I have been using Microsoft Expression Web lately and I must say, whilst on the surface it doesn’t seem that special, once you start discovering the features, it has some pretty cool stuff.

Anyway .. onto the post. I decided that I needed to use all this expression goodness to re-build my site, add a bit of Ajax goodness and generally rebuild into an XHTML1.1 table less layout with a low footprint. All was fine until my navigation was not centering on the page, and everything else was. Hmm… a bit of digging suggested that I should use

text-align:center

in the CSS. I made the change and all was good in the world. Then the tester in me stepped in … what about Firefox and Safari? Low and behold, they were not working as expected. After a quick search, it appears that because a DIV is not a block level element, Safari and Firefox are technically correct in not obeying the text-align. So to make this work with an XHTML 1.1 transitional doctype cross all 3 browsers you need:

margin: 0 auto;text-align:left;width: 780px;

If you don’t specify the width, it won’t work and IE will render it on the left of the page.

Bj Rollison has blogged about the percieved value of code coverage and the information, percieved or otherwise that it provides. This post is definatley worth a read and has me thinking about an example that I commonly use drawn from Code Complete when takking about the subject, but that is a topic for future blog post.

You know that Orcas beta you downloaded last week? Time to dump it in the bin and grab the first Rosario CTP. This is the first look at the TFS 3.0 release, which according to Microsoft lore is the one that get’s it right. So what’s so good about Rosario ? The MSDN page has all the details. Here are two key features I am after:

I can’t wait until Orcas ships. Am I waiting on a really cool testing feature … nope. (The ones I am interested in come in Rosario). Do I want to use WPF … nope. Javascript debugger … nope.

I am waiting on VS 2008, so I don’t have to install VS2005 SP1 ever again!!!

I decided to reinstall my laptop yesteday. It took 20 mins to install the operating system, 20 mins to install SQL server, 30 mins to install VS2005, and it has taken 1 1.2 hours to install VS2005 SP1 and it still isn’t finished !

I’m sorry but it should never take longer to install a patch than the origional applicaiton … period. If it does, you might as well add in SP1 out of the box and call it VS 2007.