In a move that couldn't make the fellas in the Portland office any happier, Google announced that they will no longer support Internet Explorer 6. Beginning March 1, users of IE6 will notice that certain Google services, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites, will stop working well and eventually won't work at all.

Internet Explorer 6 has been a major headache for web developers everywhere. IE6 is well-known for bugs and incomplete, inconsistent, and often incorrect support for Web standards. Hearing that Google is beginning to phase out their support of IE6 gives developers around the world more confidence to do so themselves and encourage their users to download more recent browser software such as Internet Explorer 7 or 8, Firefox, Google Chrome, or Opera.

Google Apps senior product manager Rajen Sheth recently wrote, “The web has evolved in the last ten years, from simple text pages to rich, interactive applications including video and voice. Unfortunately, very old browsers cannot run many of these new features effectively. Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.”

Even Microsoft itself won’t be supporting IE6 in its own Office Web applications. However, though Microsoft has been encouraging Windows users to update to IE7 and IE8, it intends to support IE6 through 2014.

Part of being on our technical team is looking for more efficient processes that we can employ. Lately, we’ve been looking very closely at ways to stop “rehashing” the same code over and over. We’ve noticed areas where code tends to be very similar across many websites. Why re-write it for each one?

We’re looking into two types of tools to aid in this process: ORM and dynamic code generation.

Object Relational Mapping (ORM) allows us to generate the basic code needed to store and retrieve objects from a database without having to physically write a line of code. There are many more pluses to these set of tools, but this would lead to much more efficiency for our technical team. Some of the ones we’ll be learning more about are:

• Subsonic: http://www.subsonicproject.com
• Entity Framework: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa697427(VS.80).aspx
• NHibernate: https://www.hibernate.org/343.html

Our other option is simply pure dynamic code generation. I’ve been researching T4 templates (Text Template Transformation Toolkit) and love the possibilities! The idea is to create a template that represents a coding structure you write often, then have the system use that template to generate a code base for you. These templates are being used by many companies in order to increase efficiency and productivity. In fact, the ORM Subsonic listed above uses T4 templates when generating code to represent a database.  

You can learn more about Microsoft’s MSDN page for T4 templates here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb126445.aspx.

As always, we’ll keep you updated as we continue to work on more efficient, repeatable processes for our projects.

Google recently announced the launch of their Site Performance feature as an addition to their webmaster tools. The new tool shows you information about the speed of your site and gives suggestions for making it faster. We are always conscious of page speed as we build sites; users won't stick around to view your content if they have to wait for your pages to load. Not only that, but faster sites engage users, leading to better conversion rates for things such as purchases or email signups.

The Performance Overview shows the average time it takes for your site pages to load and rates your site against average speeds across the Web. You can delve into specific pages to see what their exact load time is, and see Google’s suggestions for improvements. All you need is a Google account to set your site up to use the webmaster tools. It’s a great collection of tools for developers, webmasters and anyone with a website.

You can set up a Google account here.

One of my favorite sites to learn more about the .net framework is found at wiki.asp.net. I spend a good amount of time reading through the numerous articles presented on the site.  The ASP.NET Developer wiki allows me to learn something new quickly and from the view of my peers. Here’s a list of recommended articles that I’ve found beneficial: of some of the articles I’ve found most beneficial:

• ASP.NET Open Source Projects: This article provides a number of links to open source projects developed in .net.  I’m a firm believer that you can learn a great deal by looking at others’ code, it’s probably my favorite learning mechanism and way to spark new ideas.
• Design Patterns: If you don’t know about design patterns, I’d recommend doing some research about them as they can save you a great deal of time.  You’ll be amazed to see how many of the design patterns described in this article are either present in the code you write or within the framework you use.
• Architecture: These links will teach you about everything from software architecture to the asp.net framework architecture. A lot of these articles are interesting reads that I guarantee will help solidify your knowledge base.

Hope you enjoy some good reads!

In order to increase stability and improve the security of our sites, we recently began moving many of our clients to a new hosting company, RackSpace. This move is especially important for our ecommerce clients, as heightened security is a key component to PCI compliance (a required standard of security and policy around the protection of stored and transmitted credit card data). The principles around this standard are:

• Having a secure network with a firewall and strong passwords
• Protecting cardholder data by storing data correctly and encrypting cardholder transmissions
• Reducing vulnerability by using anti-virus software and secure systems
• Implementing access control to data by restricting physical and electronic access to data
• Regularly monitoring data by tracking access to cardholder data and testing security systems
• Maintaining an information security policy to address how information is kept secure  

We take the responsibilities and requirements of these standards very seriously and feel that moving to RackSpace is beneficial to clients across the board, for ecommerce and non-ecommerce sites alike. Not only does RackSpace offer superior security, their customer service and 24/7 monitoring are unmatched and will help us provide better support to all clients.