I was recently thrown a real curveball of a project. Instead of using a fresh MySQL database to pull information from, the customer required that we pull information from their new Microsoft SQL Server 2005 server. This isn’t the most desired method of PHP->Database interactivity but that’s what the project called for and that’s what I needed to do. Here’s how to get things going.

During the development of a recent website, I fitted the site with some awesome MooTools effects. Per usual, I would check each page with Firefox and once the page looked good, I’d switch over to Internet Explorer to make sure the site looked the same. That’s where the problem began.

Periodically, I would get a javascript-like alert box that said “Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet Site ________. Operation Aborted,” as show below:

After doing some research, I found a post by MooTools dev Aaron Newton that explained why the problem was occuring:

The first thing I do to any fresh Windows XP or Vista install is change the theme to old-school “Windows Classic” theme. Square gray boxes, in my opinion, are much better than the awful “rounded”, colored bars. The XP and Vista theme settings also bleed into Internet Explorer, shaping and color buttons in ways I don’t want.

Luckily, using an HTML META tag, I can tell the browser to ignore the theme’s settings and show the standard, gray button.

<meta http-equiv="MSThemeCompatible" content="No"/>

I’m not advocating this, simply showing how it can be done.