• [00:28] Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 RTW's!, Visual Studio 2012 – Update 2 RTM (Visual Studio ALM), Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 Now Available (Soma), VS/TFS 2012.2 (Update 2) released today (Brian Harry), Download RTM Release
• [02:21] Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (Robert Green,Orville McDonald and Dmitry Lyalin) 
• [03:41] //BUILD
• [05:43] Hackathon@BUILD
• [06:51] Windows 8 App for Channel 9 now available (Cara, Duncan Mackenzie)
• [08:11] Nice Tool for Presenters who use Visual Studio 2012 (Michael Crump)
• [09:00] New on modern.IE: Free VM Downloads, Windows 8 QuickStart Kits, Enhanced Code-Scanning Tools, and More
• [10:36] The Making of Lumilight, a game for Windows 8 (Petri Wilhelmsen), Download
• [11:21] Channel 9 Highlight: "It looks like you're writing a service!" - "Do you want security with that?" (Clemens Vasters, Barry Dorrans)

Picks of the Week!

• Mark's Pick of the Week:[13:35] Bill Gates and Paul Allen Recreate Iconic 1981 Microsoft Photo (Jamie Condliffe)
• Dan's Pick of the Week:[14:33] Avanade unveils interactive shopping with NFC, augmented reality and Kinect motion sensing (Karl Dyer)

Production Note: Yep, Dan's audio isn't 100%, sorry about that. You can hear him fine, it's just not as good as Mark's  (I wonder if there's a hidden meaning behind that? )

Scroogled!  [05:22]

Xbox blowing away the competition  [10:13]

Windows Store has more apps than others...  [14:41]

Do you know this guy?  [17:57]

additional chatter...

Scroogled...the site

Windows Phone sales quadruple

For more information, please see the additional topic here:

• Make your site touch-ready

See also related videos here:

• Web Standards: How to use XMLHttpRequest

For more information please see the topics at:

• Update your site to Web Standards

See also related videos here:

• Touch-First Experiences in IE 10

You've all heard that last week the Fall 2012 update rolled out for the XBox 360? And that one of the new features is finally a good use of my ChatPad (Oh... did I say that out loud? Doh!)... err... um... I mean that Internet Explorer 10 has come to your big screen, via your XBox 360!

And, snarky comment aside (though the chatpad is kind of a must and makes IE on the XBox much easier to use), it works surprisingly well, for HTML5 type sites that don't use plug-ins.

Here's a few snaps of in in action;

Even my personal blog looks pretty darn good, and I've done nothing to adjust it for IE10

So while it mostly "just works," would you like some guidance on providing the best experience for your XBox 360 consumers, readers and customers? Well, I've got a download just for you...

Internet Explorer for Xbox Developer’s Guide

This paper provides information for developers to who want to optimize their site for Internet Explorer for Xbox.

This is a pretty short and focused document, only 16 page, but again, focused on helping you provide the best Xbox 360  IE10 experience From the Doc;

Internet Explorer for Xbox Developer’s Guide

September 26, 2012

Abstract

This paper provides information about Internet Explorer for Xbox. It provides guidelines for developers to who want to optimize their site for Internet Explorer for Xbox. It contains design recommendations, and it describes some of the technical differences between Internet Explorer 9 and Internet Explorer for Xbox.

This information applies to the following product:
Xbox® 360

Personally even if you are just using IE on the Xbox, this doc provides a good number of hints and tips. For example, the supported Kinect for 360 voice commands. The "Full Screen" command makes viewing embedded videos pretty awesome.

Here's watching This Week on Channel 9 full screen on my big screen...

A few more snips from the Doc;

 For more information, please see the additional topic here:

• Make your site touch-ready

See also related videos here:

• Web Standards: How to use XMLHttpRequest

For more information please see the topics at:

• Update your site to Web Standards

See also related videos here:

• Touch-First Experiences in IE 10

In the video you will see the demo game that is provided in the prototype in action on a Windows 8 tablet.

“Developers and designers are reimaging the familiar on the web. Join us in celebrating their work,” the invite reads.

To promote the event, Microsoft has also launched a site at www.beautyoftheweb.com where invitees have to type in the letters to to unlock the invitation (hint: it’s “native”). There’s not much to see here otherwise, but the site does unveil IE9’s new, shinier logo. Pretty!

