A Tale of Two Browsers

While recently working on a MOSS 2007 project I came across an interesting bug in the .NET 2.0 Menu item. The site I was working on contained a menu that went 3 levels deep. Each of these menus included many items and in total the menu probably contained almost 400 items. I needed to constrcut the menu on my own so I created a sitemap and connected the menu to it. While testing the site, I found that the rollover effects of the menu created a 2 to 3 second lag. Thinking that maybe this was a Sharepoint issue, I tested the menu by creating a plain .aspx page and the menu lag seemed to be slightly slower.

I then tested the Sharepoint version in IE 6 and found that the lag was worse. After testing the page in Firefox, it rendered appropriately and there was no lag. This piqued my interest as now this seemed to be less of a menu issue and more of a browser issue. I searched all the articles and blog posts that I could find and found that other people were having the same issue when they created large menus as well.

Finally after contacting Microsoft and sending them a sample of the code that created the lag, the tech support person informed me that there is a bug in the .Net 2.0 Menu control that is not optimized with IE. There is no solution to the problem at this time and that they are working on the problem. There should be a fix for the problem an upcoming patch or service pack.

Just another problem to chalk up to the battle of the browsers.

Beginning of the End

This blog will be for the many exciting things I will have learned about MOSS (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server) 2007 and other .Net 2.0 technologies.