I come to this post a little relieved, but still frustrated enough that I felt like I needed to share my problem and solution. In short, frustration + google/bing fail + eventual win = blog post.

Setup: I’ve been working on a WPF app, which just so happens to be my first “real” WPF app (I usually do web development), and I wanted to simply embed the version number on our splash image. For those of you not familiar, in WPF having a splash image appear while your app is being loaded is as simple as right clicking on an image and setting it’s build action to “SplashScreen”. At least I believe it’s been that easy since WPF 3.5 SP1 release.

I’m willing to bet as a web developer there will be some project that you are working on that requires you to expose your data and or services across domain boundaries through an REST API and want them to be called via javascript. Maybe you wrote a jQuery plugin that retrieves data from your site, or maybe you have several domains that share the same services. Whatever the reason is, you will quickly discover the browser same-origin policy, which states “a web page served from domain1.com cannot normally connect to or communicate with a server other than domain1.com”.

Fortunately there is a way around this. It’s called JSONP or “JSON with padding”. To summarize, JSONP works around the cross-domain browser restriction by making a GET request using a script tag, which isn’t limited by the same-origin policy. It traditionally will also provide a callback method in the url so the response from the server will look something like this:

<Rambling>

Unless you live under a rock, you’ve probably heard of the announcement from Microsoft about Windows Mobile Series 7. It’s already getting rave reviews from the tech-journalists and I think the warm reception that both the Zune interface and Xbox UI have gotten have more or less proven that this is going to be successful. It’s not like this is really new, but more of a maturation of seeds that were planted a while ago.

As a follower of most things tech and as a .NET developer, I can’t say that I’m really surprised. For all the haters out there and all the people that love their iPods, iPads, and iLife, and to the open source town criers the negative nancies and googlebators out there, you’ve missed something. While you were all mouthing away at forums and making your sarcastic comments, slobbering over the latest google lab and overwhelmed with the delicious android pastry excitement, all the while announcing the death of the old blue machine. Something happened.

There is a growing trend among popular websites to end support for Internet Explorer 6 once and for all. It’s actually something that’s been going on for awhile now and any web developer will tell you its about time. The difference is now the big boys are doing it. Some big companies that have started are:

• Youtube: which now informs you that your browser sucks and recommends one of the latest ones and is predicted to drop support all together.

• Digg - http://about.digg.com/blog/much-ado-about-ie6
• Facebook (rumored) http://blog.jacobburke.com/2008/07/24/facebooks-new-design-on-ie6-doesnt-exist/

There are even sites out there with a single purpose of spreading the word to kill IE 6 usage:

• http://twibbon.com/join/IE6-Must-Die
• http://idroppedie6.com/
• http://www.bringdownie6.com/

After over a year of complaints and failed promises by Telligent, the once loved and recently hated, Graffiti CMS, has finally gone open source (Official Press Release). Believe me there was a huge amount of frustration gaining over this product, mostly for its owners utter lack of communication and upkeep (telligent). And I should know, you are reading this from an officially licensed site…