Day of .NET

Thanks to Linda for forwarding this.  Cleveland is taking part of the "Day of .NET" and details can be found over at http://clevelanddodn.org/. Subjects to covered are Silverlight, Semantic Web and Sharepoint.  Might be worth a look.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Behold IE8!

So on Tuesday I came into the office to an email from Brent announcing Microsoft’s u-turn on IE8’s default behavior.  Great news for us developer types as that now means that we wouldn’t have to start using ‹meta› tags to force IE8 to act, well, like IE8.

Today, at MIX’08, Microsoft unveiled IE8. Thanks to Jeremy Keith & Jonathan Snook’s tweets I got the latest on webslices and the link to download the beta—which I promptly did.

Now if you are running Vista it seems IE8 installs pretty quickly.  I, on the other hand, run XP Pro and had to install a couple of “critical” things from Microsoft and then do two restarts.  Some things never change.

After that IE8 runs pretty nicely.  It doesn't look a lot different from the current IE7, but I assume that may change a little nearer launch.  A couple of things that are different are the “emulate IE7” button (which requires the browser to restart) and a developer tools button which launches a new window with built-in tools akin to Pederick’s web developer toolbar or Hewitt’s Firebug add-on.

I’m going to be trying it out over the coming weekend and hopefully getting some more insights at SXSW.

Technorati tags: ie8, microsoft, browser, beta

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Popfly could let everyone mash-up...

There's something new over at the Microsoft camp, it could be very cool, and it's name is Popfly. Now I don't have an invite so I'm only going by what I've read on the Popfly site and other blogs but it does seem that this is a lot like Yahoo! Pipes on steroids. The promise is that you will use the set of online visual tools to create mashups, gadets and even web pages. You'll be able to share them with other users by grabbing the code and getting the user to add them within an Iframe on their site (something I personally hate but if it's good enough for Google). Making use of Silverlight, is a step forward and makes the whole thing look slick. There is also the Popfly Explorer which works with Visual Studio. Watch the Popfly how-to video for a better look at how it works. I'm strangely divided about this offering from Microsoft. Personal experience with the software they've offered, in the past, for building anything on the web has never put out anything but a ton of over-complicated junk, but their tools are easy to pick up and ubiquitous and the teams have now made great strides in cleaning up their output. This could be a great tool to extend the web from the root users up, but it could also be the arbiter harbinger of the return of sensory overload homepages so prevalent in the 90's.

Technorati tags: popfly, microsoft, web2.0, mashups