Mix08 Day -1 Big day for Microsoft
First day of Mix 2008 was great with Microsoft announcing the beta release of much awaited Silverlight2.0 and IE8. Here is a roundup of the major announcements.
1. Ray Ozzie hinted at a new service in which Microsoft that will attempt to unite web applications across all devices. Ray Ozzie defined it as “World of small pieces loosely joined”.
2. Kicks off IE8 Beta. Finally Microsoft has decided to make IE standard compliant. Among some of the features of IE8 that caught my attention are,
. CSS 2.1 support
. Increased JavaScript Performance - almost 2.5 times the performance of IE7 according to the charts which they showed. They claim there has been a gain of 34% in GMail loading, 45% in opening a conversation and 27% in opening a thread.
. HTML5
. WebSlices - Using which you can get constant updates about a section of the page you are interested in any web page. Somewhat similar to screen scrapping.
3. Scott Guthrie announced the Silverlight 2 Beta1 release. Nokia announced that they will be supporting Silverlight in their S60 series of devices, offering consumers the ability to enjoy rich web applications on their smartphones.
. There has been a lots of improvements over 1.1 Alpha like, Multi-Language Support, WPF UI framework, Networking support, etc.
