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

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?

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!

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

Lately, I've been busy at my work and it’s been impossible to update my blog.

Now as you know this week has been a week full of new surprises, Microsoft shipped Visual Studio Codename "Orcus" Beta 1 and early this week Telligent Systems announced availability of Community Server 2007 with huge number of features and advancements. I'm really excited to get started with Community Server 2007.

Here are some links to know more about Community Server:
Download Community Server 2007
Community Server Documentation

Earlier this week Microsoft said that they planned to ship Visual Studio "Orcas" Beta 1 for download some time in April. On April 19, they made good on their word.

Microsoft posted Visual Studio Codename "Orcus" Beta 1 Professional Edition for download and accompanying Team System lifecycle-development system tools; the 3.5 release of the .Net Framework; and a first Community Technology Preview (CTP) pre-beta build of the Express version of Orcas for non-professional programmers and hobbyists.

Microsoft said earlier this week to expect a Beta 2 of Orcas later this year. The final version of Orcas may be released to manufacturing by the end of calendar 2007, but could slip into 2008, they said.

Here are some links to know more about the new Visual Studio Codename "Orcus":
Feature Specifications for Visual Studio and .NET Framework "Orcas"
Microsoft Pre-release Software Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" Beta 1
Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" Express Editions
My "First Look at Orcas" Presentation
Visual Studio "Orcas" Web Designer Integrated into Main
Conversation with Somasegar: Orcas Beta 1 and Beyond on Channel9

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

         Anand has contributed a very clear and straightforward guide to bring Community Server, a powerful solution for online communities to audience having no prior experience or knowledge about system administration or ASP.NET. Community Server is a powerful and an award-winning solution for online communities built on Microsoft’s .NET Platform and is the most trusted solution for many companies including Microsoft, Dell, Conde Nast and Match.com.

        This book is a perfect guide for people who want to get started with their own online community website and manage it without having any prior experience. This book covers most of the fundamentals about Community Server, brief and detailed information about its features and a step-by-step guide to installation, administration, customization, and deployment of Community Server. So if you are looking for quick start guide to start off with your very own community website then this book is for you.

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...

Jajah enabled people to make a VOIP call from any phone to any phone without a download, installation, new phone number, or allowing your computer to be used in P2P network. Recently Jajah announced their services in India under very cheap rates also have extended its Free Global Calling Zone - within and between free countries, a registered Jajah user can call another registered user for free.

Visual Studio shipped the final release of VS 2005 SP1 yesterday.  It is available for immediate download in all 10 languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and both traditional and simplified Chinese).  You can download and install it here.

Yes, that right recently DiscountASP launched free IIS7 Beta hosting for all customers who are interested. This is a great way to try the new IIS7 features. You can get all the details at http://www.discountasp.net/sp_iis7hosting.aspx

[UPDATED] 04/03/07

Few weeks back I came up with another hosting company offering IIS7 beta.

The countdown has began.

The .NET Framework 3.0 has officially been released!  You can download the .NET Framework 3.0 components here:

• .NET Framework 3.0 Runtime Components
• Windows SDK for Vista and the .NET Framework 3.0 
• Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (Windows Workflow Foundation)
• Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (WCF & WPF), November 2006 CTP

Note, if you are using Windows Vista the .NET Framework 3.0 Runtime Components are installed by default.

The Readme for the released version of the .NET Framework 3.0 is available here.  If you have a previous CTP installed, please be sure to review the uninstall instructions.   If you have questions about installing the .NET Framework 3.0, please post your questions to the .NET Framework Setup Forum.

Finally Firefox 2.0 final version is out. I've been using its beta for a while now and I should say "It Rocks".

• Visual Refresh: Firefox 2's theme and user interface have been updated to improve usability without altering the familiarity of the browsing experience.

• Built-in phishing protection: Phishing Protection warns users when they encounter suspected Web forgeries, and offers to return the user to their home page. Phishing Protection is turned on by default, and works by checking sites against either a local or online list of known phishing sites. This list is automatically downloaded and regularly updated when the Phishing Protection feature is enabled.

