Hauser & Wenz :: Blog

I just wanted to try out the new IE7 Beta 2, so I first wanted to uninstall Beta 1. It took me some time to find it, but after a while I found out how: In Add/Remove Software, just click on Show Updates, and IE7 Beta 1 is an update for Windows XP ... weird.

After ignoring a frightening warning message ...

... I uninstalled the whole thing and rebooted. This worked nicely, however when I was back in the system, I got in an endless loop of popups asking me to send an error report to Microsoft.

Luckily, each of them led me some very constructive advice of what to change on my machine.

I then installed Beta 2, booted again, ignored a warning about my registry being replaced by a backup copy, et voilà, IE7 Beta 2 is up and running. The interface is a bit different from before and it will certainly take some time to get used to it. Looking forward to playing around with it and do some compatibility tests.


Update: Albert knows how to use IE7 without installing it (German only; synopsis: extract IE7 archive, create empty iexplore.exe.local file, run iexplore.exe)
Update: Jon Galloway's standalone launch script is now updated for IE7 and seems to solve the problems people were facing when using IE7 without installation.

Update 2: Installed beta 2 today, the same endless loop has gone (well, the error reporting assistant only comes up three times *sigh*)

The question comes up again and again, but nowhere in the web seems to be the correct answer (although I describe it in my German JavaScript book since quite some time). The topic is using JavaScript to call Web Services from within Mozilla type browsers. Whereas this is quite well-documented and works more or less seamlessly with PHP Web Services, .NET Web Services are problematic. Calling the Web Service works, as does parsing the return data. However, on the server end, only empty parameters arrive.
The trick is to manually set the type for the parameters you are sending to the server. So after creating a parameter:

var p = new SOAPParameter(value, name);

Then, you load the correct type; in this case, I am using string, but you could use other schema types like integer, as well:

var enc = new SOAPEncoding();
enc = senc.getAssociatedEncoding(
  "http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/",
  false);
var coll = enc.schemaCollection;
var type = coll.getType(
  "string",
  "http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema");

Finally, you link the type to the parameter:

p.schemaType = type;

And that's it! The rest is business as usual: Instantiate the SOAPCall class, set the required properties, call encode(), call asyncInvoke(), implement a callback function, and you are done.

By the way: When using the Atlas framework, you do not need this browser-specific code any more; calling .NET Web Services works in a browser-agnostic fashion here.

Gerade eingetrudelt: Die deutschen Versionen Express Editions gibt es nicht nur als Web-Installer bei Microsoft, sondern seit Kurzem auch bei Codezone als ISO-Datei. Gut, zugegeben, die ISOs liegen auch bei Microsoft, aber Codezone hatte diese Info offensichtlich als erstes.

(In other news: Den WMF-Patch gibt es seit Kurzem auf Windows/Microsoft Update.)

Der Suchdienst Neomo, an dem unser guter Kollege Stefan Fischerländer beteiligt ist, wurde (mit einiger Verzögerung) auch von den Standardmedien entdeckt. Heute steht es in der Financial Times Deutschland (Vorabmeldung gestern), und SPIEGEL, BÖRSE ONLINE, impulse und andere haben die Meldung gleich mit übernommen. Herzlichen Glückwunsch!