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Lots of shakeup with Microsoft these days.  Of course, Scoble disappears on the verge of the big “Longhorn to be Stillborn” announcement from Microsoft.

I wonder if Microsoft might be moving towards a more open-source like approach, at least on the release side of things.  Perhaps the concept of a named and branded OS will disappear, replaced with a framework that is constantly upgraded via Windows Update (kernel and all!).  Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s possible to keep home users, who generally purchase Windows once and only once with their new PC, as well as business clients that would prefer to seamlessly upgrade their client systems piecemeal (browser today, explorer shell tomorrow, kernel the day after) to keep them up-to-date.

In somewhat unrelated new, the quality of non-OS products coming out of MS recently has really dropped.  Case and point: Visual Studio 2002 and 2003.  These two are the poorest releases of the Visual Studio line so far (Visual Studio 6 being the best, IMHO).  Part of me wonders if they QA’d the product on anything but simple two or three “Hello World” project solutions.  If you don’t believe me, try any of the following tasks:

• Reference DLLs larger than 64kB.  You can only build once before having to delete all DLLs from the solution!
• Edit tables in the VS.NET HTML editor.  In fact, try pasting something over top of something else in the editor. 
• Use the Windows Forms editor for a complex form with nested panels and the like.  Have fun when you can no longer load the form in the editor and/or Visual Studio trashes your form class!  I hope you’ve checked in - into something other than VSS itself.
• Enjoy the random crashes of Visual Studio.  No pattern detected so far.

I don’t have much faith in MS to release a stable version of VS.NET 2004 (or whatever this one will be).  The fact that serious bugs that hinder your ability to write complex solutions have existed all the way from the beta up to the latest VS 2003 is almost unforgivable.

Ob</rant>

After some playing around with various bits in System.Windows.Forms, I’ve managed to pretty much eliminate the graphical glitches in the .NET control hosting plugin.

The only thing left is some strange WM_ERASEBKGND/WM_PAINT messages that seem to be coming out of nowhere.  Whenever I resize the browser I get a subtle flicker on some controls - it’s almost like the entire control has been invalidated by something.  Perhaps the Gecko plugin hosting window is doing this to force a refresh on any plugins.

Here’s another screenshot for fun:

I managed to get my .NET plugin wrapper for Firefox working just now.  I can get a .NET UserControl to show up embedded in an HTML page through Firefox.

Next step - hook up the <object> tag to download arbitrary .NET assemblies and run them as UserControls (with security of course).

Check it out!

The only issue I’m dealing with right now is that there’s lots of flicker as the control is overwritten by Mozilla (for some reason).  It’s almost like I’m supposed to be clipping the paint messages, but I don’t know enough right now about the event system to solve this.  I worked around it by forcing an invalidation on a WM_PAINT message.

It could be related to the interaction between the UserControl and Mozilla itself- perhaps the control is leaking some messages to its parent that shouldn’t be being sent.

Google has released their latest zeitgeist, but this time without the browser stats of yore.

I was hoping to see a rise in Gecko-based browsers for July, but I don’t think we’ll be seeing it for a few months.  Could this be related to the IPO?

RSS (and Atom) should come with an acceptable use flag that lets me tell people that it’s okay to syndicate my blog posts in full.

For future reference, it’s okay to quote or aggregate any of my posts, even in full.