Cheryl on the Web

I have decided that my relationship with Microsoft can only be described as love-hate. I mean, as a Microsoft developer I have to appreciate the Microsoft technology with which I work, in particular .Net. But at the same time I can’t help but despise the proprietary, non-standards-compliant and quirky technology Microsoft sometimes releases.

Take, for instance, Internet Explorer. I spent most of my day today trying to get a 100% XHTML standards-compliant website made on my Mac in iWeb to work in Internet Explorer 6. IE 6 doesn’t support transparent PNG images, which pretty much compose an entire web page if you make it using iWeb. So Apple puts a script in all their pages to “fix” the transparent PNG’s after load in Internet Explorer. Of course, there are all kinds of reasons why this doesn’t work well and an infinite number of situations in which the fix does not work. Luckily the problem is supposedly resolved in IE7 but this is just one example of Microsoft doing it’s own thing.

On Thursday of this week, I had an application of mine stop working. The application downloads a web page from a secured (HTTPS/SSL3) website. What seems to be the problem? Microsoft’s technology .Net - which I use to do the download - defaults to a TLS protocol for https download, instead of SSL3 - and not all servers support TLS. Of course, in .Net 1.1 TLS was not the default, but Microsoft was so kind as to switch the default between .Net versions. Sigh. This cost me 3 hours of troubleshooting on Friday and I am very thankful for the obscure newsgroup post that finally tipped me off to this.