Giorgio Sardo's NZ IE8 Road Trip + Web Application Toolkits

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I really enjoyed hosting Giorgio in New Zealand during Tech.Ed and for a couple of days after the event.

There have been a few interesting updates overnight and as part of the Microsoft WebsiteSpark launch, we have released 7 Web Application Toolkits, together with an introduction to the Web Application Toolkits video on Channel9. The scenarios were selectedbased on feedback from community developers and include:

Giorgio introduced the release of a Web Application Toolkit for Internet Explorer 8 that makes it easy to leverage the new features in Internet Explorer 8 (Web Slices, Accelerators and Visual Search Providers) through a set of ASP.NET controls. The sample in the toolkit is based around an auction site scenario.

toolkit

There is a 10 minute video overview of the IE8 toolkit on Channel 9

All in all Giorgio presented 11 times during the three days that he was in New Zealand!

I have also uploaded Giorgio’s Microsoft Unplugged presentation from Wellington last week to Channel 9

A highlight of the week was the Web Meetup in which more than 200 web developers attended. I organised the meetup with Giorgio and the guys from Mozilla as it had been a while since we all got together so I thought it was timely to re-enter the discussion about standards HTML5 and future browser developments.

It was a fun night and I particularly liked the discussion during the panel that I had with Chris Double on the H.264 video standard.

I see Darko shared similar opinions to me on the issues.

Also Phil’s post helped put things in perspective for me.

While I went in as a sceptical developer expecting to hear the usual rhetoric around some misguided enthusiasm about a new feature set that other browsers have been doing for years, I came out highly surprised and impressed with some of the tools that are bundled as part of the embattled browser.

Anselm also did a good job of summarizing the session.

I have a little bit more video to share from Giorgio’s roadtrip and will post it here once it is edited in the coming couple of week.

In the meantime if you were at Tech.Ed NZ take a look at the videos posted from the event - one of Giorgio’s sessions has been posted for attendees to view.