• Enhanced search capabilities: Search term suggestions will now appear as users type in the integrated search box when using the Google, Yahoo! or Answers.com search engines. A new search engine manager makes it easier to add, remove and re-order search engines, and users will be alerted when Firefox encounters a website that offers new search engines that the user may wish to install.

• Improved tabbed browsing: By default, Firefox will open links in new tabs instead of new windows, and each tab will now have a close tab button. Power users who open more tabs than can fit in a single window will see arrows on the left and right side of the tab strip that let them scroll back and forth between their tabs. The History menu will keep a list of recently closed tabs, and a shortcut lets users quickly re-open an accidentally closed tab.

• Resuming your browsing session: The Session Restore feature restores windows, tabs, text typed in forms, and in-progress downloads from the last user session. It will be activated automatically when installing an application update or extension, and users will be asked if they want to resume their previous session after a system crash.

• Previewing and subscribing to Web feeds: Users can decide how to handle Web feeds (like this one), either subscribing to them via a Web service or in a standalone RSS reader, or adding them as Live Bookmarks. My Yahoo!, Bloglines and Google Reader come pre-loaded as Web service options, but users can add any Web service that handles RSS feeds.

• Inline spell checking: A new built-in spell checker enables users to quickly check the spelling of text entered into Web forms (like this one) without having to use a separate application.

• Live Titles: When a website offers a microsummary (a regularly updated summary of the most important information on a Web page), users can create a bookmark with a "Live Title". Compact enough to fit in the space available to a bookmark label, they provide more useful information about pages than static page titles, and are regularly updated with the latest information. There are several websites that can be bookmarked with Live Titles, and even more add-ons to generate Live Titles for other popular websites.

• Improved Add-ons manager: The new Add-ons manager improves the user interface for managing extensions and themes, combining them both in a single tool.

• JavaScript 1.7: JavaScript 1.7 is a language update introducing several new features such as generators, iterators, array comprehensions, let expressions, and destructuring assignments. It also includes all the features of JavaScript 1.6.

• Extended search plugin format: The Firefox search engine format now supports search engine plugins written in Sherlock and OpenSearch formats and allows search engines to provide search term suggestions.

• Updates to the extension system: The extension system has been updated to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions.

• Client-side session and persistent storage: New support for storing structured data on the client side, to enable better handling of online transactions and improved performance when dealing with large amounts of data, such as documents and mailboxes. This is based on the WHATWG specification for client-side session and persistent storage.

• SVG text: Support for the svg:textpath specification enables SVG text to follow a curve or shape.

• New Windows installer: Based on Nullsoft Scriptable Install System, the new Windows installer resolves many long-standing issues

Download Firefox Now

I found this great article focusing on free utility Visual Studio Add-Ins.

TestDriven.NET
GhostDoc
Paster
CodeKeep
PInvoke.NET
VSWindowManager PowerToy
WSContractFirst
VSMouseBindings
CopySourceAsHTML
Cache Visualizer

Flapjax is a new programming language designed around the demands of modern, client-based Web applications. Its principal features include:

1. Event-driven, reactive evaluation
2. Templating syntax
3. Persistent data saved on a data store we provide
4. Convenient data sharing
5. Access-control for shared data
6. Interfaces to external Web services

Flapjax is easy to learn: its syntax is precisely that of JavaScript. Furthermore, because Flapjax is built entirely atop JavaScript, it runs on traditional Web browsers without the need for plug-ins or other downloads. In fact, you can (in exchange for a little more code) use Flapjax purely as a library in JavaScript rather than use the compiler from Flapjax to JavaScript, so you can integrate it into your existing programs.

Windows Vista RC2 is now available to Customer Preview Program participants for a limited time. If you’re in the CPP use these links to access RC2:

Download: Windows Vista RC2 (x86 and x64) English
Download: Windows Vista RC2 (x86 and x64) German
Download: Windows Vista RC2 (x86 and x64) Japanese

Lately I've been having a lot of trouble with getting a large amount of spam on my blog via trackbacks and deleting them manually is really one big job. Finally I got my solution to the problem of trackback spam HttpModule based Generic Trackback Spam Blocker for ASP.NET.

