About a week back Microsoft announced Internet Explorer 8 at the MIX08 conference and most interesting part is that a developer beta is now available for download.

You can go ahead and download the beta here

What's New in IE8?

Firstly, IE8 comes with lot of changes in it's internal architecture that improves readability, performance, and scalability of the browser.

Now, How it works, Andy Zeigler, Program Manager on IE Foundation Team at Microsoft explains some of the details.

Andy Zeigler Said:

You may have noticed that computers come pre-loaded with all sorts of software. While a lot of this software is useful and works well, some of it, including IE add-ons, can crash and interfere with your browsing experience. Internet Explorer 3^rd-party add-ons are COM-based, which enables developers to write high-performance add-ons with powerful features. This also means that IE and running add-ons share the same process and memory address space, so when an add-on crashes, it causes the whole browser to crash. According to an analysis we did of our Windows Error Reporting data, over 70% of all IE hangs and crashes are caused by 3^rd-party add-ons. We work closely with software vendors of the most frequently installed IE add-ons to help improve the quality of their add-ons. However, due to the large number available add-ons, it is difficult to provide outreach to every developer.

The IE Process Model

Part of what we’ve done with LCIE is to split the frame from the tabs, and allow them to function more autonomously. As a refresher, here’s a somewhat simplified view of the IE7 process model

In the IE7 model, each browser window (UI Frame) usually has its own process. There are a couple of exceptions. For example, if you press ctrl-n to open a new window, IE creates a new UI frame in the same process. The tabs, toolbar extensions, browser helper objects, and ActiveX controls all reside in the same process as the browser window. The problem with this model is that a single access violation, stack overflow, or any other type of failure will cause your entire browser, and all its tabs, to crash.

Below is a diagram of how we’ve changed the process model in IE8.

There are a number of notable changes here:

• Tabs are isolated from the frame, and are located in separate processes
  This gives IE the opportunity to isolate many failures to the tab process, thereby reducing the amount of damage done to the rest of your browsing session.
• The frame and the broker object are located in the same process
  This is a win for startup performance. The broker object is responsible for examining a URL, and determining if it should be loaded under Protected Mode or not, and launching IE at the appropriate integrity level. We no longer have to wait for the protected mode broker object’s process to startup before loading the rest of the browser.
  
• Low and Medium integrity tabs can reside in the same UI frame
  The Windows Integrity Mechanism operates on a per-process basis. Now that we can place tabs into their own processes, we can turn Protected Mode on or off on a per-tab basis. This is a big usability improvement. You no longer need separate browser windows to view sites in and out of protected mode.

Now, that's one major change that truly addresses IE's past issues.

What's next!, Yes, Now come the interesting part, something for developers, so let me proceed with what's in the box for my dev mates.

IE8 Developer Tools

All this time there were tools which offered help to web developers to developer and debug apps for IE, but mostly came as third party tools. One of the most popular tools that came as a toolbar from IE Team was the IE Developer Toolbar, which offered huge time saving and productive tools to help web developers to debug their apps.

IE8 Developer Tools provides huge improvements and productive tools to help developers build better and stable apps in no time.

What kind of tools and improvements does IE8 Developer Tools offer?

• Internet Explorer 8 simplifies the process of debugging by including developer tools out of the box and making those tools easy to use. Instead of having to find, download, and install a separate debugging application, just press SHIFT+F12, or click the developer tools icon in the command bar.
  
• In addition to simplifying the debugging process, IE8 Developer Tools offer a new perspective on your site. Instead of just a source view, the tool provides visibility into Internet Explorer’s internal representation of the site. For example, the DOM tree in the tool is built from the tree IE builds internally to display the page, not from your source. So if script changes the tree, IE8 shows you the updated tree.
  
• The Internet Explorer 8 Developer Tools also provide the ability to experiment and iterate rapidly by letting you edit a site within IE. For example, once you’ve found a style rule or property you’re interested in, click a checkbox to enable or disable it, or click an attributes in the DOM tree to edit it in-place
  
• The tools also provide easy access to all available rendering modes so you can test different modes quickly.

