After a first Platform Preview in April, the IE team has now released Platform Preview 2 for Internet Explorer 10. As web developer, front-end web designer or integrator, it’s your opportunity to test new HTML5 technologies support, which will later be coming to the final release. It’s standalone install so no worries for any conflict with an IE9 release version.

What’s in the new version?

A whole bunch of stuff, that’s for sure!
I recommend you to go over the details in the Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview Guide for Developers.

• Positioned Floats
• CSS3 Gradients (on all image types)
• CSS stylesheet limit lifted
• CSSOM Floating Point Value support
• Improved hit testing APIs
• Media Query Listeners
• HTML5: Support for async attribute on script elements
• HTML5 Drag and Drop
• HTML5 File API
• HTML5 Sandbox
• HTML5 Web Workers
• …

What is a Platform Preview?

Platform previews are released every 8 to 12 weeks and give developers a steady cadence to try out new HTML5 technology implementations coming to IE10.
We encourage developers to try it out but especially sending Feedback back to Microsoft. Sending Feedback is super easy, just choose Report Issue > Send Feedback. There are a few steps with simple questions about your issue, you can even attach a recording using the Windows 7 built-in problem recorder.

Standards and testing

With the development of IE10 PP2, Microsoft created 270 new tests in the IE Test Center and submitted them to the standards bodies.
You can access IE Test Center here:  http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/ietestcenter/

Further resources, download and learning material

• Download IE10 PP2 at http://ietestdrive.com
• New demos can be found at the same IE Test drive site
• Official blog post: Site-ready HTML5: Second IE10 Platform Preview Available for Developers (IE Engineering Team blog)
• Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview Guide for Developers at MSDN (don’t forget to check the sub-sections via the left navigation)
• Channel9 videos on IE10 PP2

Furthermore, Microsoft continues working on experimental standards by providing Prototypes through HTML5 Labs. This is the case for IndexedDB, WebSockets, Media Capture API and FileAPI, which has now been added to IE10 PP2. I highly recommend you read “HTML5, Site-Ready and Experimental” from the IE Engineering blog.

New demos – the goodies

IE Test Drive has a bunch of new demos showing off the newly supported HTML5 technologies. Here’s a few of my favorite picks.

How Stuff Works (Canvas composition)	Media Query Listeners, a step further to Media Queries Also highly recommended if you want to see examples of sites using Media Queries: http://mediaqueri.es/ (thanks Thomas Lewis for the tip)
Web Worker Fountains	Which compelled me to add a picture of the Bellagio fountains I took during the Las Vegas visit for MIX 2011 I was too late to snap the fountains in action though.
Page Visibility API	HTML 5 Sandbox

Check out the other demos on File Reader API, Drag & Drop, positioned floats, HTML5 forms and more at http://ietestdrive.com.

So, what are you going to build? Don’t hesitate to share your demos!