HttpModule based Generic Trackback Spam Blocker for ASP.NET can be plugged into any ASP.NET web application, for example, into ASP.NET blogging engines such as .Text and dasBlog, and that you do not need to make any changes to the application itself. The solution itself is simple and uncomplicated and you can download the HttpModule and it's source too.

Check it out..

Few days back Scott announced launch of Chinese and German content section on the asp.net web-site. You can switch your language preference in the top-right of the site to filter the content of the www.asp.net site, or link to them directly here:

• Chinese
• French
• Spanish
• German
• English

Few days back Scott and Omar announced the release of a new version of DasBlog this release comes with tons of new feature. I just cannot wait to get my hand on it and update my current version.

Here's some of the new features.

• Much better multi-user/blogger support including a Top Posters macro and total comments - from Christoph De Baene
• TagCloud Support - from Scott
• Support for Mobile Browsers like Blackberries and SmartPhones - from Scott
  • Note the large section in your web.config and the mobile theme that is required for this support.
• Huge (100x+) speedup in Macro execution - from Scott
• Support for If-Not-Modified to speed up execution, improve RSS bandwidth and CPU cycles - from Scott
• Direct Feedburner Support with 301 redirection for RSS and Atom feeds. Don't lose a single subscriber. We're the only blog with direct support for Feedburner and Feedflare I believe. - from Scott
  • I encourage you to check out FeedBurner. You can add FeedFlare to your posts, and modify your feed in ways DasBlog can't. They also handle your Feed bandwidth and provide rich statistics. It's free ($ for advanced stats) and it's very powerful. Do be aware that when you make the decision to move over to FeedBurner your existing feeds will start redirecting folks to FeedBurner immediately. That's part of the power of the whole thing, but be warned.
• Delete comments directly from your mail reader - from Omar
• Comment moderation option
• New themes out of the box, 18 at last count - from Many Folks
• New XML-RPC support for newMediaObject and new version of XML-RPC.NET from Charles Cook - from Omar and Giuseppe Dipietro
• Macros for Next Post and Previous Post - Justice Gray
  • Check the DasBlog theme or add this line to the top of your itemtemplate.blogtemplate.
    <%PreviousLink("&laquo;&nbsp;",25)%><%MainPageEntryLink("Main", "|")%><%NextLink("&nbsp;&raquo;",25)%><br/>
• A few security and XSS fixes
• Support for Gravatars, images of your choosing that appear next to your comments - John Forsythe
• Support for limited HTML markup in comments
• Emails removed to avoid having email addresses stolen from Feeds
• Added an Email page for leaving comments to the author, includes Captcha
• New support for RSD so client software can autoconfigure itself - from Omar
• Pluggable Rich Text Editor, choose from the latest version of FreeTextBox or FCKEditor or write your own adapter - from Josh Flanagan
• Support for alternate SMTP ports
• We work with Windows Live Writer out of the box - from Omar
• Support for CoComment - from Scott
• Microsummary support for Firefox 2.0 Beta - from Scott
• Organized source, build, and packing for clarity - from Josh Flanagan
• New Feed Icons - from Omar
• Autometic generation of Google SiteMaps - from Scott
• Automatic disabling of Comments after a certain number of days. Also manual "close comments" support - from Omar
• ContentLookAhead show future dated posts - from Josh Flanagan
• Other fixes and suggestions from Tomas Restrepo, Jason Follas, Rene Lebherz and Steven Rockarts. Added entry CPU usage optimizatons from George V. Reilly.
• Ajax Autosave Drafts support from Steven Rockarts and Justice Gray.
• Better strings and support for German from Alexander Groß, Portuguese from Adelino Araújo, and Vietnamese from Phạm Đức Hải.
• Many great new themes

Download it

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

Google recently launched News Archive Search which allows users to explore historical archives. In addition to helping you search, News archive search can automatically create timelines which show selected results from relevant time periods.

.NET Framework 3.0 Release Candidate is out and ready for download.

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.

WOOOOAW! check this out. Joy (one of my friend...a Maya expert) created this. Its awesome!

Microsoft has released the ADO.NET vNext August CTP.

