Comments

This browser is not ready to be released.  There is a serious bug that has been reported dozens of times during both the beta and the RC, and that is that IE9 does not render pictures with any reliability.  I am tired of loading a page, only to see the pictures not show up, and be force to do "Duplicate Tab" over and over until I finally produce a tab that will actually render the pictures that the web page contains.

I and others have reported this MANY times at connect.microsoft.com.  There's also a neowin thread on the problem.  http://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/958964-images-break-in-internet-explorer-beta-9080276000/

The problem goes unsolved, and seemingly dismissed and uninvestigated.  I've seen some of bugs at Connect dismissed as "Not Repro", others closed as "Fixed in the RC" (which is false), and others remain open but with no sense of urgency.

I really don't understand the problem here, as to why the IE team seems not to care about simple, basic, and essential functionality.

I like Chrome but haven't made it my main browser because its Flash performance is poor; I can't even play a YouTube video without the video freezing up after ten seconds or so.  and Chrome's Silverlight performance is absolutely atrocious.

And I do find it faster generally, particularly for Channel 9, but some pages take forever to load on Chrome while IE and FF load them quickly.  Not to mention that my scroll wheel doesn't work on Chrome, nor the scroll area of my laptop's touch pad (only works in the downard direction, and too fast at that).  If I close a Chrome window with multiple tabs, it doesn't even bother asking if I really want to close all the tabs; it just goes ahead and closes them all.  Chrome's bookmark functionality sucks.  (Photosynth plugin doesn't work either )  Yet, for all of its problems, I still enjoy using it because it feels so lightweight.  But polish is severely lacking.  It's performance isn't enough for the browser to stand on its own, it needs the "Google" name.  If a no-name company had put out this browser, nobody would pay any attention at all.

P.S.
As for ACID3, isn't that based on "standards" that are still in development and have yet to be finalized?  I recall a recent Opera beta that became the "first" browser to pass ACID3, then the next day a bug was found in the ACID3 test so it was tweaked, and suddenly that same Opera beta no longer passed.  In other words, Opera's deved coded against the test rather than the standards that ACID3 was supposed to stress.  Which means that Opera's ACID3 compliance proves nothing.  I suspect the same for the other browsers.  And Idon't put much weight on ACID3 until the things it tests against are actually finalized.  Before that, what's the point?

I just now finally got around to watching this.
It was great!

Happy New Year, everybody!

JChung2006 wrote:



You should definitely check out Tomas' blog, which littleguru linked above.  He has an article with a code sample library for implementing asynchronous workflows-like code in C#, as well as a nice set of articles introducing F#.

As interesting as F# is, I would still love to see LISP or SCHEME running on the CLR/DLR. I would find it absolutely delightful if a user-friendly dialect of LISP became the most popular software development language 5 years from now, with versions to generate CIL and JVM (and maybe Dalvik) bytecode.

There's an IronScheme project in the works that runs Scheme on the DLR.

http://wordpress.com/tag/ironlisp/
http://www.codeplex.com/IronScheme

It's open source under the Ms-PL license, so roll up your sleves and get crackin'!

Nice video (a little noisy in the background, but what can you do? ).

I love all F# content.  Keep it up! 

JohnnyAwesome wrote:

They wrote J Script in the time-span of several weekends? And he wrote that in Lisp and then rolled a C translator from scratch?

There is a reason why I could not work at Redmond and that just about summarizes it.

His mentioning that part of his Lisp background is from working on the TI Explorer (TI's lisp machine workstation) at Texas Instruments brings back some memories. My university had a couple of those TI Explorer lisp machines. I never got to do any real work on them, but I loved playing with them. They seemed to be a lot more polished than the Symbolics lisp machines we had.

Thanks for this video.
I love listening to programming language gurus. 

Very nice.

One thing I am glad to see is that the Silverlight CLR supports any .NET language.  The original WPF/E CLR specs said that only C# and VB.NET would be supported.

Great video!

I love the jig-saw puzzle on Mac part.

DanielMD wrote:



OK a couple of things:

1) The videos are really cool, and i really like the fact that Microsoft is "getting it" wend it comes to creating a game community.

2) You guys don't know the indie market that well, what XNA studio is doing has been done dozens of times (gamemaker, unity, etc... http://www.dpfiles.com/dpfileswiki/index.php?title=PAID_3D_GAME_ENGINES . The main problem is not the pipeline, or getting assets into the game, the problem comes down to stuff like doing UI programming for the game, adding scripting ability, getting all the parts working together, the physics, the network code, etc... that is the hard part where I and all Indies need help.

XNA "as is" is just Microsoft twist to the game development problem unfortunately no magic solutions for the indies, and actually not an evolution for people that are already using better tools (except for the xbox link, but that is so crippled right now, that it makes no sense for the indie developer just the hobbyst).

Bottom line, very interesting stuff, promising stuff to look forward too, but as always Microsoft fails to deliver the gold, they deliver silver that is nice, but it's not going to solve the problems of the indie developers. Still i am definetly keeping an eye on it

*sigh*
Some just can't stand to admit that Microsoft does anything innovative.

Here's a link to the DEMMX awards that took place a couple weeks ago:
http://www.demmx.com/demmx/awards/2006.jsp

XNA Game Studio Express won a couple DEMMX Awards:
Game Innovation of the Year
and
Best of Show: Innovator of the Year

So it's official - XNA is innovative.