When Software Attacks!

A great article on handy SharePoint controls

I don’t know about you, but I always mean to gather various bits of knowledge into one place, but just like tidying my filing at home, I never quite get around to it. Fortunately for me, Chris O’Brien is a bit more organised and in my ever expanding blogroll today I saw a great article about really useful SharePoint controls to use in custom pages for that handy bit of functionality.


Taking time to enjoy the scenery

You know, the thing about RSS is that it’s a bit like the advent of the motor car - you miss things. Just as driving around means you don’t get to pass the time of day with folk, or discover that tiny little deli you’d never notice from the road, RSS dehumanises the web.

For example, I subscribe to the blog of my good friend Nick Smith. Since he hasn’t posted about his new redesign, I didn’t know about it. Which is a shame, because I like it - it puts me in mind of Tim Burton’s animations with it’s tendril-like curves.


Searching SharePoint through an IE8 Activity

IE8 Activities look cool. They’re almost like favlets from where I stand, but they offer a very simple way for users to access online services and pass simple parameters.

I decided I wanted to play, and we use SharePoint heavily here at Black Marble. The obvious thing to do was to create an activity which would allow the user to search for the selected text using SharePoint search.

Activities are defined through XML. Essentially, you give it a name, an icon and define the actions that can be performed. There are execute and preview actions, but the small preview window doesn’t really lend itself to SharePoint search (I tried!).


IE8 Rapid Fire Site Test

I can’t spend much longer playing with IE8 or my wife will skin me. However, from my cursory browsing experience I’m worried. Either the devs have a good deal of work to do or I’m going to be very busy with CSS rules for a while.

Here’s the University of Bradford site in IE8:

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And to try to compare apples with oranges, here it is in Firefox 3 beta 3:

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More surprisingly, here is the Web Standards Project site in IE8:


Internet Explorer 8...

Well, as expected, the public beta of IE8 appeared on the web pretty much straight after the Mix08 keynote mentioned it. I managed to grab it within mere moments and I now have it installed on my trusty laptop.

As announced only a day or two ago, it defaults to the new rendering mode, with a big toolbar button to toggle back to IE7 mode. I haven’t had time to test the browser with any sites yet, but I’ll try to do that in the next few days and maybe post again.