Get IE 8 Beta 1 from Microsoft Now!
Posted by James | Filed under Future, Geek, Web
Microsoft has released the first public beta of Internet Explorer 8 for Windows Vista and Windows XP SP2.
Here are the download links for IE8 mentioned on the Microsoft IE8 Readiness website:
This release is essentially for people who want to make sure their websites or web applications do not break with the upcoming release of IE 8 that contains some key changes.
Update: The links for IE8 downloads are giving a 404 error at the moment, hopefully just a temporary glitch.
Tags: ie8, internet explorer 8, microsoft, public beta
Microsoft launches web analytics beta
Posted by James | Filed under Geek, Web
Microsoft has cracked open the door on its new Google Analytics competitor. Codenamed Project Gatineau, the new web analytics tool will offer web publishers and advertisers advanced tools for measuring how people are interacting with their websites.
The project launches in private beta today, and unfortunately is only available to US-based advertisers at the current time. Advertisers can sign-up via a Microsoft website.
During the beta, Project Gatineau will only be available to adCenter account holders, which means have to pay out $5 to sign up for an account if you don’t already have one. It’s not clear if the analytics tool will be available to users without adCenter accounts after Project Gatineau emerges from beta.
Tags: analytics, business, Geek, microsoft, Web
F# now an official .net language
Posted by James | Filed under Code, Geek
F# is an official .NET language now! Functional programming becomes a first-class citizen in .NET 
One of the really promising current projects from Microsoft Research is the F# programming language, spearheaded by Don Syme. F# stems from the functional programming tradition (hence the ‘F’) and has strong roots in the ML family of languages, tough also draws from C#, LINQ and Haskell. F# is designed from the outset to be a first-class citizen on .NET. This means that F# sharp runs on the CLR, embraces object-oriented programming, and has features to ensure a smooth integration with the .NET framework.
I am a big fan of technology transfer between a research organization and a product development organization so that we can "productize" the great research ideas and deliver to customers in a timely manner. This is one of the best things that has happened at Microsoft ever since we created Microsoft Research over 15 years ago. Here is another great example of technology transfer at work. We will be partnering with Don Syme and others in Microsoft Research to fully integrate the F# language into Visual Studio and continue innovating and evolving F#. In my mind, F# is another first-class programming language on the CLR.
This is really great news! Functional programming is very elegant and has a lot of benefits compared with other approaches. However, there are also some negative aspects: mostly people complain about the speed that functional languages offer. But the best thing about F# is that the team says that programs written in their language are as fast as programs written in C#.
So you get functional and dynamic benefits with the same speed as if they were written in C#. Sounds cool?
Tags: .net, functional, microsoft, programming, research
Welcome to Jimmahdigital.com, personal blog of James Simm, Wigan/Manchester-based .Net developer.
