IE 8

In discussion, heard that IE 8 is coming down the pipeline. And is shipping DOM standards compliant, with a non-default IE 7 compatibility mode. This just floors me.

So, the net effect of this is that a lot of websites are going to break, albeit slightly, as they weren't designed to match a specification, they were designed simply to work and look good in IE. But it seems a no-lose move for Microsoft, as well; when a site breaks in IE, folks might try Firefox... and see that Firefox (already mostly standards compliant) is 'broken' as well, and will blame the site. So, instead of the last ten years of lax standardization on the part of Microsoft biting them in the ass, it's might just come back around and look bad for the content providers.

Dunno. It's not a highly technical topic, but it's a really interesting one. Microsoft is the 900 lb gorilla in the room, and when they decide to make a very sweeping change, it's worth looking out for ahead of time.

IDE Woes

So, the following line crashes the VS.NET 2007 complier/IDE:

const string[] attributesToReturn = null;

I'm not reassigning the string array, so this didn't make any sense to me until I dug a little farther. Arrays are objects in C#, and objects are created at runtime. const entries in C# need to be resolved at compile time. There's another modifier, readonly, that works similarly to const, but values may be set at runtime and then not further changed.

Now, I still don't know why the complier and IDE failed entirely, but at least I know why the code was wrong.