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Scrollbars in EdgeHtml WebView and Edge browser

2019 Aug 22, 5:35

The scrollbars in UWP WebView and in Edge have different default behavior leading to many emails to my team. (Everything I talk about here is for the EdgeHtml based WebView and Edge browser and does not apply to the Chromium based Edge browser and WebView2).

There is a Edge only -ms-overflow-style CSS property that controls scroll behavior. We have a different default for this in the WebView as compared to the Edge browser. If you want the appearance of the scrollbar in the WebView to match the browser then you must explicitly set that CSS property. The Edge browser default is scrollbar which gives us a Windows desktop styled non-auto-hiding scrollbar. The WebView default is -ms-autohiding-scrollbar which gives a sort of compromise between desktop and UWP app scrollbar behavior. In this configuration it is auto-hiding. When used with the mouse you'll get Windows desktop styled scrollbars and when used with touch you'll get the UWP styled scrollbars.

Since WebViews are intended to be used in apps this style is the default in order to better match the app's scrollbars. However this difference between the browser and WebView has led to confusion.

Here’s an -ms-overflow-style JSFiddle showing the difference between the two styles. Try it in the Edge browser and in WebView. An easy way to try it in the Edge WebView is using the JavaScript Browser.

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MSApp.getHtmlPrintDocumentSourceAsync - JavaScript UWP app printing

2017 Oct 11, 5:49

The documentation for printing in JavaScript UWP apps is out of date as it all references MSApp.getHtmlPrintDocumentSource but that method has been replaced by MSApp.getHtmlPrintDocumentSourceAsync since WinPhone 8.1.

Background

Previous to WinPhone 8.1 the WebView's HTML content ran on the UI thread of the app. This is troublesome for rendering arbitrary web content since in the extreme case the JavaScript of some arbitrary web page might just sit in a loop and never return control to your app's UI. With WinPhone 8.1 we added off thread WebView in which the WebView runs HTML content on a separate UI thread.

Off thread WebView required changing our MSApp.getHtmlPrintDocumentSource API which could no longer synchronously produce an HtmlPrintDocumentSource. With WebViews running on their own threads it may take some time for them to generate their print content for the HtmlPrintDocumentSource and we don't want to hang the app's UI thread in the interim. So the MSApp.getHtmlPrintDocumentSource API was replaced with MSApp.getHtmlPrintDocumentSourceAsync which returns a promise the resolved value of which is the eventual HtmlPrintDocumentSource.

Sample

However, the usage of the API is otherwise unchanged. So in sample code you see referencing MSApp.getHtmlPrintDocumentSource the sample code is still reasonable but you need to call MSApp.getHtmlPrintDocumentSourceAsync instead and wait for the promise to complete. For example the PrintManager docs has an example implementing a PrintTaskRequested event handler in a JavaScript UWP app.

    function onPrintTaskRequested(printEvent) {    
var printTask = printEvent.request.createPrintTask("Print Sample", function (args) {
args.setSource(MSApp.getHtmlPrintDocumentSource(document));
});

Instead we need to obtain a deferral in the event handler so we can asynchronously wait for getHtmlPrintDocumentSourceAsync to complete:

    function onPrintTaskRequested(printEvent) {    
var printTask = printEvent.request.createPrintTask("Print Sample", function (args) {
const deferral = args.getDeferral();
MSApp.getHtmlPrintDocumentSourceAsync(document).then(htmlPrintDocumentSource => {
args.setSource(htmlPrintDocumentSource);
deferral.complete();
}, error => {
console.error("Error: " + error.message + " " + error.stack);
deferral.complete();
});
});
PermalinkCommentsjavascript MSApp printing programming uwp webview win10 windows

Retweet of igrigorik

2015 Jul 26, 2:43
writing Promise-using API's: http://bit.ly/1KsMQ7X  - must read for all JavaScript and spec developers alike.
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Tweet from David_Risney

2015 Mar 11, 9:57
Chrome moving Service Worker's fetch() API to the window. Like XHR but with promises http://updates.html5rocks.com/2015/03/introduction-to-fetch … via @ChromiumDev
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mostlysignssomeportents: More than 90% of Americans believe...

