I’ve been experimenting with IE9 beta in work recently, and been finding it annoying when I go to show someone what I’ve been working on and need to refresh a page a couple of times after running it from Visual Studio 2010 before it ‘takes’, and will display the page and work properly. I’m getting a little tired of saying ‘it’s only a beta…’ and sort of harms my decision to install it in the first place. Sure, hitting refresh a few times isn’t really cutting into my productivity any but it’s one of those small frustrations… something about controlling one’s environment, and smoothing our day’s problems out. That sort of thing.
I was browsing around trying to find help on a problem I’ve been working on at home (another learning project), and came across a blog that had a great explanation, a working sample, and the answer that I wanted – although the explanation didn’t point me to the answer that I wanted, when I went back and re-read it I realised it was right there and could have solved my problem an evening sooner. D’oh.
One of my habits when reading blogs is that if I find the post useful, or at least well-written and informative, I will go to the front page and see what they’ve posted recently. Dan Wahlin’s blog front page is an archive page, so you get to see a lot of interesting titles all at once. One of those titles was Getting the IE9 Beta to Play Well with Visual Studio 2010 and it described exactly the problem that I’m having in work with the beta, and also a suggestion to get around it. Since I found this in the middle of the Christmas bank holiday season, I had to wait a few days to try it out and see if it works… I’m not really keen on installing IE9 at home just to see a few days earlier! It seems to have worked so far, it’s a lot nicer than hitting refresh over and over till it sticks. So anyway, if you see a helpful or interesting blog post – look up recent posts in that blog. There might be something useful there too.