IE 7.0 can drive me nuts and how to default start your XBAP in FireFox.
Well I can scarcely believe it myself. If you had asked me a few years ago if I could imagine using FireFox as my preferred debugging environment in .NET then I would have laughed hard, but yes folks it’s true. IE 7.0 is driving me insane with how slow it is whilst debugging. Let me take you through a course of events that led me to writing this post.
It all began with me developing a company intranet application using WPF XBAP technology and several views (I am using MVC) into it I decided to update my source control to tortoise 1.5.0 and grab the newest version of Ankh as it was meant to work nicely in Vista. So, no problems with the installs and just as I open up VS.NET 2008 I discover that the Ankh install has caused VS to loose its project history and my profile settings as well and it begins to set up as though for the first time.
Now I am a patient guy, so I just quickly get things back to the way they were and fire up my XBAP ready to start work again. I create another view port for my application and decide that I would like to run the application to see this new view…..oh oh, default settings have gone back to IE 7.0 and it’s a tad slower than FireFox in loading the application and just as slow in releasing the IE process and stopping the debugger too. I wondered if the trick to getting the XBAP back to loading by default in FireFox was the same as it is for ASP.Net? A quick look for the context menu option on the XAML files does not show up with a ‘browse with’ so I decided to open an ASP.Net application and reset the default browser from there, then switch back to the XBAP and hey presto - the problem is solved. See below for the visuals:
Go to an ASPX page and right click to get the context menu and select ‘Browse With’, then select FireFox as the default browser….reopen my WPF application and my XBAP now loads in FireFox by default and I’m all done!
