Buta no Ie

Microsoft has announced they’re busy working away on the next version of Internet Explorer. Some of the more interesting things included:

• Much better JavaScript performance! IE8 was a nice first step at improving JS performance on IE but still woefully behind the JS profilers and JIT compilers of Firefox, Safari, et al. Early builds of IE9 are already 4 times faster in the SunSpider benchmark than that of IE8 and putting it about par with Firefox 3.5.
• CSS Level 3! Again early builds apparently are able to pass the majority of the CSS3 Selectors Testsuite, 41 out of 43. Of course, Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4 already completely pass this test. IE8 only passed 22 of these tests by the way.

Where’s more HTML5?

Microsoft was very non-committal about this. They made a good start in IE8 with things like DOM storage, cross document messaging (XDM) and have a built in JSON API, but where’s <video> or more importantly <canvas>?

It’s a promising start for Microsoft with news about IE9′s JS performance and CSS3 compliance. Here’s hoping to Microsoft finding time to implement some of the HTML elements that competitors have already integrated into their browsers. Don’t need IE10 to STILL be playing catch-up.

Hey, what’s a couple of years between posts right?

I recently had the opportunity to demo our Contoso Riders Quick App at EnergizeIT in Toronto. A big thanks to Jean-Luc David and Chris Dufour for being such great hosts and for making our Services track a great success!

So you might be asking yourself; “What’s a Quick App?”

Quick Apps are projects that showcase the Microsoft Live Platform service offerings and also serve as templates which developers can use as a springboard to base their own projects off of. They are open-source projects release under Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL).

In the case of Contoso Riders, we implemented services and APIs such as:

• Live ID for user authentication
• Live Messenger Presence API and IM Control for Instant Messenging
• Virtual Earth Map Control to display and Virtual Earth Collections for storing map and routing information
• Silverlight Streaming for hosting videos
• Live Spaces Weblogs and the Metaweblog API to store and manage content
• Live Spaces Photo Albums to store photos

You can download the source for Contoso Riders on CodePlex as part of the Windows Live Quick Apps project.