We do know a lot about the upcoming browser thanks to extensive blog posts from the IE team regarding its support for web standards, including HTML 5 and CSS3. It will also offer hardware acceleration and an improved, internal JavaScript engine called “Chakra.”

What we don’t know is what IE 9 will actually look like but rumors are already circulating with speculations about that topic. Guess we have to wait to find out for sure.

In this newest preview, developers have a chance to check out IE9’s fully hardware-accelerated HTML5 implementation and test drive samples of modern SVG and native JavaScript in action.

And as before, the applications made available for testing purposes are fun for developers and non-developers alike. For example, there’s a Hamster Dance Revolution game, the musical IE Beatz, and the Psychedelic Browsing app which shows off hardware acceleration’s capabilities.

Continued improvements to the Javascript engine are measured using the Webkit Sunspider benchmark and the results, charted here, and they’re encouraging. IE9 has come a long, long way from IE8, that’s for sure. And the differences between IE9 and other modern web browsers on this microbenchmark are converging within thousandths of seconds, the post notes.

Also in the latest preview, IE’s score on the Acid3 test improves from 83 to 95, which is also good news.

This preview is the last one before IE launches its beta, so developers and designers need to get their sites ready soon. There are some tips on doing so listed at the bottom of the page here.

In the latest release, the feature spotlight is on the browser’s support for the HTML5 web standard, with its included support for the HTML5 Canvas element, audio and video tags. Several new demos show off these features, including one called the “IMDb Video Panorama.”

Through a partnership with Amazon (which owns IMDb), Microsoft created a fun, interactive video showcase application which lets you scroll through trailers for current and upcoming movies.

Another Amazon app, the “Amazon Shelf,” presents a virtual bookshelf with interactive features that let you flip through pages of a book to see reviews, ratings, snippets, price and other info available from Amazon.com.

Other improvements in this release include performance increases for JavaScript and additional standards support, including the Web Open Font Format. See videos of IE9 in action on Channel 9.

For example, under the speed demos section, you’ll find the gorgeous visual search engine demo called Flickr Explorer, a game called Browser Flip, and the Star Wars-esque Scrolling Text demo.

There are also four new HTML5 demos showing off things like CSS3 media queries, DOM range and selection and more plus graphics demos using diagrams, org charts and even a tweet cloud, where you can hover over Twitter search terms floating in clouds to view more information about a randomly selected tweet.

Interested developers can grab the latest preview from here.

As previously announced, the new browser will support HTML5, CSS3, and hardware acceleration. It also sports a new JavaScript engine called “Chakra.” You can read more about its improvements and how to send feedback over on the IE blog here.

When you first launch the IE9 preview browser, you’re taken to the IE9 Test Drive website where you’ll find a series of tests ready to be run. There are speed demos for testing browser performance, graphics demos, and HTML5 demos for testing border radius, CSS2, DOM Style, and DOM events. There’s also an “HTML 5 T-Shirt Designer” app that uses HTML5 and XHTML to let you create your own shirt.

Internet Explorer 9

Arguably one of the bigger announcements from PDC, Steven Sinofsky gave attendees a first look at what’s coming in IE9 with a demo of an early build. The updated browser will support new web standards including HTML5 and CSS3 and will also have a faster JavaScript rendering engine. Sinofsky admitted that JavaScript performance in IE8 was much slower than other browsers and it’s clear that addressing this problem was a key goal for the IE9 team. A post on the IE blog shows a chart comparing the script performance on IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. Although still a test build, IE9 has narrowed the gap considerably when it comes to speed:

The new browser will also include “hardware accelerated rendering” which means it will now render graphics and text using the graphics card instead of the CPU. For the end user, this means that online images, videos, animations, and web fonts will be displayed faster, more clearly, and will use less CPU in the process of doing so. This is one of the better features of IE9 as it takes advantage of Direct2D and DirectWrite technologies to do something that today’s other browsers don’t – and it’s more useful than both Google's Native Client and Mozilla's WebGL for accelerated 3D graphics, said Dean Hachamovitch, IE’s GM.

Office 2010

At PDC, Office 2010 launched into beta along with SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, Project 2010 and Office Web Apps. Office has been given a new look with updated logos and icons, but the most exciting development is the Outlook Social Connector. With this tool, you can track conversations and stay up-to-date with everyone you communicate with via email without having to switch over to another program or website.