• The ADO.NET Entity Framework, which includes:
  • The Entity Data Model (EDM), which allows developers to model data at a higher level of abstraction
  • A powerful client-views/mapping engine to map to and from store schemas
  • Full query support over EDM schemas using Entity SQL and LINQ
  • An object services layer that allows you to choose to present query results as rows and columns or as objects. When using .NET objects, the system will transparently do identity resolution, change tracking and update processing for you.
  • An open provider model that allows other stores to plug into the ADO.NET Entity Framework
• Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) integration in ADO.NET for this CTP includes:
  • LINQ to Entities: formulate queries using LINQ against your EDM schemas
  • LINQ to DataSet: the DataSet finally gets full query capabilities! You can formulate LINQ queries that go against one or more DataTable objects. The LINQ to DataSet implementation will even optimize certain query patterns for better execution performance.
• Tools
  • We're working hard to include a rich set of tools that integrate naturally with the runtime components to provide a great end-to-end experience. Some early tools are included in this CTP, and more will come soon!

In the CTP package you'll find:

• The actual ADO.NET CTP assemblies that will be installed in your system
• A few new project templates to create new ADO.NET Entity Framework-based applications and entity model libraries
• Various examples that illustrate how to use the ADO.NET Entity Framework and the LINQ integration in many different scenarios
• A couple of documents that describe the Entity Framework & LINQ integration.

Launchy is a free windows utility designed to help you forget about your start menu, the icons on your desktop, and even your file manager.

Launchy indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes!

Download now

I'm really impressed with this tool. Writer is a desktop application that makes it easier to compose compelling blog posts using Windows Live Spaces or your current blog service.

Few things that I really loved about this tool. Firstly WYSIWYG authoring you can now author your post and know exactly what it will look like before you publish it.

Secondly Photo publishing writer makes inserting, customizing and uploading photos to blog. Once you've inserted the picture writer provides an editing tool to modify picture size, text wrapping, borders and apply effects.

Thirdly Map publishing writer inserts Windows Live Local map into your post and Lastly Drafts you can close your window anytime it autosaves, you can keep unlimited number of items in the draft.

Writer SDK is available it allows developers to extend writer's capabilities.

Download now

It looks Microsoft is listening to it's customers.

I had mentioned a while back that we planned to call the version of IE7 in Windows Vista “Internet Explorer 7+”. Well, the feedback we got on the blog was overwhelming – many of you didn’t like it. So, as we’ve said on our website, we heard you. I’m pleased to announce that we’re switching the name back to “Internet Explorer 7”. No plus. No dot x. Just “Internet Explorer 7”.

Specifically, here are the official full names:

• For Windows XP: “Windows Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP”
• For Windows Vista: “Windows Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Vista”

Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space. With Photosynth you can:

• walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle;
• seamlessly zoom in or out of a photograph even if it's gigapixels in size;
• see where pictures were taken in relation to one another;
• find similar photos to the one you’re currently viewing;
• explore a custom tour or see where you’ve been; or
• send a collection to a friend.

check it out..

This is real good news. MSDN library which used to be subscriber only downloads are now free.

You can download MSDN Library May 2006 Edition @ http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=373930CB-A3D7-4EA5-B421-DD6818DC7C41&displaylang=en

Updated content sets in the May 2006 Edition include:

• Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server
• SQL Server 2005
• Microsoft Knowledge Base
• Internet Information Server SDK
• Internet Security and Acceleration Server SDK
• And More...

With its powerful 3D capabilities WPF provides a leap forward in user experiences; but how do you create compelling 3D models and then make them available to your applications? In this Channel 9 video, Microsoft UK’s Richard Godfrey interviews the developers of Shaxam (www.shaxam.com) about their experiences and approach to building a Lightwave 3D to XAML convertor. Michael Stocking, Mark Hennessy-Barrett, Alex Young and Steve Kennett have all played a part in creating a friction-free way of building impressive WPF applications using complex 3D geometries such as the human heart shown in this clip.

BumpTop is a real cool virtual 3D desktop. It aims to enrich the desktop metaphor with expressive, lightweight techniques found in the real world. check it out.

Watch the video demo


Lo-Res YouTube

I just received an invitation to try out the beta version of Windows Live Mail Desktop a email client like Microsoft Outlook Express.