IE8 Improvements And New Features

Domain Highlighting

At a glance, the most visible change with IE8 is Domain Highlighting. Internet Explorer 8 will automatically highlight what it considers to be the owning domain of whatever site you’re currently viewing. This helps users identify the real site they’re on when a website attempts to deceive them. The screen shot below shows how IE8’s Domain Highlighting can help users spot these attacks

Support For Pasting Multi-Line URLs

IE8 will automatically strip out excess carriage returns and line feeds within a URL when pasted into the Address Bar. Many web e-mail applications automatically split long lines into multiple lines, which meant you couldn’t easily copy and paste them into the browser. Users can now highlight an entire URL, no matter how many lines it spans, and paste it directly into the Address Bar.

Example: if you copy and paste the next 3 lines into the Address Bar of IE7, only the first line (an incomplete fragment of the entire URL) will appear. In IE8, the entire URL will appear:

http:/
/www.chiragbatra.com/
blog/default.aspx

New Functionality on the Favorites bar:

The Favorites bar, previously known as the Links toolbar, has been updated with great new functionality that helps you get information from your favorite websites quickly and easily. The new IE8 Favorites bar still has your favorite links just one click away, but also allows you to add WebSlices (new feature debuting in IE8) and feeds to the Favorites bar, facilitating your navigation experience. The WebSlices and feeds on the Favorites bar will check for updates to content on your favorite websites without requiring navigation to those websites.

WebSlice

WebSlices bring your favorite pieces of the web with you. WebSlices are portions of a webpage that you can subscribe to and view updates directly from the Favorites bar.

WebSlices let you subscribe to a portion of webpage to get updates and view these changes without having to go back to the site.  Let’s say that you’re an eBay, and you’ve got your heart set on a 80’s Swatch watch. With WebSlices, I can subscribe to the auction item and know when there is a price change directly on the browser chrome.

try out WebSlices on these sites

• StumbleUpon – Get the buzz on latest sites.
• Facebook – Keep track of your friends’ status.

Activities

This is another great feature that comes with IE8, with Activities, you can access your services from any webpage. Activities simplify the common task of copying, navigating, and pasting into a single action. Just make a selection and click on the Activity button or context menu to view your services.

Here are some other Activities that you may find helpful:

• Find products from eBay – View active auctions for the selected product.
• Lookup website reviews with StumbleUpon – See how other people rate the current website that you’re on.
• Share with Facebook – Add interesting sites to your Facebook profile for your friends to see.
• Discovery with Me.dium - Find related sites from your friends and community on Me.dium.

Cheers!

Few months back I had blogged about this real amazing news from .NET Framework's team, plans to release Source Code of .NET Framework Libraries and enable debugging support of them in Visual Studio 2008. Well... the special day has arrived, Recently Scott announced Source Code of .Net Framework Libraries is now available for everyone.

Isn't this great news?! I'm pretty much excited to check it out.

Currently source code for the following .NET Framework libraries are available.

• .NET Base Class Libraries including System, System.CodeDom, System.Collections, System.ComponentModel, System.Diagnostics, System.Drawing, System.Globalization, System.IO, System.Net, System.Reflection, System.Runtime, System.Security, System.Text, System.Threading, etc).
• ASP.NET (System.Web, System.Web.Extensions)
• Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms)
• Windows Presentation Foundation (System.Windows)
• ADO.NET and XML (System.Data and System.Xml)

Scott has also mentioned that they'll be adding up more libraries in near future.

And now How do you configure Visual Studio to avail this feature?

Well.. Shawn Burke has blogged a brief post explaining "How to Configure Visual Studio to Debug .NET Framework Source Code".

I'd recommend checking the following links for more details:

.Net framework library source code now available - ScottGu
Configuring Visual Studio to Debug .NET Framework Source Code - Shawn Burke
.NET Framework Library Source Code available for viewing - Scott Hanselman 

Cheers!
Chirag

enjoy! :D

Recently Scott announced some really exciting news for .NET developers that his team has been working to enable the ability for .NET developers to browse and download source code of .NET Framework Libraries and also with debugging support.

This feature will be available with .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, which is expected later this year.

