I know you've heard it before, but we are heading down the final path to ship.... really we are 
As part of that path, we've been working hard for the past few months focused on making sure that our new code base meets the expectations of you folk, the Niners. What has that meant? Well, it meant new features of course, but it also meant extending some of our existing code to make it more enjoyable for how people use Channel 9... even modifying our initial ideas around the UI and the UX to make it both an improvement and familiar.
That is probably already enough talk for most people, so for all of those folks ... please feel free to jump over to the beta (http://beta.channel9.msdn.com), check it out, and provide feedback.
I do want to explain what is new/improved, what is missing and what are known beta issues that we are planning to fix in the short term. We'll go through these features/differences in an upcoming dev diary, but for now here it is in basic text form.
What's New/Improved
Browser/Standards compatibility
- Nearly identical experience across IE and FF and the site is very usable in Opera and Safari
- Font scaling (make your text size larger/smaller in your browser and the site stays usable and looking good) is now possible
Videos
- Support for multiple video and audio formats (MP4, Zune formatted WMV, High Quality WMV, Regular WMV, WMA and MP3) with corresponding RSS feeds for use with aggregators including Zune and iTunes
- Silverlight Player with an available iFrame for inclusion in other web sites
- The ability to tell people about your favorite videos using a direct post to Facebook, Digg or Deli.cio.us link
Forums/Commenting
- Asynchronous (AJAX) paging through comments on videos, threads in the forums and more
- New "Reply To" model that automatically displays the comment you are replying to hooked up to your comment
- New Editor with broad browser support
User Submitted content (wiki/sandbox)
- Added commenting to wiki pages
- Async history browsing and editing
- New syntax matching codeplex's wiki syntax
- Tagging support added to the Sandbox, so that uploaded samples can be categorized (think C#, Web, WPF)
What's Missing/Coming Soon
- "Recent Changes" pages/feeds in the wiki are no longer available (will return)
- "Compare with previous" no longer available (will return)
- IE 6 support has issues, mostly around our extensive use of transparent PNGs
- Profiles are really lacking compared to how they are in the current C9 (some improvements planned, will plan more based on your feedback!).
- Watched Threads is gone.
- User info (blog, web site, caption) on posts is gone, but will come back later in some form of quick info pop-up.
- No Emoticons in the editor (coming soon)
- No Poll
- No Quote option for replying
Note: The beta itself is missing some things just because it is a beta, including Live ID sign-in... and our data isn't anywhere near up-to-date between the live and beta sites.
I'm sure there is more, but please check it out now and let us know what you think. There is a feedback forum (http://beta.channel9.msdn.com/forums/feedback) on the new site, but I've also created a page for the beta on uservoice.com, you can check it out here http://channel9.uservoice.com and you can use that site to submit comments, ideas, and to vote on other people's feedback.