I’ve been working on a side project for a while now. A big AJAX-y web application with tons of moving parts. Last night I was getting ready to publish a version for the client to review when I noticed something odd when viewing in Internet Explorer 8. It started out peculiar, turning out to be extremely frustrating.

How a portion of the page looked in Firefox 3.5

And how the same page looked in Internet Explorer 8 (with and without Compatibility Mode) Notice how the font style changes at “State”.

I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out what the heck was going on. Thinking I had hosed a style somewhere, I opened up Firebug and inspected the element. This is what I saw. Ok, looks normal to me.

But using Internet Explorer’s Developer Tools, I saw this. Notice how the span does not close, and the rest of the elements are a child of the span tag.

So, going over the HTML in the ASPX page, I find this, I hadn’t closed the span tag properly. DOH!

Fixing the markup like such, makes the page render properly.

So, is this a bug or a feature of Internet Explorer 8? Or, a bug or a feature of Firefox 3.5?  For me the moral of the story is to make sure that all my block element tags are properly closed.

Time to code,

James

Last Tuesday (July 14th, 2009) was the 2nd Annual Most Valuable Member Event for the Inland Empire .NET User’s Group. The first MVM event was a great success, and I wanted this time around to be just as, if not more, spectacular. I’d like to say it was, and boy howdy.

The sponsors really came through with tons of prizes. Riverside Medical Clinic allowed us to use both the conference room and classrooms – the conference room for the meeting, the classroom for serving the food. My cunados, Ricki and Mauricio prepared authentic Salvadoran food - pupusas, chilaquiles, chiles rellenos y arroz - which was sponsored by Patrick Conway at TekSystems.

William played his guitar during the breaks, and there was tons of conversation, laughter, geekiness and all out fun. Efren Toscano and Josh Highland of TechZulu were there to video tape the event. Wm. Marc Salsberry was taking tons of pictures (in that fantastic way he does).

And, there were four special guests presenting. Volkan Uzun on ReSharper, Dustin Davis on Red Gate ANTS Profiler, David Jung on User Interface testing with Visual Studio 2010, and the lovely and fetching Lynn Langit, gave an update on what is going on with SmartCare in Zambia.

Everyone won prizes, and went home with giant bags of swag. Carmina and I were up till after midnight the night before preparing everything.

Up late packing the swag

Inside the MVM backpack

You may be wondering, so what does it mean to be the Inland Empire .NET User’s Group Most Valuable Member and First and Second Runner’s Up. Here is what they each received.

Additional sponsors stepped forward and provided software to raffle off. Telerik provided a copy of their suite of tools. TechSmith donated a copy of Camtasia Studio. Balsamiq Studios provided three copies of Mockup. TimeSnapper provided ten copies of their software. Red Gate sent books, shirts, lanyards. ComponentOne, Telerik, JetBrains, Developer Express, and Apress provided tons of shirts.

Some fun facts

View Full Album

Thanks to all who helped out, who came to see what was what, who participated in collecting points, who provided the TONS of swag, and, who made the evening something to remember.

So, in no particular order…

Time to breathe again,

James