As a web developer I’m almost always tasked with ensuring that websites and web applications I build not only work but look good in the popular browsers for the target platform. Sometimes you may get a client with some obscure version of a browser (not necessarily Internet Explorer, Firefox or Chrome) and you don’t have that platform available to test it locally to try and replicate the issue and hopefully fix it.

Along comes Browsershots – a website with a very simple front-end. Type in the address to the page you wish to view (obviously needs to be hosted online already and not a password protected site) and select as many or as few browsers (and platofmrs) to test, whether or not JavaScript and/or Flash is required or not (even which version must be avaialble) and even screen resolutions and colour depths. Click the button, and sit back.

Through what I’m assuming are multiple virtual machines on their servers which are instructed to browse to the site you requested and then a screenshot is taken of that browser and added to your screenshot queue.

It will notify you of the progress, whether or not the browser screenshot will be available or approxiamtely how long it will be before your screenshot is queued and taken.

The site even allows you to download all the screenshots in a single ZIP file – how handy is that.

I’m definitely bookmarking this site for my next browser-compatibility issue resolution!

We’ve recently upgraded our development laptops with SQL 2008 from SQL 2005. Today I was trying to create a new database for a client within the management studio and every time I decided, for example, to change a column that was defined nullable to not nullable and tried saving my design, which in turn would save the table changes, it gave me the following error:

Now, I understand the need for potentially re-creating the table if for example you had an existing table where a column was nullable and it contained data then you wanted to make it not nullable (without a default value) it would correctly so moan. But you would think that the Microsoft devs would build a system intuitive enough to know that where there isn’t any data in the table yet, because you’re designing the schema, it could automatically drop and re-create the table and any associated relationships.

Needless to say, to prevent this from happening to you – go into the Tools -> Options and click on the Designers item in the tree menu on the left and make sure “Prevent saving changes that require table re-creation” is not ticked as below:

Hope that helps someone else too!

The Mono Project has just released its latest version 2.0 allowing .Net developers to test and port (sometimes with little or no coding changes) so that they can be run on other platforms like Linux and Mac. The lastest version of Mono is compatible with server and desktop version of the 2.0 version of the .Net platform. This will now allow software developers and software houses to reach a wider range of clients since they can develop software using Microsoft’s architecture that will run on different platforms.