Internet Explorer 8 compatibility

Now that Internet Explorer 8 has been released in March, I've been going through my sites testing compatibility. So far I haven't had any rendering issues, I guess it's helped developing for Firefox first to ensure W3C standards, then regression testing for IE7.

TechNet had a great article highlighting What's New In Internet Explorer 8. I learned a few compatibility tweaks to force the Compatibility Mode. Most importantly, the order of what applies as you can set it in many places. This order is sequential, the last applied wins.

• User button in browser
• Group Policy
• Server
  
• Site
  
• Page

Both site and page are handled with a meta tag in the page headers, if it's ever needed:

meta equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7"

SQL Security For Dummies

Having gone through a couple of SQL setup audits with Microsoft, it became apparent that a lot of the security issues for SQL, no matter if SQL 2000, 2005, or 2008, are common sense if you have a good reference.

TechNet had an article about Common SQL Server Security Issues and Solutions. After reading through it, I found that almost every single item is easy to implement for anyone (DBA or not) using SQL. Most importantly, every single item is part of the audit when you pay for having Microsoft come on site to evaluate your SQL setup. So far I've also found that all of the items if missed are easy to remediate.