Duncan Mackenzie .NET

If you've written an app, private or public, using my data feed of Xbox live info I'd really appreciate it if you'd let me know. This isn't a required 'sign-up', but I want to start to keep track so that I could possibly create a page listing all the sites using it, and it may also be useful to be able to contact folks if I need to make a change or take the service down for an hour or so. Just comment on this post, or drop me a line at duncanma@microsoft.com. [read more...]

We recently updated a few of our web sites with code that would provide a 'nicer' experience for browsers that were not compatible with the ASP.NET ATLAS (AJAX) scripts we were using. For some reason though, a few users who were running a fully compatible browser (Firefox 2.0.0.*), were seeing the no-script experience. We were puzzled, but one of the users figured out that their ImageShack toolbar might be causing the problem. Sure enough, after I installed that same toolbar myself I was able to test and confirm that it truly is causing the confusion. Using a little test page, [read more...]

I've been fiddling around with mobile interfaces for both my personal site and for the various sites I work on (http://on10.net, http://channel9.msdn.com, amongst others) and I noticed the use of <meta name="viewport" content... /> on some other mobile sites. A quick search and I found a great discussion of the viewport meta tag on furbo.org (the apple developer site provides the same info in a more reference format). Turns out this simple meta tag helps Mobile Safari determine how best to scale your site for the smaller screen of the iPhone (relative to a desktop that is). I don't have [read more...]

So I have a file on disk, web.config in this case, and I right click and pick 'open with | Visual Studio 2008' ... and I get this:   Windows cannot find 'C:\projects\9\web.config'. Make sure you typed the name correctly, and then try again. [OK]   VS 2008 opens, but no file. If I then pick the file from File | Open it works fine... what the hell? As far as I can remember, this was true with VS 2005 and it has annoyed me every day... [read more...]