Today I tried Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express as a change to Visual Studio, hoping that it had less bloat and would be a good alternative or upgrade from previous Visual Studio IDEs, even as an Express version.

This was the popup it presented to me when I opened my first site.

What the f*ck!

I respect that Microsoft wants to promote version 3.5 of the framework but this is f*cking stupid, and arguably irresponsible, too.

We’ve had a bit of discussion in the office recently regarding Steve Balmer’s threatening letter to Yahoo! and MS’s potential acquisition of it.

Balmer makes several strong points in his letter. One, that the current state of the economy today makes the offer even better than it was several months ago. And two, that the board of directors may be potentially ignoring their share holder base and the best monetary outcome for it. After clarifying MS’s position, Balmer said that MS would be forced to go directly to the share holders if Yahoo! didn’t re-consider their offer and start a path of negotiations.

This can be looked at from a couple different points of view. On the one hand, this is a very Microsoft “strong arm” type of move — trying to take what MS thinks is theirs, regardless of the potential obstacles that might lie in the way. On the other hand, MS makes a few good points. A large majority of expert analysis suggested in January that Microsoft’s 62% premium offer over Yahoo!’s stock price was a good deal for share holders. And while many holders may believe in getting the best deal they can, they also don’t want to potentially throw a deal away all together.

Still, what is most interesting about this battle is the publicity of it. Both sides are using the press to their full advantage. Making hostile bids and equally hostile rebuttals. In my opinion it seems that the PR battle occurring on both sides could potentially harm both the perceived outcome of a deal by the public as well as the employees of both companies. Yahoo! and MS have very different cultures and the last thing a sustained group of Yahoo! employees will want is the feeling of being overtaken forcefully by a hostile company.

It seems unlikely that MS won’t get their way at some point. However, the question remains that even if MS is capable of forcing Yahoo! into a buyout, will governments both here in the U.S. and abroad allow it to happen? This process is definitely still in the early stages, but man what firefight it’s been so far.

Yesterday I needed to reference the syntax for getting the string representation of a .NET DateTime object in a specific format. Google and MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network)’s own search brought me to this page. This page and the next few I found on the topic where less then helpful. These pages highlight two issues I have with MSDN’s documentation.

First, while MSDN’s documentation is excellent and thorough as an encyclopedic work, it fails as a quick reference. It’s often hard to find the nugget of info you need, especially if you are in a hurry. For example – on the page I reference above – instead of providing some simple examples demonstrating the concept – you need to scroll through about 80 lines of code. I’m happy to do that, but I’d appreciate some quick examples at the top for when I’m in a hurry. It would make my life a little easier.

Second, the default .NET version that MSDN shows documentation for is the latest .NET version, 3.5. I respect Microsoft’s desire to push and promote the latest version of its framework, but not taking developers to the most common – and the version of documentation they are most likely looking for – does not seem the best strategy, or even a good strategy. It’s annoying because it requires extra clicks and effort to get to the version of info you are actually looking for. It’s double annoying because .NET 3.5 is still a new technology and not yet widely adopted; 2.0 seems to the de facto standard.

I think that MSDN will get better in time, especially with the feedback system that was implemented sometime ago. Microsoft seems more open to input these days and I hope the .NET community can encourage MSDN to evolve.

Looks like today at the SXSW conference in Texas the Internet Explorer team made a surprise announcement that IE8 beta 1 is available for public download. Right now.

That’s right, the standards compliant, new version of IE is out for public testing and use as we speak.

I really have to say, over the past few months of reading the Microsoft IE blog I’ve been impressed with their change in attitude. This release of IE8, ahead of schedule just goes to further my appreciation of their new approach regarding developers and users.

I’m also personally excited to see continual development and advancement in the Microsoft browser space. The sooner IE8 goes live via Windows update the better. Hopefully within a year or so IE6 will be a memory of the past and developers can finally start to utilize PNG graphics and advanced CSS to the fullest.

About a month ago I posted a blog about Internet Explorer 8 (which recently passed the Acid 2 web standards test) requiring a special tag to utilize its new web standards rendering method.

In essence, this meant that sites and developers who had been using web standardized code would have to “turn on” standards in IE8 with a specific html META tag. Otherwise IE8 would render exactly like IE7. While this might have helped a few sites maintain backward compatibility, clearly it was not the way to force web developers and users to respect standards and adhere to them.

Case in point: IE’s development team agrees. Internet Explorer 8 will now automatically render sites in “standards mode” without needing to be told to do so. Sites that I built years ago with web standards in mind will finally fully work in Internet Explorer for the first time, this is great news!

I really want to extend my gratitude to Microsoft’s IE team for thinking through this one and listening to the community. It goes to show that things really have taken a change for the better regarding IE. And to be honest, I’m extremely happy that I can give Microsoft a pat on the back for a really trying to do what’s best for their developers and their users.

Good stuff.