Comment: Microsoft springs surprises at MIX08

Posted on 6 Mar 2008 at 10:35

Having arrived at MIX08 in Las Vegas, the first event to attend was the Keynote speech by Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie, and, as was expected, there was a barrage of announcements as well as partner deals with the likes of Nokia and NBC to tell us about.

The big news was the announcement of the beta of IE8 going live as I write this just after the keynote.

IE8 apparently will render CSS-based websites correctly, much more like the likes of Firefox and Safari.

It also has an IE7 'compatibility' mode so that if a website is designed just to work correctly in IE7 (ie, badly) the web pages can be made to force IE8 to display as IE7 would have done.

I suspect this is more for the intranet community with their customer web-based solutions rather than the internet-based websites.

The other big items of news are the release of Silverlight 2 for both the Windows and Mac platforms. Interestingly, the player won't require .NET Framework 3.5 to run, which makes it a fairly lightweight and quick install at just 4.5MB.

Silverlight has been adopted by NBC for the coverage of the 2008 Olympics, where they're expecting 2,200 hours of video a day to be produced. A new Silverlight video application is being developed to enable picture-in-picture and HD video streaming, which will auto adjust depending on bandwidth and local CPU usage.

Cool stuff with lots more to follow.