Thushan Fernando Uncut

Yippe Ya Ya yay! Microsoft just released IE8 Beta 2 as posted on the IEBlog:

We’re excited to release IE8 Beta 2 today for public download. You can find it at http://www.microsoft.com/ie8. Please try it out!

You’ll find versions for 32- and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008. In addition to English, IE8 Beta 2 is available in Japanese, Chinese (Simplified), and German. Additional languages will be available soon.

While Beta 1 was for developers, we think that anyone who browses or works on the web will enjoy IE8 Beta 2. Before the team blogs about our Beta 2 in detail, here’s an overview of what you’ll find in IE8.

We focused our work around three themes: everyday browsing (the things that real people do all the time), safety (the term most people use for what we’ve called ‘trustworthy’ in previous posts), and the platform (the focus of Beta 1, how developers around the world will build the next billion web pages and the next waves of great services).

Go and download a copy and try it out. While your waiting checkout the cool new features in IE8.

Lutz Roeder just sent the word out that he has stopped working on Reflector handing the reigns to Red Gate Software who themselves have some impressive software such as the ANTS Profiler.

One of the coolest and most useful tools in anyones developer arsenal.

Kevin Frie, the lead developer for core bits of the CLR just posted some information about the changes in .NET CLR 3.5 SP1. Heres an excerpt:

NGen infrastructure rewrite: the new infrastructure uses less memory, produces less fragmented NGen images with much better locality, and does so in dramatically less time.  What this means to you:  Installing or servicing an NGen image is much faster, and cold startup time of your NGen’ed code is better.

Framework Startup Performance Improvements: The framework is now better optimized for startup.  We’ve tweaked the framework to consider more scenarios for startup, and now layout both code & data in the framework’s NGen images more optimally.  What this means to you:  Even your JIT code starts faster!

Better OS citizenship: We’ve modified NGen to produce images that are ASLR capable, in an effort to decrease potential security attack surface area.  We’ve also started generating stacks that are always walkable using EBP-chaining for x86.  What this means to you:  Stack traces are more consistent, and NGen images aren’t as easily used to attack the system.

Better 32-bit code quality: The x86 JIT has dramatically improved inlining heuristics that result in generally better code quality, and, in particular, much lower “cost of abstraction”.  If you want to author a data type that only manipulates a single integer, you can wrap the thing in a struct, and expect similar performance to code that explicitly uses an integer.  There have also been some improvements to the ‘assertion propagation’ portion of the JIT, which means better null/range check elimination, as well as better constant propagation, and slight better ‘smarts’ in the JIT optimizer, overall.  What this means to you:  Your managed code should run slightly faster (and sometimes dramatically faster!).  Note to 64 bit junkies:  We’re working on getting x64 there, too.  The work just wasn’t quite there in time.

Whats interesting to note is that the CLR Optimisations for inlining will finally be coming to the 64bit CLR, just hope that it comes sometime sooner rather than later.

In the meantime, grab the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.

Finally after a long wait Microsoft have just RTM’d Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 weighing in at a hefty 851Mb (ISO). The update also includes fixes for .NET Framework 3.5, which brings some cool new features to the table.

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 delivers:

• Improved WPF designers
• SQL Server 2008 support
• ADO.NET Entity Designer
• Visual Basic and Visual C++ components and tools (including an MFC-based Office 2007 style ‘Ribbon’)
• Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server (TFS) addresses customer feedback on version control usability and performance, email integration with work item tracking and full support for hosting on SQL Server 2008
• Richer JavaScript support, enhanced AJAX and data tools, and Web site deployment improvements

The .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 delivers:

• Performance increases between 20-45% for WPF-based applications – without having to change any code
• WCF improvements that give developers more control over the way they access data and services
• Streamlined installation experience for client applications
• Improvements in the area of data platform, such as the ADO.NET Entity Framework, ADO.NET Data Services and support for SQL Server 2008’s new features

This effectively means the previous workaround for those who couldnt wait for SQL Server 2008 installation is redundant now that you can download a copy the final release!!! Yay for us!

If your like me and got down and dirty with pre-releases you’ll have to use the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2008 Hotfix Cleanup Utility first followed by the VS2008 Preparation Tool and try the installation.

As you may be aware, Microsoft RTM’d SQL Server 2008 a few days ago, unfortunately if you have the RTM version of Visual Studio 2008 (any edition) installed you’ll find that installing SQL Server 2008 you’ll get a nasty little surprise:

Rule “Previous releases of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008″ failed.

A previous release of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 is installed on this computer. Upgrade Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 to the SP1 before installing SQL Server 2008.

This is all explained in the KB956139 - Visual Studio 2008 SP1 may be required for SQL Server 2008 installations, there is however a fix or a workaround to installing SQL Server without the need for SP1 if you aren’t able to obtain it.

