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

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".

Few days back Google took an amazing step towards Rich Internet Application arena and announced Google Gears. A tiny (700k) browser plug-in download that lets a Web Application store data on your local machine.

As for now only Google Reader has been introduced with Offline Mode feature and I'm hoping to see Google's other Web Apps to kick start with this feature too.

Above is a Security Dialog box that pops up as soon you start or load a Web App that is using Google Gear and it lets you know that Google Gear is going to store data on your local machine. Google Gears uses SQLite to store information locally and uses SQL from JavaScript to CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) data.

Here are few links to know more about Google Gears.

• Google Gears Developer site
• Google Gears Frequently asked questions
• Google Gears Developer Forum

If in case you have missed the news or didn't get it as yet then WPF/E is now called Silverlight. Yeah! Its kinda a kewl name.

Few weeks back Microsoft at MIX07 made a number of announcements and showed off Silverlight. Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform run-time that enables media and interactive content and application scenarios or say its a browser independent version of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Silverlight currently supports IE6, IE7, Firefox and Safari browsers on both Windows and the Mac and is installed by a single click installation that takes only couple of seconds.

Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 Beta is now available for download including a Go Live license which means Microsoft customers can deploy their Silverlight applications.

Here couple of links that I'd recommend to check...

• ScottGu's Keynotes & Article about Silverlight
• MIX 2007 Silverlight Sessions
• "How Do I?" with Silverlight 1.0
• "How Do I?" with Silverlight 1.1
• Using Blend with Silverlight 1.0

Few days back Scott Hanselman blogged and about  this amazing AJAX Timeline Widget developed by some guys at MIT.

Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAX widget for visualizing time-based events. Timeline can be used with zero software installation, server-side or client-side. And like Google Maps, you can populate Timeline with data by pointing it to an XML file.

How to create Timelines
Timeline Examples

The ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Documentation is available for download and can now be easily downloaded for offline usage and Nikhil has updated his cool UpdateHistory Control for the final version of ASP.NET AJAX. This allows developers to add history entries to the browser's navigation stack selectively for some post-backs.

The package contains the following controls, which includes the initial release of a couple of new controls.

UpdateHistory

This is a non-visual control that allows you to add history entries to the browser's navigation stack selectively for some post-backs, and not for some others. This helps fix the back button to make it work, and allows you to implement Ajax patterns such as "logical navigation" and unique URLs.

StyledUpdatePanel

A simple derived UpdatePanel that adds CSS class semantics. A simple addition, but a useful feature, nevertheless, that didn't make the feature cut.

AnimatedUpdatePanel

Another derived UpdatePanel that displays new content using a variety of animations or effects: slides, wipes, cross-fades as well as a visual highlight. This allows you to implement the "visual notification" Ajax patterns such as the one second spotlight and one second mutation.

Downloads: Binaries, samples and source code | Video on Channel9

Finally the wait is over and ASP.NET AJAX final version is out. You can download it here.

ASP.NET AJAX 1.0

ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 delivers a rich client-side AJAX library that provides cross platform, cross browser support for a core JavaScript type-system, JSON-based network serialization stack, JavaScript component/control model, as well as common client JavaScript helper classes.  ASP.NET AJAX also delivers a rich server-side library that integrates AJAX functionality within ASP.NET, and enables developers to easily AJAX-enable existing ASP.NET 2.0 sites with minimal effort.

ASP.NET AJAX is available for free, and can be used with ASP.NET 2.0 and VS 2005.  It is a fully supported Microsoft product, and is backed by a standard 10 year Microsoft support license (with Microsoft Product Support available via phone 24 hours a day x 7 days a week).

ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit

In addition to the fully-supported ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 release, you can use the more than 30 free ASP.NET AJAX enabled controls available within the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.  The control toolkit is a shared-source collaborative project built together by a team containing both Microsoft and non-Microsoft developers (visit the CodePlex Project to learn more, or volunteer to contribute).  All source for the controls is provided completely for free (with full re-use and modification rights).

