Tony Schreiner's WebLogDeveloper - IE | Vista. Fighting complexity for 9 years and counting.The Best Massively Multiplayer Real-time Online Game of All Time- December 12, 2006 Back in college, in 1996 (I believe) I frequently played the pre-release version of SubSpace, a massively multiplayer online game that was originally designed as a project to test the affects of lag over a modem. If I recall correctly, I first played using a 14.4k baud modem... and it worked. Here's a recent screen shot, Christmas themed because it's that time of the year: Fast forward ten years, and despite being a 10-year old 2D game, the original company abandoning it, and...http://blogs.msdn.com/tonyschr/archive/2006/12/11/the-best-massively-multiplayer-real-time... Interface Smuggling- December 12, 2006 While I'm on the subject of COM and extension compatibility, another issue that affected a small number of extensions in IE7 involved passing an interface to a worker thread without first marshalling the interface using CoMarshalInterface() (or the longer and more convenient form, CoMarshalInterThreadInterfaceInStream()). IE uses the uses the Single Threaded Apartment (STA) model for its UI threads, which in normal scenarios works like the following: If you're on the same thread, calling..http://blogs.msdn.com/tonyschr/archive/2006/12/11/interface-smuggling.aspx Spy vs. Spy: Revenge of the Tooltip- December 11, 2006 On Friday I talked about some of the problems with unbalanced CoInitialize() and CoUninitialize() calls and how to debug an unbalanced CoUninitialize inside IE7. At the end I mentioned that using IInitializeSpy in an extension to "fix" an unbalanced init or uninit was a bad thing and to never do it. Here's one story that illustrates why. In the late stages of IE7 beta testing a coworker found that IE7 on XP would sometimes hang when sending messages through Outlook Web Access. At first the.http://blogs.msdn.com/tonyschr/archive/2006/12/11/spy-vs-spy-revenge-of-the-tooltip.aspx Space Shuttle Analogies- December 10, 2006 First, congratulations to everybody who contributed to the successful launch of the space shuttle Discovery this evening. I watched online via. NASA TV and it's been a long time since I've watched a "live" liftoff. In some recent meetings people have been making analogies between the space shuttle and complex software such as Windows and Internet Explorer. Whenever this happens I can't help but think of Richard P. Feynman's observations about the Challenger accident. A detailed...http://blogs.msdn.com/tonyschr/archive/2006/12/09/space-shuttle-analogies.aspx My Toolbar or BHO is Causing IE7 on Vista to Crash on Close. Help!- December 9, 2006 During the development of IE7, one problem we discovered was that a small number of extensions have unbalanced CoInitialize() or CoUninitialize() calls. On IE6 they sometimes lucked out, but due to architectural changes in IE7 these would cause crashes, hangs, or erratic behavior. Unbalanced CoInitialize() calls seem harmless enough at first glance. During shutdown COM will detect this and do the missing uninits. However, one problem is that on XP it does this while holding the loader...http://blogs.msdn.com/tonyschr/archive/2006/12/08/my-toolbar-or-bho-is-causing-ie7-on-vist... IE7 Tabbed Browsing Q & A- December 7, 2006 I'm working on some long-overdue posts about tabbed browsing, but before I get too deep into them what I'd like to know most is: what do you want to know about IE7's tabbed browsing implementation If you have questions, please post them as comments. For the smaller questions I may reply as a comment, but the bigger questions will be answered as future blog posts. In the end I plan to wrap everything up in a "FAQ" for future reference. Please keep in mind that I have to use a certain amount.http://blogs.msdn.com/tonyschr/archive/2006/12/06/ie7-tabbed-browsing-q-a.aspx IE7 Menu Flickering Toggling Glitch- December 7, 2006 Just before we shipped IE7 we heard sporadic reports of a "Heisenbug" where users would click a tab or click in the address bar, and the IE window would start shaking (or "flickering", or "menus bouncing up and down", depending on how users described it). We researched the bug and contacted some end users, but it remained a mystery until an employee on another team reported the issue and we were able to do some local debugging. To make a long story short, it turned out to be a issues..http://blogs.msdn.com/tonyschr/archive/2006/12/06/ie7-menu-flickering-toggling-glitch.aspx |