.  Of course it’s on US Pacific time, so it doesn’t start until 5PM Australian EST.  So don’t forget to get Firefox & be part of the world record.

From the Mozilla Developer Centre:

Whenever we’re asked “when is Firefox going to be released” we endeavour to answer to the best of our abilities, but the truth of the matter is that we’ll only ever ship “when it’s ready”. We have a lot of indicators that help us understand when the product is ready for release: feedback from our pre-release milestones, excitement in the community and the press, availability of compatible Add-Ons, and a large active beta community helping us ensure that the release is compatible with all the various sites on the Internet.

After more than 34 months of active development, and with the contributions of thousands, we’re proud to announce that we’re ready. It is our expectation to ship Firefox 3 this upcoming Tuesday, June 17th. Put on your party hats and get ready to download Firefox 3 - the best web browser, period.

Plus the 3rd Release Candidate is out today.  Unless you’re on a Mac you don’t need it though, as it contains only a single change to fix a Mac-only bug that was causing the system to hang or crash at startup or shutdown.

Mozilla has released the second Release Candidate for Firefox 3, if you had RC1 installed it would have come as an automatic update, otherwise you can get it from the download page.  The release notes for RC2 are here. 

There aren’t any new features, this is a pure bugfix release. Ironically though, there are more ‘known issues’ in RC2 than there were in RC1 (21 vs 17). 

The final for Firefox 3 is due later this month I believe.

Amit Agarwal from Digital Inspiration has posted that FeedDemon, the best RSS reader ever, has been updated to version 2.7.  It’s kind of unexpected as the last version that was announced by Nick Bradbury was the 2.6.1 RC2.   Nick has added Amit’s post to his shared clippings folder, but other than that there’s been no ‘official’ announcement.  FileForum seems to have gotten the update first, and then the Newsgator download page was hastily updated to the 2.7 version (the page still mentions the 2.6 version, but the download file is for 2.7).

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How’s that for an inflammatory title?

Let me prefix this post with a brief disclaimer.  I like Microsoft’s .NET platform.  C# is a great language to work in, it’s flexible & powerful.  Plus, the .NET framework contains some great functionality that makes my job so much easier.  In short, C# rocks.

Having said that, I have some issues with ASP.NET. Deane Barker from Gadgetopia has highlighted some of these issues, and while I’m not quite as down on it as he is, I think he makes some good points

ASP.Net is such an abstraction. It’s like one day Bill decided that we all knew too much about how the Web worked, and he needed to invent a framework that changed all the rules and hid all the scary HTTP stuff so that a generation of Web developers that he trained on his stuff exclusively would have a very skewed perspective about how the Web actually worked.

I hope that didn’t sound arrogant, but I do think that if you’ve never done any Web development except ASP.Net using Web Forms, then there’s a lot you missed about Web development.

I think the UpdatePanel released with the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions really demonstrates this issue.  The UpdatePanel is really powerful.  It allows you to write your code essentially the same as you always have, with a few small modifications.  You then just wrap your ASP/HTML controls in an UpdatePanel and hey presto, you’ve got them running as AJAX controls.  No page refreshes, no postbacks.  Except that last one isn’t true, it just looks true.  On each AJAX event (that is, any event that’s wired up in the code behind for a control that’s a trigger for an update panel), the page does a postback.  The full page load life-cycle, including the view state.  It has to be this way, or how else could you still access all the values and states of the controls in your code behind methods?

This is just the problem, it makes the development of AJAX-type sites too easy.  You don’t have to know what’s going on behind the scenes, you don’t have to understand the asynchronous calls made & the HTTP processes going on.

Now, this may not be all that important if you’re on a small site, with very few steps in the page life-cycle implemented, and small view state.  But if your site is large and complex, and you have a lot of controls on the page (ie large view state) this becomes a real issue.  If you page currently takes a couple of seconds to load, due to complex processing and data connections, then on every AJAX call, this is how long it’s going to take.  Obviously you won’t need to wait for the full page render time, but this is not usually the most time-consuming part of the page load process. Also, you should always make sure you don’t double handle stuff by wrapping as much as possible in a if (!IsPostback) block, but if the page is complex, this will still not always be enough.

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Despite Microsoft Senior VP Chris Capossela saying that a search interface for the new Office ribbon device was unnecessary, Microsoft Office Labs yesterday released the internal project called ‘Scout’, now given the far less interesting title ‘Search Commands’.  What is it with Microsoft having cool development names and then giving the products really boring release titles?

Anyway, the plugin adds another tab to Word, Powerpoint & Excel.  It’s added as the last tab, but helpfully, you can just click ‘Windows Key + Y’ and it will jump to the search box from the application. 

All it really is is a search box, a bunch of suggestions plus a gigantic help button. It is very useful though.  Just start typing in the box and it will come up with a list of commands related to what you’ve typed in.  It starts with partial matches and narrows down as you type.  What is particularly handy is that it isn’t just doing a text match on the name of the commands, it’s doing a contextual match too.  The example given in the help tutorial is that if you enter ‘background’ it comes up with a bunch of commands related to document backgrounds (in Word).  This includes things like Watermarks, changing themes and shading.  I’m not sure how this is done, there must be some sort of categorisation for the application’s commands behind the scenes.

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