2014 Jun 7, 9:55


mostlysignssomeportents:

More than 90% of Americans believe that the US government is unduly influenced by money, and the Mayday.US super PAC is raising $5M to fund the election campaigns of politicians who’ll pledge to dismantle super PACs and enact other campaign finance reforms. They raised more than $1M in 30 days last month, and this month, the goal is $5M. It’s the brainchild of Lawrence Lessig, who’s going to run prototype the project by running five electoral campaigns in 2014, and use the lessons of those projects to win enough anti-corruption seats in 2016 to effect real change.

Again, I’m not able to contribute to Mayday.US, because I’m a Canadian and Briton. But I ask my American friends to put in $10, and promise that I’ll put CAD1000 into any comparable Canadian effort and/or £1000 into a comparable UK effort. We all win when countries embrace evidence-based policy guided by doing what’s best for its citizens, rather than lining the pockets of corrupting multinationals.

Mayday.US

Please reblog!

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Promises/A+

2013 Dec 17, 9:03

What is good and common of all JS promise designs collected as Promises/A+

Promises/A+

An open standard for sound, interoperable JavaScript promises—by implementers, for implementers.

PermalinkCommentstechnical javascript

JavaScript Promises: There and back again - HTML5 Rocks

2013 Dec 17, 9:02

The ES6 form of Promises.

PermalinkCommentstechnical javascript

Serializing JavaScript Promise Execution

2013 Aug 10, 3:07
Occasionally I have need to run a set of unrelated promises in series, for instance an object dealing with a WinRT camera API that can only execute one async operation at a time, or an object handling postMessage message events and must resolve associated async operations in the same order it received the requests. The solution is very simply to keep track of the last promise and when adding a new promise in serial add a continuation of the last promise to execute the new promise and point the last promise at the result. I encapsulate the simple solution in a simple constructor:

    function PromiseExecutionSerializer() {
var lastPromise = WinJS.Promise.wrap(); // Start with an empty fulfilled promise.

this.addPromiseForSerializedExecution = function(promiseFunction) {
lastPromise = lastPromise.then(function () {
// Don't call directly so next promise doesn't get previous result parameter.
return promiseFunction();
});
}
}

The only thing to watch out for is to ensure you don't pass the result of a previous promise onto a subsequent promise that is unrelated.
PermalinkCommentsasync javascript promise technical

Words with Hints Windows 8 App Development Notes

2013 Jul 4, 1:00

My second completed app for the Windows Store was Words with Hints a companion to Words with Friends or other Scrabble like games that gives you *ahem* hints. You provide your tiles and optionally letters placed in a line on the board and Words with Hints gives you word options.

I wrote this the first time by building a regular expression to check against my dictionary of words which made for a slow app on the Surface. In subsequent release of the app I now spawn four web workers (one for each of the Surface's cores) each with its own fourth of my dictionary. Each fourth of the dictionary is a trie which makes it easy for me to discard whole chunks of possible combinations of Scrabble letters as I walk the tree of possibilities.

The dictionaries are large and takes a noticeable amount of time to load on the Surface. The best performing mechanism I found to load them is as JavaScript source files that simply define their portion of the dictionary on the global object and synchronously (only on the worker so not blocking the UI thread). Putting them into .js files means they take advantage of bytecode caching making them load faster. However because the data is mostly strings and not code there is a dramatic size increase when the app is installed. The total size of the four dictionary .js files is about 44Mb. The bytecode cache for the dictionary files is about double that 88Mb meaning the dictionary plus the bytecode cache is 132Mb.

To handle the bother of postMessage communication and web workers this was the first app in which I used my promise MessagePort project which I'll discuss more in the future.

This is the first app in which I used the Microsoft Ad SDK. It was difficult to find the install for the SDK and difficult to use their website, but once setup, the Ad SDK was easy to import into VS and easy to use in my app.

PermalinkCommentsdevelopment technical windows windows-store words-with-hints

Attention:!!!, Behold, you are reading a letter from your President Barack Obama.

2012 Sep 26, 2:43

Eric gets the most entertaining mail.

