owssvr.dll : Hack Attempt?

By tim

Just had some SiteGuard mails about people trying to access http://www.mywebsite.com/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll

Initial thoughts were that somebody was trying to ascertain the presence of SharePoint on the server to possibly use it as an attack surface for some kind of hack

However, it would seem that it's a false alarm :¬)

Users with Microsoft Office and a version of Internet Explorer with the "Discuss" toolbar enabled are, indirectly, to blame for this 404.  The aforementioned toolbar does a request to owssvr.dll to see whehter or not the site has the ability to open the discussion panel

http://www.xav.com/scripts/guardian/help/1022.html for more info :¬)

Scrolling div and anchor links

By rob

I've just hit a browser difference that stopped me for a while!

My problem:

Text links outside a scolling div to jump the scroll view to the desired location within the scrolling div.
The scrolling div has the css overflow:auto; with a set height to enable scrolling.
Using normal anchor links and names worked for firefox but not IE6 + IE7, after researching on the net I came across a javascript equivalent.

document.getElementById('elmID').scrollIntoView(true);

Using this javascript and adding ID's to the areas I needed for scroll view worked a treat! 

Web Accessibility Testing

By rob

Web accessibility is an important issue, more and more companies are being sued for not complying!
The site we currently used to test for AAA compliancy has been taken on by IBM and no-longer support for public testing. 

I’ve had a hunt on the web and done a few tests using the following tools:

Fujitsu Web Accessibility App (http://www.fujitsu.com/global/accessibility/assistance/wi/) – You need the latest JAVA installed on your machine (http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp - scroll down to “Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 Update 5”).

Once installed I’ve checked URL and typed in “http://www.creative-jar.com/” hit “start checking” now I’m presented with a webpage displaying a list of guidelines. I’ve clicked on the http://www.creative-jar.com/ link on the page which jumps me down the page to the priority levels (1 – A, 2 – AA, 3 – AAA). Below this is the whole list of problems, detailing in what needs to be done to correct this. If you click on view, it’ll load up the page highlighting the problem.

Firefox Accessibility plug-in https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5809

This adds the accessibility tool bar, where you’ll find a button on the left named “reports” – click this and select “Accessibility Issues”. This will load up a new window listing all the issues, double clicking on the issue will pop up a box with all the occurring problems, also highlighting the problem on the webpage. These are tested to the AAA compliance standards on http://www.w3.org/WAI/

Recently I have noticed a new addition to the guidelines which was not in the bobby webxact tool. This being the contrast ratio of text and backgrounds. The ratio is 3:1, which eliminates nice little details on a lot of sites :/ bah!

I suggest for all those who do testing and building use the firefox plug-in for it’s a quick and easy way to check for problems.
The fujitsu app, is nice but might be long winded for updating small problems.

Good ASP.Net Ajax Tutorial

By tim

Lewis came across a goot tutorial on how to create your own ajax extenders for the standard controls in  the ASP.Net toolkit

http://weblogs.asp.net/dwahlin/archive/2007/08/08/creating-an-asp-net-ajax-toolkit-extender-control.aspx gives a good walkthrough on how to extend the GridView control to disply like an Excel srepadhseet with frozen headers and all that good stuff, well as much good stuff as you can get in Excel

i'm going to run through and extend the GridView as described in the article but maybe it's a moot point now that we have the ListView control in .net 3.5. It does, however, open it up for older sites which need some richer functionality while still using the .net 2 framework

I still enjoy using the Ajax Framework and toolkit alot so it's good that there's still life left in it and they've not dropped it completely yet!!

Silverlight 2 Beta is here!!!!

By tim

yay, at last!!  Microsoft have released the first beta version of Silverlight 2, formerly Silverlight 1.1

Looking at the post (http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2008/03/05/asp-mediaplayer-and-asp-silverlight-controls-update.aspx), there looks to be some really nice controls out-of-the-box, including asp:MediaPlayer and a raft of asp:SilverLight stuff

Highly exciting stuff.  Also, i hear they've overcome the asynchronous file upload via some special privilege method whereby client-side code can access user-verified files and upload them so i'm eager to see how this works in production

Feature rich comparedf to the previous version >> http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/overview.aspx

and an SDK for Visual Studio 2008 >>  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E0BAE58E-9C0B-4090-A1DB-F134D9F095FD&displaylang=en

Yarr :¬)