AJAX opens many interesting new doors in terms of how we can tailor the user experience to the customers needs and how we can display content based on any number of state context.

This sometimes means fetching and manipulating HTML or XML in our server side code and sending it to the browser as execution time via an AJAX request.

Earlier today I was "sprucing up" a demo on implementing the "Partial Page Update Pattern" in preparation for a talk on AJAX Patterns that I'm giving at AJAX World next week in New York.

I always try to minimize my demo application dependencies and isolate the concept that I'm talking about as much as possible and I wanted to return some markup to my web page and dynamically update the DOM, but I didn't want to add a file or database dependency so I decided to just store HTML in a VB string.

I wanted more than trivial markup and HTML is time consuming to convert to a programming friendly string, what with all those quotes and all.

I decided to write a little quickie utility to do string conversion of cut-and-paste HTML when a little searching produced a free utility to do just what I wanted.

It's great for testing, demos, or if you have a manual cut-and-paste editing process. (But don't REALLY store HTML in your source code !)

Try it out.

[Just Click Here to get your copy - it's free.]

I love Office 2007, but recently I've had big problems with Word.

1.) I can't select text.....

It seems this is a common problem with a number of add-ins. In this case it was the Word plug-in for Snag-It 8 from TechSmith - when I uninstalled it, mouse support came back. Note that this is not JUST a Snag-It problem. A bit of searching on the web reveals that MANY plug ins can cause this problem.

2.) The more irritating but was that Word always crashes on exit. I tried disabling and removing all the add-ins, deleting all the auto loaded templates, even uninstalling and re-installing Office 2007 with no success. Just about the time I was about to commit to waste my day rebuilding my day - I found the answer in a newsgroup archive.

DO THIS !!!

• 1. Start Regedit.
• 2. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Data
• 3. Right mouse click on the "Data" folder and delete it.
• 4. Close Regedit.

POOF - Word 2007 is back to it's awesome self !!