You have failed to comply with them after all the warning and instructions given to you, but since you are also among the terrorist we are facing in the country, I will personal make sure that I wipe away the crime in the state and I promise you that you will definitely pay with your life because I am here to protect the interest of my people and not to put them in shame, you suppose to support this government and not to spoil it.

PermalinkCommentshumor spam scam email eric-law

Jet Set Radio HD coming soon with awesome soundtrack...

2012 Jun 1, 2:55


Jet Set Radio HD coming soon with awesome soundtrack promised. Exciting!

PermalinkCommentsjet-set-radio video-game game video music xbox

Coding in Marble - Rico Mariani's Performance Tidbits - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

2012 Feb 6, 8:47

In short: excessive use of promises leads to a ton of short lived objects and resulting poorer pref.

PermalinkCommentsperf technical javascript promise async

CommonJS, I Promise by Kris Kowal - JSConf.eu ☠ 2010

2010 Dec 14, 3:06"Join Kris for a pointed presentation on the state of CommonJS: what's done, what's being debated, and what needs to be done."PermalinkCommentsjavascript video commonjs technical kris-kowal

Why the internet will fail (from 1995) « Three Word Chant!

2010 Feb 26, 8:50Did I read this already on Paleo-Future? Anyway still an awesome 1995 rant on why the Internet will fail. "Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople."PermalinkCommentshumor internet fail article history

How Flash Drives and Social Engineering can Compromise Networks

2010 Jan 22, 1:44"He seeded the customer's parking lot with USB flash drives, each of which had a Trojan horse installed on it. When the employees arrived for work in the morning, they were quite excited to find the free gadgets laying around the parking lot. Employees eagerly collected the USB drives and plugged them into the first computers they came across: their own workstations."PermalinkCommentsvia:ericlaw security usb windows social-engineering computer technical

Flickr Visual Search in IE8

2009 Apr 10, 9:48

A while ago I promised to say how an xsltproc Meddler script would be useful and the general answer is its useful for hooking up a client application that wants data from the web in a particular XML format and the data is available on the web but in another XML format. The specific case for this post is a Flickr Search service that includes IE8 Visual Search Suggestions. IE8 wants the Visual Search Suggestions XML format and Flickr gives out search data in their Flickr web API XML format.

So I wrote an XSLT to convert from Flickr Search XML to Visual Suggestions XML and used my xsltproc Meddler script to actually apply this xslt.

After getting this all working I've placed the result in two places: (1) I've updated the xsltproc Meddler script to include this XSLT and an XML file to install it as a search provider - although you'll need to edit the XML to include your own Flickr API key. (2) I've created a service for this so you can just install the Flickr search provider if you're interested in having the functionality and don't care about the implementation. Additionally, to the search provider I've added accelerator preview support to show the Flickr slideshow which I think looks snazzy.

Doing a quick search for this it looks like there's at least one other such implementation, but mine has the distinction of being done through XSLT which I provide, updated XML namespaces to work with the released version of IE8, and I made it so you know its good.

PermalinkCommentsmeddler xml ie8 xslt flickr technical boring search suggestions

PolitiFact | The Obameter: Tracking Barack Obama's Campaign Promises

2009 Jan 24, 2:42"PolitiFact has compiled about 500 promises that Barack Obama made during the campaign and is tracking their progress on our Obameter. We rate their status as No Action, In the Works or Stalled. Once we find action is completed, we rate them Promise Kept, Compromise or Promise Broken."PermalinkCommentspolitics news government obama election president tracking

FeedSync

2008 Nov 5, 3:51This site has example implementations for feedsync: "The FeedSync Specification is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License and the Microsoft Open Specification Promise. Microsoft encourages developers to create independent implementations of the FeedSync specification. See the Developer page for more information on how to write a FeedSync enabled application, and the Implementations page to see how people are using FeedSync already."PermalinkCommentsfree software development feedsync feed microsoft live windows rss sse

Translucent and shaped windows in core Java

2008 Mar 5, 6:32"... today's build 12 of JDK 6.0u10 delivers on the promise - translucent and shaped windows with core Java classes only!"PermalinkCommentsblog article java jdk transparent windows gui api shape
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