Microsoft will begin with offering the source code for .NET Framework Libraries including:

• System
• System.IO
• System.Collections
• System.Configuration
• System.Threading
• System.Net
• System.Security
• System.Runtime
• System.Text
• ASP.NET (System.Web)
• Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms)
• ADO.NET (System.Data)
• XML (System.Xml)
• WPF (System.Windows)

How it Works?

In Scott's blog you'll find all the details and screens on "How it works", but it's  as easy and simple like you were debugging and browsing the source code locally - step through, set breakpoints, inspect variables, etc.

Here are few links to know more about this feature.

• Making .NET Framework source available to developers
• Channel 9 Video, more details on Reference Source
• Releasing the Source Code for the .NET Framework Libraries
• Hanselminutes Podcast 83 - Microsoft to release .NET Framework Libraries Source

I'm really excited and just can't wait to get my hand on it. (:-P)

A day back Microsoft announced Silverlight 1.0 final release for Mac and Windows. A cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the web.

Some of its features include:

• Built-in codec support for playing VC-1 and WMV video, and MP3 and WMA audio within a browser.  The VC-1 codec is a big step forward for incorporating media within a web experience - since it supports very efficiently playing high-quality, high definition video in the browser.  It is a standards-based media format that is implemented in all HD-DVD and Blueray DVD players, and is supported by hundreds of millions of mobile devices, XBOX 360s, PlayStation 3s, and Windows Media Centers (enabling you to encode content once and run it on all of these devices + Silverlight unmodified).  It enables you to use a huge library of existing video content and provides access to the broad ecosystem of existing Windows Media tools, components, vendors and hardware. 

• Silverlight supports the ability to progressively download and play media content from any web-server.  You can point Silverlight at any URL containing video/audio media content, and it will download it and enable you to play it within the browser.  No special server software is required, and Silverlight can work with any web-server (including Apache on Linux).  Microsoft will also be releasing an IIS 7.0 media pack that enables rich bandwidth throttling features that you can enable on your web-server for free.

• Silverlight also optionally supports built-in media streaming.  This enables you to use a streaming server like Windows Media Server on the backend to efficiently stream video/audio (note: Windows Media Server is a free product that runs on Windows Server).  Streaming brings some significant benefits in that: 1) it can improve the end-user's experience when they seek around in a large video stream, and 2) it can dramatically lower your bandwidth costs. 

• Silverlight enables you to create rich UI and animations, and blend vector graphics with HTML to create compelling content experiences.  It supports a Javascript programming model to develop these.  One benefit of this is that it makes it really easy to integrate these experiences within AJAX web-pages (since you can write Javascript code to update both the HTML and XAML elements together). 

• Silverlight makes it easy to build rich video player interactive experiences.  You can blend together its media capabilities with the vector graphic support to create any type of media playing experience you want.  Silverlight includes the ability to "go full screen" to create a completely immersive experience, as well as to overlay menus/content/controls/text directly on top of running video content (allowing you to enable DVD like experiences).  Silverlight also provides the ability to resize running video on the fly without requiring the video stream to be stopped or restarted.

Silverlight for Linux

Microsoft also announced Silverlight support on Linux and its partnership with Novell to provide a great Silverlight implementation for Linux.  Microsoft will be delivering Silverlight Media Codecs for Linux, and Novell will be building a 100% compatible Silverlight runtime implementation called "Moonlight".

Many of you might be thinking, what's this Nokia N95 Ad catch line doing up here. Now, all that I can say is, the new Visual Studio 2008 is not just yet another release, its pretty much more than that.

There has been huge number of improvements in the latest Visual Studio and covering up each and everyone is beyond the scope of this post. So I'll be pointing out key objects.

• Multi-Targeting Support.
• Better AJAX and Javascript Support.
• Rich HTML/CSS WYSIWYG Designer. 
• Significantly Improved Data Support

Multi-Targeting Support - Few weeks back Scott Guthrie blogged about this amazing new feature. One of the big changes that you are going to experience starting from VS 2008 release is to support what is call "Multi-Targeting" - which means that Visual Studio will now support targeting multiple versions of the .NET Framework, and developers will be able to start taking advantage of the new features Visual Studio provides without having to always upgrade their existing projects and deployed applications to use a new version of the .NET Framework library.

