New Zealand IE8 Taskforce : Developers

Internet Explorer Administration Kit 8 Release Candidate 1

nzie8 — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 02:48:19 GMT

Hi All,

The Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) 8 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) simplifies the creation, deployment and management of customized Internet Explorer 8 packages. IEAK 8 can be used to configure the out-of-box Internet Explorer 8 experience or to manage user settings after Internet Explorer 8 deployment.

Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) 8 RC1 enables the most efficient way to deploy Internet Explorer 8 and manage Web-based solutions. Learn how to tailor a custom browser to meet your customers' needs. Visit the IEAK 8 RC1 site on TechNet for more information on the Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) 8 RC1.

Please note: You must have Internet Explorer 8 RC1 installed on your computer in order for IEAK 8 RC1 to run successfully.

To download and understand the system requirements, visit here.

Nick.

Internet Explorer 8 - Release Candidate 1 Released

nzie8 — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 00:30:00 GMT

We're excited to make the IE8 Release Candidate available today for public download today in 25 languages for Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server customers. You can find it at http://www.microsoft.com/ie8. Please download it now and try it out.

Downloads

(NB: Windows 7 users will get an updated IE8 with the next update of Windows 7)

Internet Explorer 8 is the latest version of the familiar web browser you are most comfortable using, helping you get everything you want from the web faster, easier, more privately and securely than ever before.

Faster Internet Explorer 8 is more responsive with new pages and tabs, opening up fast and reliably. You can now get to the information you care about most, in fewer steps; one click access to your webmail, favourite news sites or other online services.
Easier Reduce the steps to accomplish many common tasks, and automate your access to real time information updates. You can keep track of your favorite sports team, news, weather with a single click.
More Private Helps protect your privacy and confidential information where ever you go on the web.
More Secure Helps protect and stop malicious software from reaching your PC, and makes it easier to detect when a website is an imposter.

IE8 is focused on how people really use the web. Consumers want a browser that makes the tasks they do every day faster and easier. The activities people spend their time on define real-world performance: navigating to websites, working with tabs, searching, keeping track of changing information (like traffic or an auction), and using the information from one site with another (as in getting a map). Everyone wants a trustworthy browser that keeps them in control and protects their safety. Developers want great developer tools, great interoperability, and a powerful platform that enables them innovate. For some people, accessibility is crucial; for some organizations, policy, administration, and deployment are essential.

Support for IE8 RC1 can be received by visiting the Internet Explorer Beta Newsgroup to discuss issues, or by contacting Customer Support Services.
If you use a screen reader, please consult the Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 release notes before downloading.

Nick

Customising Internet Explorer 8 to Drive Users to Your Website

nzie8 — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 01:45:22 GMT

Hi All,

Nigel Parker from our developer and platform team in New Zealand has put together an excellent blog post on how to leverage some of the new features and functionality in IE8 to drive and enhance the experience users have with websites. Nigel has put together a collection of sample code and examples that the community can build on and leverage, to provide real value and a richer user experience for those using Internet Explorer 8.

In September we were fortunate to have Matt Heller over from the IE Team to deliver a roadshow across New Zealand to raise awareness and address questions and concerns that customers may have with the new version of our browser platform. We recorded our Auckland presentation, so if you weren’t able to attend, or you’d like a refresher, please check out the video online.

We have a wealth of resources available on our NZ IE8 Website, NZIE8 blog and the IE Team Blog so do check them out.

For the full details on Nigel’s examples and demos, see this blog post - http://blogs.msdn.com/nigel/archive/2008/11/13/customising-ie8-to-drive-users-to-your-website.aspx.

Nick.

Internet Explorer 8 and IP Licensing

nzie8 — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 05:54:08 GMT

When Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 launched in March, we wrote a post describing the permissive intellectual property licensing approaches we took for components of that release, such as Creative Commons licenses for copyrights in selected specs and the Microsoft Open Specification Promise (“OSP”) for implementations of those specs.

Now with the launch of Beta 2, We’re happy to highlight a few ways we’re continuing to make our innovations available to the community. By doing so, we hope to continue to foster the type of collaboration in the community that is so important to the “generativity” of the Internet, to borrow a term from Jonathan Zittrain (whose new book, by the way, is an important and worthwhile read).

Creative Commons License for Copyright in the Search Suggestions Specification

For Search Suggestions, we’re licensing copyright in the XML Search Suggestions Format Specification under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. This license lets others copy, distribute, modify and build upon the specification, even for commercial uses, as long as they give credit to Microsoft and license their own changes under the same terms. Special thanks to DeWitt Clinton and other contributors to the OpenSearch JSON Search Suggestions extension, whose work relates to the XML Search Suggestions Format spec. Visit Creative Commons for more information about their licenses, including how to use Creative Commons licenses on your own work.

