Intro

The first session of interest I went to for the second day was a session on the new features in Internet Explorer 9. Firsts message in this session was: STOP USING IE 6!

Yes! Even Microsoft wants you to stop using IE 6. Of course, they will point out that when IE 6 was released, it was more standards compliant than the major player at the time, Netscape 4, but admittedly they also point out that they dropped the ball after that and let other competitors pass them.

The good thing is Microsoft is trying to make a mends, and I must say that I was impressed with direction they are going with IE 9.

If you are interested in seeing for your self you can visit their web site at http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/.

Performance

During the first part of the session, a bar chart was presented comparing all of the major browser players JavaScript engine.  The first bar on the chart represented IE 8, and I was really surprised to see how slow IE 8 was. It must have been at least four or five time slower than the fastest browser JavaScript Engine, Chrome. However, the latest release of the IE 9, is very close and is in fact faster than the latest Firefox JavaScript engine and even its beta release too.

Where IE 9 really shines in performance is its graphics accelerator engine. There was a demo of moving graphics on a web page and IE 9  was able to processed it seamlessly and when the same demo was done in Chrome it was much slower and very choppy.

HTML 5

IE 9 will have full support of HTML 5 with features such as: SVG1.1 video, and audio. If you want to learn more about SVG there is a very good open source graphic editor you can play with called Inkscape.

Other things HTML 5 has is a new function called DOMContentloaded which allows you specify that some images should not be loaded until the DOM is completely loaded. For example, this is a good approach for websites that want to show third party ads, but do not want those ads to hinder the time it takes to load the web page. By forcing those ads to load at the end the webpage will appear to load faster.

CSS3

Turning to CSS3, a neat feature is that you will be able filter styles based on what client is accessing the site and other criteria such as what screen size the client has. Called media queries , this feature provides the flexibility to choose what styles to load based on media types.

For example you can conditionally load a style sheet based on whether the client is a browser or a printer:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="sans-serif.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="serif.css">

CSS3 also allows provides more ways for you to select elements. For example input:not(enabled) will only style an input element that is not enabled.

CSS3 provides more granular control over colors allowing you to control things like opacity and even making the opacity increase in value as the color progresses through an element.

Debug Tools

IE 9 has added some new functionality to their debug tool. The main feature being the Network tab. Similar to Fiddler, except now incorporated in the browser, this tab will allow you to watch what is being requested and the response that is coming back, including what is contained in the header.

Conclusion

Thats all I have for not but  check back and I will update the site with other sessions I have attended.

I had the chance to see the Microsoft Teched Keynote today mainly presented by Bob Muglia, and unlike previous TechEd keynotes I have attended--actually I have only attended one in 2007--it was all business and no fluff. No side celebrities to some lame skit this time around. There were no earth shattering announcements made today although today they made a major push to go to the cloud which I thought was pretty interesting.

The main drive of the keynote was all about cloud computing. It was the overall theme that pretty much drove the whole keynote address. Each topic that was presented somehow tied back to the cloud. As a matter of fact, one of the demos was of an application that allowed user to be authenticated and recognized by a website via Active Directory profiles without that user actually having to be on the premises where that website is hosted. This was done by hosting the Activity Directory profiles in the cloud via Azure. Seems a pretty scary thing to do, but Muglia emphases as one of his points that the emphasis of this drive was that it was secure.

Muglia announced today that Visual Studio 2010, will now have the capabilities to develop applications specifically for Azure. From within Visual Studio you can specify things like how big your virtual environment will be, and you will be able to deploy directly to Azure with tracing of the deployment provided.

Other announcements that were made that:

• The AppFabric plug in for IIS 7 is now available in RTM. This will allow IT to better manage deployments, diagnose and monitor WCF services, and provide a more flexible and scalable caching alternative to the current ASP.Net caching.
• Windows Server R2 SP1 and Windows 7 SP1 will be available in July.
• A new version of Windows Communicator will be available which will provide better conferencing (including video) as well as a "big brother" function that will analyze a user mail and other data and determine what skill-sets they have so someone in the company can search on that skill-set and give you a ring if you have it.  Sounds a bit scary to me.
• Full development capability for the Windows 7 Phone will be able to be done in Visual Studio 2010 and Silverlight. This is a good sign that Microsoft still wants to be in the phone market although I think they still have a ways to go if they want catch up to the iPhone. Seems they are going after the business phone market.
• Windows 9 will have full support of HTML 5 and have graphics acceleration for faster graphics rendering of a web page.
• The new version of Web Expressions was released to day and it includes a Super Preview to compare what you design pages in to different browser versions such as IE 6, 7, 8, Firefox, and new with this release is Safari on the Mac. Yes you can now test Mac versions of Safari with needing a Mac. By they way, you can also do it on Spoon.net. http://spoon.net/browsers/

There a few other announcement but those were the ones as a web developer that interested me. I will try and update the blog with other stuff I learn through out this week so stay in touched.