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Showing posts from February, 2011

Is Chrome intentionally trying to mess up web development?

A couple of weeks ago I posted about the weird behavior of Chrome's omnibox. Today, am posting about how Chrome's bungled a very simple feature of all web browsers. Since the very early days of the web, web browsers have always had an option for viewing the source code of the currently rendered page. Typically the menu is called "View Source" or something similar. You click it and you get the HTML source for the page you're looking at. Very simple, right? Well Chrome does it differently. In the spirit of complicating simple things, clicking on "View Source" in Chrome doesn't just give you the HTML of the current page. Oh no! It makes another request to the web server and shows you the HTML for that version. Yep. I am not sure how that's better than just showing the HTML of the already rendered page but that's what Chrome does. So in addition to using the omnibox to complicate web development , the "View Source" option makes a triv

Does InfoPath (still) suck?

A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog post titled "InfoPath & SharePoint (Part 1)". Back then I had just started working on a project using InfoPath 2007. So, expectedly, the post wasn't very complimentary to InfoPath (or SharePoint). In fact, I said: InfoPath sucks and SharePoint is the most expensive piece of crap ever. InfoPath, as a development environment, has absolutely no redeeming value. It's worthless.... ( more ) Since then my opinion of InfoPath has changed slightly. It still suffers from all the flaws I pointed out in that post. However, I think when used right, InfoPath can be an OK tool. I think it's well suited for designing one off forms and not for anything that requires complex logic or multiple iterations (like most software development requires). Alas, most CTOs fall in love with its point & click simplicity and integration with SharePoint that they try to use it to replace more developed technologies like ASP.NET. What do you get? A h

Chrome's Omnibox, debugging web applications and web statistics

If you use the latest version of Google's Chrome browser , you may have seen this setting: Couple of days ago, I decided to turn it on. This way, I can get instant results when I search via the omnibox. Since I never go to Google's home page, this is the only way for me to get the benefits of instant search. So I turned it on and promptly forgot about it. Fact is, I never actually thought about how it worked. Why? Because the way it works is every character you typed is instantly sent, as a search query , to your search provider. So far, that's not a big deal. That's intuitive. However, what's not so intuitive is that once Chrome detects you are typing a URL , it starts sending those requests to the webserver for the URL. So say you want to type in "http://localhost/myapplication/pageAmTesting.aspx?Id=500", the last few requests Chrome will send are: http://localhost/myapplication/pageAmTesting.asp http://localhost/myapplication/pageAmTesting.aspx h