Better AJAX and JavaScript Support - As all might know how frustrating it was by manually typing Javascript before, you are going to be in for a pleasant treat with "Orcas".  Visual Studio now provides full Javascript Intellisense completion in .ASPX files, .HTM files, as well as in external .JS files.  It delivers Intellisense for vanilla Javascript code, as well as provides rich support for the new ASP.NET AJAX client Javascript framework and Javascript code built with it.

Rich HTML/CSS WYSIWYG Designer

• Split View Support (the ability to have both HTML Source and WYSIWYG design open simultaneously)
• Extremely rich CSS support (CSS property window, CSS inheritance viewer, CSS preview, and CSS manager)
• Dramatically improved view switching performance (moving from source->html design mode is now nearly instantaneous)
• Support for control designers within source view (property builders, event wire-up and wizards now work in source view)
• Richer ruler and layout support (better yet, values can be automatically stored in external CSS files)
• Designer support for nested master pages

Significantly Improved Data Support - VS2008 will include support for LINQ - which makes data access with .NET radically better by making the concept of querying a first class programming concept.

Wish to try Visual Studio 2008 Beta1?

Mingle² - Online Dating

Scott announced some great news...

A few points to note about this release.

• This is the final release on an ASP.NET 1.1 codebase. No bugs will be fixed unless this release kills a kitten.
  • NOTE: To be clear, even though this is compiled under ASP.NET 1.1, it runs GREAT under .NET 2.0 as is. Just follow the comments in the web.config to change a few settings.
• The next release will literally be in a week or so, it will be called DasBlog 2.0 and will be compiled under .NET 2.0 and have changes to support Medium Trust environments.
  • This will allow folks downloading the source to compile DasBlog happily with VS 2005 or Orcas, or just MSBuild.
• We'll announce a one year roadmap with our plan to move towards .NET 3.5 as well as a new release every 60 days.
• We will very likely move to a location that is not SourceForge.
• We'll have a visual refresh of the main project page as well as some consolidation, but for now:
  • DasBlog.Info - For DasBlog information.
  • DasBlog.us - For "us," the DasBlog forums
  • DasBlog Mailing Lists - Subscribe to either the Developer's list, or the Checkin's List to see what's going on.

UPDATE: Alexander Groß has the definitive guide on How To Secure Your dasBlog Installation.

In this release we've fixed some and added some:

• Fixed a metric buttload of bugs
• Taken in more patches from the public than any other release (Thanks public!)
• Category and Home Page Paging Macros
• LiveComment Preview (thanks SubText!)
• Emailed Daily Activity Reports
• Windows Live Writer Custom Integration
• Support for Akismet Comment Spam Support
  • Go get a WordPress account, without a blog, and use the API key they'll send you.
• Optionally show comments on the Permalink Page
• Even more performance gains (4x+) in the Macro engine
• New Internationalized Languages, including Swedish (Thanks Per Salmi!)
  • This brings our total supported language count up to 15! Although we can ALWAYS use more, and we really need double-checkers and updaters to put in localized strings for some of the new features!
• Support for Blogging directly from Word 2007
• Many fixes in our Blogger API and MetaWebLog API support
• Better detection of referrals from Search Engines
• CSS fixes and additions like highlighting of the Blog Author's comments
  • Make the comment email address match the email address in sitesecurity.config for this feature.
• DHTML Timeline of Posts from the MIT Simile project
• Support for SMTP Servers like Gmail for notifications
• New themes
• Support for THREE Rich Editors - FreeTextBox, FCKEditor and TinyMCE (in DasBlog Contrib, see the source)

Thanks to the DasBlog team and the active folks on the Developer List (in no particular order)....

Omar Shahine, Clemens Vasters, Tom Watts, Ken Hughes, Paul Van Brenk, John Forsythe, Nick Schweitzer, Kenneth Lefebvre, Ben Scheirman, Tim Sherrill, Alexander Gross, James Snape, Raymond Llewellyn, Tony Bunce, Josh Flanagan, Aaron Fischer, Anthony Bouch, Ayende Rahien, Ben Taylor, George V. Reilly, Greg Hughes, Mike Schinkel, Marc Mercuri, Rajiv Popat, Tim Sherrill

...and the many patch contributors!