Simply customise the installer so that these components aren’t installed:

• Management Tools
• Integration Services
• Business Intelligence Development Studio

Then things will chug along nicely:-)

You can download it on MSDN Subscriber Downloads or the TechNet Subscriber Downloads section. Dont forget to checkout What’s New in SQL Server 2008.

Well its been a while since I’ve written anything for WebSoftware, but I’ve been working on a Ftp tool for quite sometime, unfortunately due to work and university commitments I never got around to finishing up the product.

Here’s a little teaser shot of DevFtp, a tool written for developers and goes on a slightly different path to conventional FTP editors in the market today.

The goal of the product is to assist web developers and those who maintain alot of content to easily edit/manage transfers all within the same editor. The core internals & xFtpx engines have been completed, written in .NET 2.0 in order to maintain maximum compatibility with older versions of Windows.

As of writing the GUI your seeing there is current but various tweaks are being conducted to assist and do things differently, its just a teaser for now. The idea is to keep the GUI to be as simple and straight forward as possible.

Thus far theres support for Ftp (duh!), SFTP (Ftp over SSH), FTPS (SSL) Implicit & Explicit.

The editor provides full queuing of work items, synchronising of remote/local fodlers and syntax highlighting - pfft thats a given! - using the same Syntax Highlighting engine that will feature in the upcoming (:O) HotHTML 4 product. More information on both products will be released as time goes on but at this stage no dates are set for betas or public releases.

An interesting bit-o-javascript posted by Mike-On-Ads that exploits an age old trick of leaking out the browsers navigated history. Armed with the info a cunning developer can workout what gender the viewer is.

The blog posting on the site explains the method used and allows you to try it out. Give it a ago and see how accurate it is

Here are my results:

Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 34%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 66%

Damn, I knew I shouldnt be browsing SlashDot that much, atleast it wasnt Cosmopolitan or Womens Weekly (ooops!). Unfortunately, only my current session records the history as I clear my page history when firefox closes. I’ll have to try it again and see if it changes.

MSY(.com.au - dont go there yet!), one of the most competitive IT hardware stores in Australia recently got hacked and the site has embedded Net-Worm.JS.Aspxor.a worm. Only realised after I went to the site and Firefox blocked the page. You can read all about the hack and the effects on the Whirlpool Thread or Google Safe Browsing diagnostic page.

Its always nice when someones got your back. Who knows MSY might actually endup making a proper website now instead of the messy FrontPage site that was.

Gentoo 2008.0 has finally been released, only a week ago did I start compiling 2007.0  on a fresh box. Ah wells, great thing about meta-distributions, its so easy to update! I must confess though, I’m still relatively a n00b to Gentoo having been an Ubuntu/Debian user thus far.

Heres whats new from the  official home page:

• Updated installer:
  The installer now only performs networkless installations using the packages and ebuild tree on the LiveCD. It also contains numerous fixes for extended and logical partitions.
• Improved hardware support:
  Moving to the 2.6.24 kernel added many new drivers for hardware released since the 2007.0 release.
• Complete rework of profiles:
  Restructuring profiles allowed significant cleanup of redundancies, reducing developer maintenance and confusion. The difference for you is that profiles now appear in /usr/portage/profiles/ under default/linux/ instead of default-linux/. See the upgrading guide for more details.
• Xfce instead of GNOME on the LiveCD:
  To save space, the LiveCDs switched to the smaller Xfce environment. This means that a binary installation using the LiveCD will install Xfce, but you’re still free to build GNOME or KDE from source.
• No LiveDVDs on x86 or amd64:
  In the interest of getting the release out, the release engineering team decided to postpone LiveDVDs because of problems in their generation. They may show up later—if so, we’ll let you know.
• Updated packages:
  Highlights of the 2008.0 release include Portage 2.1.4.4, a 2.6.24 kernel, Xfce 4.4.2, gcc 4.1.2 and glibc 2.6.1.

Check the Where to Get Gentoo Linux page for information on downloading!

PS. The code-name “Its what plants crave” is from the movie Idiocracy with Luke Wilson (Owen Wilson’s brother). Gentoo - Its got Electrolytes!

Ubuntu 8.04 was released when I was in Japan, but it didnt stop me from downloading it - sucked it up at ~5Mbps which was bloody ridiculous!

Now we can finally get our hands on the first update to this LTS, Ubuntu 8.04.1 which contains - amongst a slew of bug-fixed packages - Firefox 3.0 Final. More information on the changes are posted on the Ubuntu mailing list release notification.

I’m still running 7.10 on the server at home - until I get the bawls (and time!) to redo the lovely server ZEUS has become to be! In the meantime, my Dell M1330 is upgrading to the 8.04.1 release as I write.

Grab a copy of Ubuntu 8.04.1 today!

On a side note, just recently saw the release of Sabayon Linux 3.5 which brings some really cool things to the table, I’ve downloaded the LiveDVD and considering giving it a go.