What it gives you

Try WLM Desktop Beta

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Everywhere Edition CTP is the compact database for rapidly developing applications in both native and the managed environment that extend enterprise data management capabilities to desktop applications

Download

The goal of the Microsoft Robotics Studio is to supply a software platform for the robotics community that can be used across a wide variety of hardware, applicable to a wide audience of users, and development of a wide variety of applications. As a platform, our intent is also to enable a third parties to supply support for new hardware, technologies, and tools, just as Microsoft Windows provides a platform for others to bring their products and technologies to the community of PC users. So while we may populate our platform with some of our own contributions, those should not be considered exclusive to tools or libraries provided by other parties looking to provide interesting technologies for this platform.

The Microsoft Robotics Studio delivers three areas of software:

1. A scalable, extensible runtime architecture that can span a wide variety of hardware and devices. The programming interface can be used to address robots using 8-bit or 16-bit processors as well as 32-bit systems with multi-core processors and devices from simple touch sensors to laser distance finding devices.
2. A set of useful tools that make programming and debugging robot applications scenarios easier. These include a high quality visual simulation environment that uses the Ageia Technologies™ PhysX™ engine.
3. A set of useful technology libraries services samples to help developers get started with writing robot applications.

While our development environment runs on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 R2, it can be used to support not only robots that support Windows, but also robots that can operate as clients to a PC running Windows. We provide information that can be used by hardware or software vendors to make their products compatible with our development platform.

We are pleased to present our community technical preview (CTP). As a preview this represents an early release not yet intended for commercial use, however, it should enable you to try out and see what we are working on. Similarly, this CTP does not include all the components we hope to deliver, so there may be subsequent updates we provide. Also as a preview, some of what here may be subject to change before commercial release

See Microsoft Robotics Studio demos first hand and listen in as Channel9 interviews the Robotics team.

Download Robotics Studio June 2006 CTP

A new developer community for .NET Framework 3.0 (formerly WinFX) has been launched.

check it out: www.netfx3.com

S. Somasegar describes the decision to rename WinFX to the .NET Framework 3.0. Now the WinFX technology you know has a name that identifies it for exactly what it is—the next version of Microsoft’s developer framework.

Yahoo! has not introduced anything new they have just customized IE 7 beta 2 to meet their needs. Yahoo! has used the beta version of the Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) to customize IE7 beta 2. It is available to all developers and partners who want to create their own customized versions of IE7, as well as IT pros who want to use it to ease enterprise deployment.

Download Yahoo! optimized IE7 beta 2

Windows Vista is now available to all developers. Download or order Windows Vista Beta 2 via the Customer Preview Program (CPP) or the Beta Experience program.

Check it out

This is a real useful site if your looking for creating buttons. It lets you create buttons online in a variety of different formats and the output quality is quite nice compared to stock buttons or plain text buttons.

Check it out

Google Spreadsheets is ready to launch according to the Wall Street Journal (subscription required), Google will release a Web-based spreadsheet application on Tuesday. It will first be available on a limited basis. Microsoft is well aware and continues to invest in its own on-line services.

Click here for Google's Sneak Peak

This website provides a good flash presentation and short videos on how customers and partners are finding Windows Vista more productive and a better platform to building innovative apps.

Check it out: www.seewindowsvista.com

Recently IE team announced the official name of IE for Windows Vista, "Internet Explorer 7+". While all versions of IE7 are built from the same code base, there are some important differences in IE7+, most significantly the addition of Windows Vista-only features like Protected Mode, Parental Controls, and improved Network Diagnostics and most of these features take advantage of big changes in Windows Vista. What I feel is the naming part will just cause big confusions among the IE users.

I found this wonderful tool info from ScottGu's recent post. I would have to say This Tool Rocks!. The main idea about SQL Prompt is it provides Intellisense style auto-completion for Microsoft SQL Server editors. It will tell you the exact formatting you should use for your SQL commands, while you are writing them and will therefore help you write fast, perfectly formatted SQL statements. SQL Prompt improves the productivity of all SQL script creation. SQL Prompt can be downloaded free until 1st September 2006 and we are providing forum support on the SQL Prompt support forum. A web help file is also available.

Download here

IIS 7.0's new home for IIS resources, blogs, downloads and news updates.

