ASP.NET MVC, Bootstrap, and Internet Explorer Compatibility View

Works on My Machine…or Does It?

It’s always frustrating when you’re working on a project, and everything looks good when you’re running it from Visual Studio, and then you deploy to your web server, and suddenly something’s not rendering correctly. In this post, I’ll give you some tips for troubleshooting these problems when the target browser is Internet Explorer.

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Responsive Design: Fix for Windows Phone 8 Device Adaptation

As I mentioned on Saturday, I just updated my blog theme to something a bit more clean and modern. In addition to just wanting something that looked good, one of the features that factored into my choosing the Wise Words theme for Orchard was its support for responsive web design, leveraging Twitter bootstrap and bootstrap responsive to automatically reformat content and resize elements depending on the available screen real estate.

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New Blog Theme

Seemed like it was about time, so I’ve finally gotten around to doing a little housecleaning on the blog, and installed a new theme for Orchard, called Wise Words, by Shovel & Rake. I’ve done a fair amount of tweaking to the theme to get it the way I wanted it, and while I was at it, I’ve cleared away a few of the less important sidebar items.

While I was at it, I took Scott Hanselman‘s advice and did a run-through of all the PNGs on my site (after downloading the code and assets locally), and ran them all through PNGOut via powershell. A few of the largest images, I pulled into Paint.NET and saved in 8-bit format, which makes a HUGE difference in filesize, and with reasonable dithering levels, didn’t make that big a difference in quality.

So hopefully, things will be a little easier to read, and to find, and with luck the site will load a little faster, too. And since the new theme is designed to be responsive, it should hopefully also be more friendly for mobile device users.

I’ve still got a few things to tweak here and there. For example, the code samples in my posts came out a little wonky with the new theme. But I’ve updated most of the images and videos that were hanging over past the sidebar, and tweaked other issues that I ran across.

If you see something that’s clearly not right, please drop me a note and let me know, or simply post a comment here.

Tweak Touch Behavior in Internet Explorer with User Style Sheets

As touch becomes a more and more prevalent means of interacting with PCs as well as phones and tablets (I’m typing this on a Lenovo Carbon X1 Touch laptop), developers should be aware of how to create touch-friendly sites and apps that help users make the most of touch-enabled devices.

If you’re building apps for the Windows Store, there’s good guidance available on touch interaction design on the Windows Store developer center.

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Quick Hits Issue #5: Resources for App Developers and User Groups

In this issue, I’ve got some great resources for app developers, as well as for user groups:

Get up to Speed on HTML, CSS3, and JavaScript

If you’ve done some web development, but want to kick your skills up a notch, check out Learn HTML5 with JavaScript & CSS3 Jump Start Training, a course from Microsoft Virtual Academy. The course covers HTML Semantic Markup, CSS3 Selectors, Layout and Animation, JavaScript Core and DOM Interaction, and more.

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