In the last weeks I had the pleasure to travel to Australia and New Zealand and spend some time with the local communities of web developers, designers, enthusiasts, students…to talk about Internet Explorer 8, HTML 5, Web Standards, Developer Tools, Expression Super Preview, Fiddler and much more…

I have to admit I’ve been very impressed by the level of enthusiasm coming from all the venues I’ve been at: Tech ED Gold Coast, Tech Ed Auckland, MSDN Unplugged, Auckland Web Meetup, Auckland and Victoria University, … I’d really like to thank all the thousands people I met for their participation and their feedbacks: GRAZIE! In particular, those two made my 25 hours trip back to Seattle more enjoyable:

“[…] very enlightening presentation which I believe effectively illustrated a major shift of attitude within Microsoft towards the web and related standards.” (Darko)

“While I went in as a skeptical developer […] I came out highly surprised and impressed” (Anselm)

It’s been great to meet face to face with my colleagues Nigel Parker and Michael Kordahi; those guys are just super stars…and they have a good sense of…”fashion” :-) . You really don’t want to miss their Photosynths (and a lot of other cool stuff!) here and here !!

Lastly I’d like to thank John Ballinger for organizing and inviting me to the Auckland Web Meetup; I really enjoyed meeting the usergroup and the Firefox team (leaded by Robert O'Callahan) and discussing together some of the pending issues that make so complex to write and implement the HTML 5 spec, and some of the ideas that will make developers and designers life easier (e.g. test cases, Expression SuperPreview, …).

So, to all of you, THANKS! :-)

PS: starting from the next post, I will share the source code of my demos ;)

I’m happy to announce we just released a Web Application Toolkit for Internet Explorer 8!

The goal of this Web Application Toolkit is to leverage the new features in Internet Explorer 8 (Web Slices, Accelerators and Visual Search Providers) to extend the reach of your Web site and services also to those users that are not on your site.

The kit include sample projects and the following controls:

• ASP.NET Web Slice control: Enabling users to subscribe to your content directly within a Web page
• ASP.NET Accelerator control: To facilitate the access to your Web application or services from any Web page through contextual menu options
• ASP.NET Visual Search control: Allowing users to search within your site through the browser Visual Search Box
• ASP.NET Browser Helper control: Used to detect if the visitor of your site is using Internet Explorer 8

Download the code and samples here.
Watch a screencast to get started here.

Happy coding!