Check it: http://www.iis.net

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdntv/episode.aspx?xml=episodes/en/20060504WPFDL/manifest.xml

I installed IE7 Beta 2 the latest build and I came up with a strange issue with the Quick Tabs that they were not at all visible. I tried reinstalling it but nothing really helped you can understand how it feels so at last I reported this issue to the support and it was fixed. Thanks a lot! J

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/05/01/587745.aspx

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

The new live.com is LIVE...

Whats New?

You’ll notice hot new themes!

http://www.live.com

Windows Communication Foundation Official portal launched.

http://www.windowscommunication.net

What is WCF?

Windows Communication Foundation (previously codenamed "Indigo") is Microsoft's unified framework for building distributed applications.

With WCF, you can build secure, reliable, transacted Web services applications that interoperate with apps built on other platforms and integrate with the applications you're building on today's .NET technologies. And WCF is designed to be the next logical version of today's .NET distributed technologies, so if you’re using ASMX, COM+, MSMQ, .NET Remoting, or WSE, you'll love WCF.

WCF is part of WinFX, Microsoft's next-generation Windows framework. WinFX is an extension of the .NET Framework 2.0, and will be available as part of the Windows Vista operating system, as well as for Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP.

AHAH is a very simple technique for dynamically updating web pages using JavaScript. It involves using XMLHTTPRequest to retrieve (X)HTML fragments which are then inserted directly into the web page, whence they can be styled using CSS.

• Live.com beta
  Have your way with this page. Sign in, get the content you want—news, sports, search results, whatever—add columns, and move stuff around at will. It’s all you.
  
• Windows Live Mail beta
  It’s all new web mail, built from the ground up. Preview your e-mail without loading a new page each time (like Outlook®) drag and drop messages into folders, and generally power through your e-mail in a flash.
  
• Windows Live Safety Center beta
  It’s like taking your PC in for a tune up at the service station. If the service station was free and available 24/7. Get free on-demand virus cleaning and a comprehensive PC health checkup to help keep your PC running its best.
  
• Windows Live Favorites beta
  You are away from your own computer and want to get to the important sites you use everyday? No problem, now that your Internet Explorer Favorites can travel with you.
  
• Windows Live Messenger beta
  
  Coming soon - This will be the next-generation MSN Messenger. The name is new, but it will still be free to download Messenger and use most of its features. And there will be some remarkable new ways to instantly share and connect with friends.
  
• Windows OneCare Live beta
  The things you should have to help protect your PC, but probably don’t because they’re such a hassle. Stuff like virus scanning, firewall settings, tune ups, and software backups—delivered to you in a friendly, easy-to-use package that runs quietly in the background.
  
• Windows Live Search beta-mobile
  
  Coming soon - Picture this: You search for a restaurant with your phone, then click on the result to be connected immediately. Plus, you can see detailed maps, driving directions, and more—all formatted to fit the screen on your mobile device.
  
• Custom Domains Beta
  Already own your own Internet domain name?
  Have us host e-mail and IM for you in a domain you already own.
  • Create up to 20 e-mail accounts within your domain
  • Get a 250 MB inbox for each account*
  • Check your e-mail from any Web-enabled PC
  • Junk e-mail filter protection using Microsoft SmartScreen technology
  • Virus scanning and cleaning of e-mail
  • Seamless access with MSN Messenger, MSN Spaces, etc

Maxthon Internet Browser software is a powerful tabbed browser with a highly customizable interface. It is based on the Internet Explorer browser engine (your most likely current web browser) which means that what works in the IE browser will work the same in Maxthon tabbed browser but with many additional efficient features like...

• Tabbed Browsing Interface
• Mouse Gestures
• Super Drag&Drop
• Privacy Protection
• AD Hunter
• RSS Reader
• IE Extensions Support
• External Utility Bar
• Skinning
• And Much More to Explore...

Download Now!

Your Creative Power Unleashed.

Microsoft Expression™ takes the many sides of your creative personality to all new levels. Professional design tools give you greater flexibility to create sophisticated applications and content. Innovative technologies enable faster and richer interface development for Windows applications or the Web. Compatibility between products increases all levels of your personal productivity.

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