The majority of controls within the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit leverage the "Control Extender" pattern that the core ASP.NET AJAX library introduces, and which delivers a super powerful way to easily enable specific AJAX scenarios on a site with minimal effort.

Check ScottGu's Blog for more details...

Scott just announced the naming and roadmap for Atlas going forward. Read more...

The Windows Live Contacts gadget is a client-side browser JavaScript object that enables visitors to use their Windows Live contacts with your Web site.  Instead of typing a shipping address into a shopping cart form, for example, the user could simply select one of their Windows Live contacts from the contact gadget.  The user saves time and effort in completing the order, and you gain the benefits of an address book for your Web site without having to implement, maintain, and provision data storage and management UI on your servers.  The user maintains control of their personal contacts data, while you focus on providing services with data the user gives you. (Read the privacy notice for the Windows Live Contacts gadget.)

See the Windows Live Contacts gadget working in our live samples:

• Start a Party
• Map Your Contacts

A key aspect of this gadget is maintaining secure data isolation between multiple domains.  The gadget obtains the user’s contacts data from Windows Live servers via a secure HTTPS connection and releases to your Web page only the data for the contacts that the user selects and approves for sharing with your Web page.  In this way, users stay in control of their data, which offers them a level of confidence in dealing with third-party Web sites.  

Your Web site needs to make a clear statement to the user about how you will be using the data they share with you.  The Windows Live Contacts gadget requires that you supply a URL to a privacy statement and that you display that URL to the end user when they are prompted to approve transfer of the selected contact data to your site.  If you use the shared data only for the current activity and then discard it, you should say so in your privacy statement.  If you store the shared data on your servers for any purpose, you should say so in your privacy statement and provide means for the user to review or delete such stored data.

Few days back I came across another cool AJAX Engine called AjaxMagic.Net. The cool & best thing about AjaxMagic.NET is you don't need to write any JavaScript code or any client side script just integrate it and program the regular ASP.NET way code behind or code inline. It’s very easy to integrate just three steps and it’s done. AjaxMagic.Net is free & open-source Ajax engine available for both the .NET frameworks 1.1 as well as 2.0. You can download it here http://www.magicajax.net/Default.aspx/tabindex/1/tabid/29

AjaxMagic.Net article on codeproject.com
http://www.codeproject.com/ajax/magicajax.asp

An article explaining how AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) can be used to make your Microsoft ASP.NET applications more dynamic and responsive. Read more . . .

Atlas Presentation Slides and Demos at PDC 2005. Read More

The Community Preview Site for ASP.NET code-named “Atlas”

ASP.NET “Atlas” is a package of new Web development technologies that integrates an extensive set of client script libraries with the rich, server-based development platform of ASP.NET 2.0. “Atlas” enables you to develop Web applications that can update data on a Web page by making direct calls to a Web server — without needing to round trip the page. With “Atlas”, you can take advantage of the best of ASP.NET and server-side code while doing much of the work in the browser, enabling a richer user experience.

ASP.NET “Atlas” includes:

• Client script libraries that provide a complete solution for creating client-based Web applications. The client script libraries support object-oriented development, cross-browser compatibility, asynchronous calls to Web services, and behaviors and components for creating a full-featured UI.
• Web server controls that provide a declarative way to emit markup and client script for "Atlas" features.
• Web services, such as ASP.NET profiles, that can add useful server-side features to an "Atlas" application.

Read More

In my previous blog I had provided few articles explaining about AJAX here are some AJAX useful links. Check them.

A Venture Forth » Blog Archive » Top 10 Ajax Applications
ComponentArt Web.UI 3.0
Backbase - Rich Internet Applications
CodeTranslator: Free Code Translation From VB.NET <-> C#
Emil’s Chronicle » DHTML Spell Checker
Behaviour
Sam Stephenson's "Prototype"

script.aculo.us - web 2.0 javascript
Rico - Home

Ajax.NET
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nextaction
BackPackIt
TiddlyWiki (runs http://www.hanselman.com now.)
Aardvark (Firefox Extension)