Microsoft Open Specification Promise for Implementations of the Search Suggestions Specification

Microsoft has developed the Open Specification Promise (“OSP”) to provide a simple and clear patent promise to reassure the broad audience of developers and customers that a given specification can be used for free, easily, now and forever. The OSP was developed with feedback from customers and the open source community, and we’re happy to make the XML Search Suggestions Format Spec available under the OSP. The use of the OSP confirms that Microsoft patents needed to implement this specification can be used for free. More complete information about the OSP can be found here.

Web Slice Icon Guidelines

Internet Explorer 8 introduces Web Slices as a way for web sites to allow users to subscribe to specific content directly within a Web page. Users can see when content changes and view the updated portion of the Web page directly from the Favorites bar of Internet Explorer. The Web Slice icon provides a common visual cue that a web page supports web slices. Developers may freely use the icon under the Web Slice Icon Guidelines that we have developed, which are intended to promote the integrity of the icon as a common symbol for Web Slice functionality. We made it easier to use the icon in accordance with the Guidelines by making available for download .png and .gif renderings of the icon in various sizes.

We are pleased to continue to contribute to the web community and, as always, look forward to your feedback.

source

Application Compatibility Logging in IE8

nzie8 — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:19:00 GMT

The latest Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) release, ACT 5.0.5428.1080 is publicly available and can be downloaded here.

To give you some background, ACT helps customers understand their application compatibility situation by helping identify which applications are compatible with Vista, IE7, and IE8 and which require further testing. ACT allows compatibility data to be uploaded from individual machines to a central location for analysis, grouping and reporting. Once an issue has been identified, help will be available on how to resolve a particular issue or create a workaround. Furthermore, partners and customers using ACT are able to post comments to the Online Application Community, where they can share data and information about application compatibility testing.

The IE components of ACT are:

Internet Explorer Compatibility Test Tool (IECTT). The IECTT helps identify your Web-based issues, shows your results in real time, and allows you to upload and view the data in the Application Compatibility Manager (ACM), a part of the ACT toolkit. As you test your application or site, the IECTT records events in real time when compatibility issues occur. For instance, if one of your sites injects JavaScript to another site and the IE8 Cross-site scripting (XSS) filter detects this as a reflection attack, a Cross-Site Scripting Filter event would be logged in the IECTT UI.
Internet Explorer Compatibility Evaluators (IECE). The IECE can be deployed within an enterprise and will help identify Web-based issues in the background. As you test your application or site, the IECE records events in the background as they occur. You will be able to view the logged events in the ACM after you upload them.

Overall, these tools help customers lower their costs for application compatibility testing, prioritize their applications, and deploy Internet Explorer more quickly.

The work flow for identifying application compatibility issues before rolling out a new version of IE8 is shown below:

Install the latest version of ACT and IE8.
Either deploy the IECE to a body of testers or use the IECTT and enable logging.
Begin a regression test pass of all line of business applications and sites.
Once a compatibility event has been encountered, diagnose the problem and create a suitable workaround or fix.

New Application Compatibility Events added in IE8

We added logging for twelve new Application Compatibility Events in IE8, as shown in the table below. Including the IE7 events, we now currently log 31 compatibility events. The Internet Explorer Compatibility article contains more information on these events.

New IE8 Event Name	Event ID
Cross-Site Scripting Filter	1046
Intranet at Medium Integrity Level	1047
DEP/NX Crash Recovery	1048
Standards Mode	1049
File Name Restriction	1056
Codepage Sniffing	1058
AJAX Navigation	1059
Application Protocol	1061
Windows Reuse Navigation Restriction	1062
MIME Sniffing Restrictions - no IMAGE elevation to HTML	1064
Web Proxy Error Handling Changes	1065
Certificate Filtering	1073

Internet Explorer Application Compatibility article

In the past, we noticed that the ACT tool helped identify the compatibility issues that occur in a line of business application or website, however, the tool itself did not provide any guidance for remediation. In IE8, we are providing a resource that gives exactly that information. The article is linked directly in the IECTT logged message or is directly available here. The article covers the following topics for all IE7 and IE8 compatibility events:

Logged Message – This is a copy of the event description that you’ll see in the Internet Explorer Compatibility Test Tool.
What is it? – This is an elaboration of the logged message explaining what the event is. Additional references are provided when available.
When is this event logged? – This is a short description of what has to happen in your Web page for this event to be logged in the Internet Explorer Compatibility Test Tool.
Example – Most events include examples that demonstrate how to make the corresponding event create a log entry in the Internet Explorer Compatibility Test Tool. These examples help make the description of the event more concrete.
Remediation – Guidance on what you can do to eliminate the incompatibility from your Web site.

