It always seemed a little strange to me that the new Expression Web and Blend tools would not be available under a MSDN Subscription ... after all, they are still development tools at heart.

Well Microsoft is, from now, adding these two tools to the MSDN Premium subscribtion, which was apparently inspired by customer feedback!

As announced on Somasegar's WebLog:

"Expression Blend and Expression Web are intended to help creative professionals collaborate with developers to create rich user experiences for the Web, Windows Vista applications and beyond, which means we need to make sure both tools are readily available to our developer community."

The offer excludes Expression Design and Expression Media as they "... are not directly intended for application development, we feel they fall outside the current scope of MSDN Subscriptions". Fair enough.

I've just fixed a strange bug I was having when comparing a web page in IE and Firefox. The page simply had a single textbox, and a button. By default, in accordance with W3C standards, both browsers will post-back to the server when the user hits <Enter> from within the textbox.

Just the behaviour I wanted, except that when the post-back occurs from IE, the button's event handler does not get triggered on the server!! Very strange ... but this article on 4guysfromrolla.com gives a great explanation.

Basically, IE does not post-back a fully serialised form if there is only one textbox on the page! The server does not know what triggered the post-back and so cannot call the correct server-side event handler. The workaround? ... add another textbox to the form (but just make it hidden!).

This is true for IE6 and IE7 ...