Likely inspired by the demands for more social inbox experiences provided by plugins like Xobni as well as third-party services like Gist, the Social Connector will also focus on social network and email integration. As with Xobni, the connector tracks your communication history with your email contacts, your upcoming meetings, and it helps you easily find attachments they may have sent. It also offers activity feeds for each person based on their actions on both business and consumer social networks, including SharePoint 2010’s new social features and Windows Live. 

The first consumer network to support the new feature is LinkedIn, the professional business networking site. With the LinkedIn integration, you’ll be able to track your connections, email them, send invites, and more.

The Social Connector is available now in the Office 2010 beta and the LinkedIn integration will go live early next year.

Silverlight 4

Another major announcement was the developer release of the Silverlight 4 public beta. The updated platform includes a number of new features like webcam and microphone support for sharing audio and video in Silverlight apps, performance improvements that allow it to run 200% faster than Silverlight 3, support for Google Chrome, Deep Zoom enhancements, multi-touch support, and the ability to bring data into the app via copy/paste or drag-and-drop. For example, you could now drag an Office document into a Silverlight application, if desired.

To show off the new capabilities, a Silverlight Facebook app was demonstrated (TechCrunch has the screenshots).  In the app, cycling through the photos was a much faster experience that what it would be in the browser.

Silverlight 4 is a developer release only so no end-user runtime is being provided at this time.

Pivot

Pivot is a new Microsoft Live Labs experience that lets you interact with “massive amounts of data in ways that are powerful, informative, and fun.” Essentially, it’s a visualization tool for organizing datasets to discover new patterns and insights. The tool, built in SeaDragon and powered by Silverlight, does the visualization over the web. In other words, it’s streaming the data, not caching it locally to your hard drive.

In Pivot, datasets are organized as collections which are displayed using thumbnail images. The collections consist of objects that share some common attributes. In Pivot, you can analyze all these objects in a broader context. For example, as the video explains on Pivot’s homepage, they used Pivot to look at all of social lending organization Kiva’s loans and sort them by loan type.

Another example of Pivot in action is Brandon Watson’s Crunchbase Viewer which allows you to sort through the massive amounts of data stored in the online database about internet startups.

In order to use Pivot, you need an invite. You can request one here.

In addition, new enhancements have been added to the Cooliris Internet Explorer plugin to improve performance. According to the company, image searches’ performance have improved up to 30% with the updated plugin.

The company also reports that they will soon support Bing Video searches, too, but have not revealed an exact date yet.

To download Cooliris, visit the company homepage here: cooliris.com.

This second method is actually a great way to make a web slice for any RSS feed you want to track in your browser – and you don’t need to code or do anything technical to create this one. In fact, all you have to do is go to the LiveSlices gallery and click the “Install” button next to the “Feed Slice” option. Then you can just enter the URL of the RSS feed you want to follow. Once the feed is verified, you just add it to your Favorites bar. Here's the one Amit made, as an example.

Note that feed slices won’t include your site’s favicon and you won’t know how many people subscribe. Still, it’s a much simpler way of creating a Web Slice without needing to have any technical knowledge.

If you haven’t been testing the beta, today you can download the the updated browser and see what you’ve been missing. There are several new features being introduced, including a private browsing mode, a visual search tool, colorful tabs, a smart bar, as well as interactive features like web slices and accelerators.

Upon First Launch…

You’ll notice the differences between IE7 and IE8 right away when you launch the new browser today. As you surf and open additional tabs, you’ll see that tabs are grouped together when they’re launched via links from one particular website. Those tabs are also color-coded so you can tell which tabs are associated with each other. This is handy for anyone who does a lot of research on the web or who just likes to have a lot of tabs open at the same time. It’s also a feature that other browsers don’t do – at least, not right out of the box. Although add-ons and extensions can deliver that functionality to some other browsers, that doesn’t mean as much to a good part of the web surfing population who use their web browsers “as is” with little customization.

There are other UI changes, too, which will help out those “non-tweakers.” For example, the new Favorites Bar (formerly called the “Links” Bar) in IE8 is now switched on by default. With one click on the star with the green arrow, favorite websites can be added to this bar without having to fuss with the whole bookmarks manager setup. Just click and the bookmark appears at the top of the window.

