What are we facing?

I have some products integrated in Visual Studio 2008 Shell (integrated mode) like Phalanger. I would love to have Aggiorno Add-in installed in VS 2008 Shell integrated mode, so I could use it along with the integrated products.

The Solution

Let's assume you have Visual Studio 2008 Shell Integrated mode already installed. Let's assume you have .msi file of Aggiorno which is the installer for the Aggiorno Add-in.

You’ll first have to run the following registry file, that you can download:

InstallOnVsIntegrated.reg (340.00 bytes)

Which contains the following code

 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Setup]
"Dbghelp_path"="C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0"

After you run it (in Vista you do a right-click on the file and click "Merge") you now can install Aggiorno Add-in on Visual Studio Shell, just run the installer.

In that way you will be able to see Aggiorno along with Phalanger coexisting happily.

Some external resources

• Visual Studio Shell overview.
• Phalanger.

What are we facing?

I have a web page that needs a printer friendly version and I don’t want to change its markup.

The Solution

Fortunately the html link tag allows to associate a style sheet depending on what device the document will be displayed on. Among the list of possible values that the media attribute can handle we will be focusing on the print value which is going to help us link an printing specific style sheet to the web page. The following example illustrates how to use the media attribute.

Now that you have added the the link tag, you’ll notice that whatever style included in printerfriendly.css style sheet file will not affect any tag in your page when you’re are viewing it in your web browser, but if you print it, or execute print preview (let’s not waste paper), you’ll see that the printer specific styles will do their job.

Some External References

• Print Different
• Html Link Tag

What are we facing?

There are not a universal implementation of all CSS selectors across all browsers. This page from Centricle shows a neat matrix of OS/browsers against supported selectors. Particularly, I would like to treat the differences between Internet Explorer browsers. Is there a way to deal the style of my site in different ways across different versions of IE?

The Solution

There at least two solutions, but take them cautiously.

First solution: browser detection via JavaScript by querying three properties of the “BrowserDetect” object. You can detect which browser is visiting your page, not just between versions of IE. This solution is highly controversial as you can’t entirely trust the “BrowserDetect” object and may be not implemented at all.

Second solution: the Internet Explorer conditional comments are a way to deal with it. It is specific for IE browsers. The good thing is that it doesn’t break the rendering of other browsers as they are just comments.

So for example:

  <!-- [if gte IE 6]
  <style type="text/css">
       @import ("ie6up.css");
  </style>
  -->

It will load the file “ie6up.css” if the IE browser is version is 6 or greater. Any other browser will ignore it as a comment. The caveat is that such style manipulation should be at CSS file level, not in the HTML file. That puts a maintainability cost on it. Again, take it cautiously.

Some external references

• Detecting Internet Explorer More Effectively
• IE8's "User-Agent String and Version Vector"
• A third solution by Tantek Çelik: IE Band Pass filter