Microsoft is heavily pushing HTML 5 as “Native on Windows”. To promote this message they are highlighting the hardware acceleration in IE 9 for HTML and SVG, as well as the Windows 7 Taskbar Integration for Websites. Between the two the emphasis was on performance and the difference between merely having some hardware acceleration and having “full hardware acceleration”.
IE 10 development started three weeks ago with the first drop available today at IE Test Drive. The planned cadence is 8 to 12 weeks between each platform preview. In addition to the features below, IE 10 was being demonstrated with a machine using an ARM processor and what appeared to be Windows 7.
- CSS Multi-column Layout
- CSS Grid Layout and Flexible Box Layout
- ECMAScript 5 Strict Mode
- CSS Gradients
- CSS Transitions/3D Transitions
ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update will include HTML 5, jQuery 1.5, Modernizer, Entity Framework 4.1, and Scaffolding. Modernizer is an open source toolkit that assists developers with using HTML 5 in a way that gracefully degrades for older browsers. Heavy emphasis was placed on how these tools work together. For example, the same validation attributes used on code-first models for Entity Framework are used for validation in MVC and database generation in SQL CE.
WebMatrix was touched on. The highlight was Template Monster, which sells templates and themes for many types of applications include websites, Flash, and Facebook. Web Matrix uses Razor templates, which are downloaded from Template Monster using WebMatrix’s package manager.
Microsoft is promoting Orchard CMS. This is an open source project that “is focused on delivering a .NET-based CMS application that will allow users to rapidly create content-driven Websites, and an extensibility framework that will allow developers and customizers to provide additional functionality through module extensions and themes.” Orchard CMS feels a lot like WordPress, the popular blogging framework for PHP. Orchard-based modules and extensions are built using ASP.NET MVC and the Razor syntax.
Again, templates and theme vendors are being highlighted. This time around it was Bind Tuning another commercial vendor that focuses on SharePoint, DNN, and Orchard themes. The emphasis isn’t so much on the theming itself, but how quickly one can create new websites by using MVC or Orchard with themes just being part of the solution.