Another button at the top near the favorites bar is called “Quick Tabs.” It’s almost small enough to go unnoticed so it stays out of the way, but at some point even the most non-observant web surfer will give this button an accidental click. That’s all it will take to make using this new feature a part of their daily routine. Here, websites are laid out as live-updating and good-sized thumbnail images of the sites that are open in your tabs. It’s an easy way to navigate through a myriad of open tabs and find the one you need.

Also, IE8 takes advantage of tabbed browsing to deliver relevant content when you click the “new tab” button, conveniently available to the right of all your open tabs. Instead of just presenting you with blank white space, it asks “what do you want to do next?” and suggests various tasks like launching an “InPrivate” window, use an Accelerator, or re-open a closed tab. (That last option is going to be very useful for those of us with too-fast trigger fingers when it comes to closing tabs.)

Speaking of “InPrivate,” that option is also a new IE8 feature which launches you into a private browsing session where none of your activity is tracked. No history, no saved passwords, no temporary internet files, no saved form information, no saved visited URLs,…nothing.  Of course, you’ll have to remember to close the browser before this info is wiped, but it’s definitely handy for surfing from publicly shared machines or anywhere you’re concerned about leaving traces of your activity.

Two of the features getting the most attention in IE8, however, are two of the most unique: “Web Slices” and “Accelerators.” Web Slices are sort of like really smart, live bookmarks. You add them to your bookmark bar as you would any other site, but instead of taking you to another web page when you click them, they display a small window with live web content. Because they work in real time, they can be used for keeping tabs on an auction, for example, as you can with the eBay Web Slice, or for keeping track of the current weather, among many other things.

Accelerators, the other big new feature in IE8, are designed to help you better interact with whatever web content you’re browsing. When you highlight text on a web page and right-click, you’ll see a list of actions you can take using that content. For example, you can blog it, map it, search it, email it, etc. There are a slew of accelerators to choose from so you can customize this menu to include your favorite services. I particularly like the ones like “Share on Facebook” and “Google Define,” as they both speed up the process of performing online actions which I do nearly every day.

The web slices and accelerators are found in the IE8 add-ons gallery, where they’re grouped along with search providers by category and popularity in well-organized and clean category pages. Each item has a button called “Add to Internet Explorer” which, upon clicking, pops up a window where all you have to do is click an “Add” button to confirm your choice.

Another change that makes browsing faster is the new “Smart Address Bar” which pulls up the addresses and sites from your browsing history as you begin to type – a feature that is a nod to an IE8 competitor, Firefox 3.0. The search box also does the same.

However, the search box has some nifty tricks of its own – and ones that are also unique to IE8, the best perhaps being its capability to do visual searches. Start typing in the search box and along with suggested searches related to your item, you’ll also see images. This is thanks to IE8’s new “visual search” feature which displays images within the search box itself.

The search box also lets you quickly switch from one search provider to another, a feature that lets you not only try your search on other search engines (cough, live.com, cough), but also lets you search within particular sites as well. For example, you can click on “Amazon” to search for your keyword on that site or “New York Times” to just search just that online news source. And all you have to do is click the search provider button to re-search -  you don’t have to retype your keyword or hit enter – IE8 will just re-run the search for you.

The available sites you can add as search providers are also found on the IE8 Add-ons site. For visual searches, look for Add-ons that identify themselves as “visual search” in their title, like this Wikipedia one or this Freebase one.

Finally, because IE8 is focused on being standards-compliant, pages on the web designed for the less-compliant older versions of IE may display oddly if they haven’t been re-coded for IE8. I haven’t encountered too many occurrences of this since most developers have already made the necessary changes – especially on larger sites run by businesses. But if you stumble upon the occasional, older web page a quick click on the “compatibility button” located next to the Address Bar will re-display page correctly.

With all these new tricks, it’s clear that IE is not only a big improvement over its previous incarnations, it’s now even a worthy competitor to the large number of other browsers out there. For all those who use IE regularly, the upgrade will be a pleasant surprise. And for those who had moved away in favor of other browsers, IE8 has introduced several features that may even win back some of those switchers.

IE8 is available now for users of Windows XP and Vista. A special version for beta testers of Windows 7 will arrive later on with the next update to that OS.

