3 in the wings and even Safari with version3 is looking pretty good on Windows. Some people even like Opera (actually, it’s pretty cool on the Mobile platform).

So why are folks still persisting in using IE6? 31% of internet users in recent reports. That’s almost a third. More than all the non-IE browser population combined.

It’s old, and it’s got some quirks. And those quirks make developers lives a misery (I should know, I spent many happy years wrangling browser incompatibility issues).

If all those folks using a version of any browser older than IE7 could just upgrade, get with the program and do their bit (it’s only a few moments to download and install and it doesn’t even insist on a legal copy of Windows these days!) then developers could concentrate on making great web applications using all the cool Ajax, Silverlight and Javascript features without having to worry about testing a load of different quirky behaviors.

It’s not just old versions of IE that are a problem – if you’re running anything older than the current version of a browser then you’re part of the problem – be it Firefox, Opera, IE, Safari, Maxthon or one of many others. The newer browsers still can’t quite agree on what standards they’re complying with and how they interpret some of the instructions in the standards (and I’ve read some of those documents… they’re not exactly unambiguous in places) but they’re better.

I’m not saying you should run business critical processes on bleeding edge beta versions of IE or the alternatives, but at least upgrade to the latest “released” version – you’ll save a lot of developers a lot of pain.

Please. Save the developers. It’s a great cause and supporting it won’t cost you much more than a few moments of your time.

In my previous post I looked at using WebSlices to expose updates to my blog but Joshua pointed out there’s a much simpler solution in IE8 if you have an existing RSS feed…

Rather than subscribe to a web slice or an RSS feed as you normally would simply drag the URL of the RSS feed to your links bar (or in Favorites add it to your “Favorites Bar” just like any other link) and thanks to the goodness of the underlying RSS platform in Vista you not only get subscribed to the feed but in your links bar you get a notification when a new item arrives (just like for WebSlices) and can even see unread and read items at a glance.

The more I play around with IE8 the more ways I’m impressed with it. Things like standards compliance and improved Javascript and rendering performance are, without a doubt, exciting – but the subtle things that are happening in the chrome itself serve as a reminder than innovation is alive and kicking on the IE team ;)

It's really frustrating at the moment as almost everything I'm working on relates to MIX08 coming March 5-7 in Las Vegas.... and I don't want to spoil any of the surprises!

So all the really cool stuff that's keeping me busy in the office and on the road at the moment has to stay under wraps.

Come March 10th though you'll have read all about it on VisitMIX and all I'll need to do it link to it ;)

As well as my stuff (which of course I'm excited by!) I'm looking forward to dropping in on Franks panel - "Web 2.0 and beyond - what is the business reality" and some other sessions.

If you're coming to MIX look me up.... but not until day 2 when all my stuff has been presented ;)

It's quite often a question I ask myself when lost and confused in a city far from home (and actually I ask myself the question when I'm just popping down the shops sometimes!)

Luckily I recently discovered Navizon which lets me pair a GPS device with my phone and show me where I am on a map (yes, I know I can do the same with Windows Live Search for Mobile but ... there's more to the story). Navizon give users who report GPS data back to them points (and points mean cold hard cash via PayPal). The reason Navizon give the rewards is that their positioning service doesn't just work with a GPS equipped device. If you only have phone (and ideally WiFi) capabilities it can use information about the local cells and visible WiFi networks coupled with the afore-mentioned GPS data to make a pretty good guess as to where you are.

One of the cool things is that the Navizon API is available for other companies to make their software location aware so hopefully we'll see some good things coming soon. In the meantime users can also access data (including the optional "tracker" functionality) to keep an eye out for buddies or alert friends and family when they enter a certain place or use the XML feed to locate yourself on a map.

I decided to have a play with the XML feed and Live Maps to see what I could do...

BTW if you sign up to Navizon don't forget my referal code - 5E585D5B5A :)

Back at the beginning I registered a new domain. Almost immediately Googlebot turned up and indexed it, followed less than a week later by Baiduspider. It's taken until now however for the rest of the gang to turn up - over this weekend the site finally got a visit from Yahoo! Slurp, MSNbot and a surprise visitor from MERL.

What makes the progression interesting (and as someone who works at MS a little worrying that we took so long) is not just the fact that Google and Baidu found the site before it was linked from anywhere (do they have deals with the hosting ISP, the domain registrar or do they watch DNS servers for new sites - and do Baidu get data from Google, which would explain the quick following in the footsteps) but that even when it was in other indexes and had a couple of links from sites that are much longer established they took so long to find the site... and the quality of a search on both Yahoo! and MSN doesn't yet return as much content as Google (can't speak for Baidu until I find a Chinese speaker).

Since the latest upgrade of the Live search engine I've been pretty impressed with the quality of the results and the speed (it's certainly a much stronger contender for Google now) but it seems that there's still a little bit of work do go on agility to make sure it finds sites quicker and gets a better in-depth picture. Older, better established, sites don't seem to have the depth or discovery issues so it's obviously something a few repeat visits would resolve.

Still no sign of Ask (formerly known as AskJeeves) or some of the other second tier players... but except for a few niche uses I've not seen much reason to desert the big two (ah, I remember finally switching from WebCrawler to Google years ago!)

There is much said about standards compliance and IE in it's history. On occasion I've had some frustrations getting things to work in IE only to find it fail in Firefox or Safari.

Well, the good news is that IE is moving forwards in that direction.

Dean has just posted the details on the IE teams blog.