Also see David Tesar's post Top 5 Reasons for IT Pros to Deploy.

The new Liveslices site is not a Microsoft-owned property, but the look of its design has a similar feel to those sites we’re seeing in the Microsoft family of websites, including the one for IE 8. (Right down to the same font!) In other words, it has a clean and simple layout.

When you click into the Liveslices gallery, you’re presented with a list of Webslices to choose from and the company promises that they’re going to keep adding to this list.

The ones they currently have available are pretty cool – there are Webslices for Flickr, Twitter, feeds, Gmail, CNN, MSNBC, and more. My favorites (clearly) are the Twitter, Gmail, and Feed ones. With the Gmail and Twitter slices, you can click to see the latest from both your Twitter account and your inbox. The feed one is also great for keep up with your favorite sites. Photogs will love the two Flickr slices for checking out the most interesting photos and the uploads from everyone.

Although the site is brand-new, it’s clearly off to a good start. Got any suggestions for how they can improve? You can leave a comment on their blog here.

The service also includes a scheduler function if you want to keep an eye on a web page that changes a lot. Instead of having to return day-after-day to take a new snapshot, you can configure Iterasi to do so for you.

To get the new add-on for Internet Explorer, head over to the Iterasi download page. The browser extension works in IE 7 and IE 8 on XP and Vista (and likely Windows 7 Beta, too.)

Thanks @corvida!

If you’ve never used Foxmarks before, you should check out Lifehacker’s informative “how to” guide before installing. If you’re already familiar with the add-on, you can just go grab the IE download from here.

With the FriendFeed Accelerator, you can capture text on a web page and send it to straight to FriendFeed’s share page with pre-filled fields. The Accelerator will grab the URL and title of the page as the text.

If you haven’t checked out Accelerators yet, you should. They are one of my favorite new features in IE8. So far, I’ve installed Accelerators for Sharing, including ones that let me share to Facebook, Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and of course, Hotmail. I’ve also added Search Accelerators like Find on Facebook and Find on LinkedIn as well as those that let me search Wikipedia, Amazon, and New York Times.

You can find these and more in the IE8 Add-ons Gallery.

If you’re still running IE7, the high-level changes you’ll notice in the new IE8 include increased speed, increased responsiveness, and overall improved stability. However, it’s the new features like Accelerators and Web Slices that are getting the most attention.

Accelerators

The new IE8 includes something called “accelerators” which help speed up web activities like searches, finding a place on a map, blogging, and more. These are all available just by highlighting the text you want to act on, then right-clicking. A list of accelerators will appear. Several are built-in to the browser by default and developers can also extend the browser by creating their own and offering them as a download.

Web Slices

Another big new feature is “web slices.” These are special sorts of bookmarks (sort of) that you can add to your favorites bar. When clicked, these bookmarks don’t redirect you to a new page, but rather display portions of a web page in a small but easy-to-read window that appears. They’re great for keeping up with things like headlines or weather without having to navigate away from the site you’re on.

And More...

Also new in IE8 is private browsing, improved inline search, an improved search bar, automatic crash recovery, and tab groups. 

What You Need to Know About RC1

Specifically, in IE8 RC1:

1. If you are a Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 user and you are upgrading from IE8 Beta 1 or Beta 2 to IE8 RC1, you are no longer required to manually uninstall earlier IE8 builds. Instead, IE8 RC1 installer will automatically upgrade your machine from the earlier IE8 builds to the latest IE8 build, all with a single reboot.
2. There is a new pre-requisite for IE8 RC1 (KB957388). This update supersedes KB943302 and KB957055 and will be automatically installed as part of your RC1 upgrade, as long as you keep “Install the latest updates” checkbox checked. This update addresses known application compatibility issues in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 and improves the performance and reliability of IE8.
3. All IE8 Beta 1 and Beta 2 users will be offered IE8 RC1 via Windows Update in 25 languages. For Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, the IE language that gets offered via Windows Update will match the base OS language. For Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, the IE language that gets offered via Windows Update will match the Active Language that the user selected for their account.

You can get more information about system requirements and installation on the IE Blog. Also, be sure to check out the IE 8 video over on TechNet Edge.

For previous IE8 coverage here on Channel 10, check out our IE 8 First Look video for a run down of what's new.