We will be adding additional examples and remediation to this article before the final IE8 release.

As you can see, we refined our Application Compatibility logging in IE8 and have provided a useful resource in the IE Application Compatibility article. We look forward to you trying it out and giving us feedback in the IE newsgroups.

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The IE8 IEAK

nzie8 — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:15:33 GMT

Hi All,

Back in June, James Pratt and Jane Maliouta alluded to IEAK improvements for IE8. Today, I will be talking about the work we have done in this area.

Internet Explorer Administration Kit 8 Beta

IEAK8 Beta is now available publically for everyone to try. To give you some background, the IEAK allows you to deploy customized packages and manage IE settings post deployment within corporations and among Internet Content Providers (ICP) and Internet Service Providers (ISP). For instance, Acme Corp could use IEAK to create a custom IE package for their employees that has Acme favorites, search providers, home pages, Web Slices, Accelerators, and more.

We simplified creating, deploying and managing branded IE packages. We optimized the IEAK to help you build your customized IE packages more quickly and to allow you to configure and customize new features in Internet Explorer 8, like Accelerators and Web Slices.

In this post, I will be talking about how the IEAK:

Helps customize new features in IE8
Provides full language and platform support
Builds IE8 packages more quickly and is more intuitive.

Customize New Features in IE8

The following new features can be now customized via the IEAK8:

Accelerators

You can easily include custom defaults for Accelerators: simply point to an XML file for the desired Accelerator, or import existing Accelerators from a local machine.

Web Slices

In the Favorites, Favorites Bar and Feeds dialog you can now add custom Web Slices by simply clicking on the Web Slice radio button and specifying the Web Slice information.

Compatibility View

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 introduces Compatibility View which is a significant enhancement over the “Emulate IE7” functionality from IE8 Beta 1. You can customize this feature in the Compatibility view dialog.

Search Enhancements

IE8 supports search providers which offer rich text and image suggestions; through IEAK 8 you can add search providers with suggestions and configure default search providers.

Additional IE8 Features

Many other IE8 features, like InPrivate Browsing, Developer Tools and Delete Browsing History, can be customized in the Additional Settings page available in the corporate license mode. For example, in a corporate environment you might want to encourage users to delete saved passwords; you can chose to have the Delete Passwords checkbox in Delete Browsing History checked by default. Similarly, you may want to turn off InPrivate Browsing mode by default.

Build Your IE8 Package More Quickly

Internet Explorer 8 Customization Wizard has fewer pages than the Internet Explorer 7 Customization Wizard: you’ll be able to build your customized package faster now.

Furthermore, we have redesigned some screens to simplify the overall flow of the wizard. Custom Components is a good example of this. Compared to the original screen, this dialog box now displays a list of custom components and allows easy addition and removal of items through a pop-up window.

The IEAK7 Custom Components Screen:

The simplified IEAK8 Custom Components Screen:

Full Language and Platform support

The IEAK8 Beta can build IE8 packages for all platforms and 24 languages supported by IE8 Beta 2. Please refer to the blog posted titled IE8 Beta 2 Available in 25 Languages for a complete list of supported platforms and languages.

How does the IEAK apply branding?

Customers have often asked me how the IEAK applies branding to IE. Branding in this case can be defined as any customization of IE, including all the customizations mentioned above. The IEAK generated IE package contains both the IE8 setup files (unless you are using the configuration only package, in which case IE8 would already be installed on your computer and you wouldn’t need the setup files) and customizations. The IE8 setup is used to install IE8. Upon restart, customizations are applied per user to the registry and branding files.

The customizations are stored in the install.ins file found under the Custom or Signup folders in the Internet Explorer directory. The install.ins file contains all types of branding including IEAK and unattend branding. IEAK branding consists of ISP, ICP and corporate branding, while unattend branding consists of the manufacturer defaults.

Branding is also applied when the user chooses to Reset Internet Explorer settings (RIES). This can be done by selecting Reset under the Advanced tab in the internet options dialog. RIES will apply the branding found in the install.ins file. If a user were to remove the install.ins file and reset IE, the branding step would get skipped. In IE8, RIES comes with a Remove Branding option; however, this option only removes ISP, ICP and Corporate branding; unattend branding will not be removed.

We refined the IEAK in this release and look forward to your feedback once you’ve had a chance to try it out.

NB: James discusses what's new in IE8 for IT Pros in his screencast here

Source

Introducing the IE8 Developer Tools JScript Profiler

nzie8 — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 01:37:55 GMT

The recently released Beta 2 of Internet Explorer 8 contains a lot of improvements which are aimed at making developing web applications on Internet Explorer 8 easier and more productive. One of these improvements is the JScript Profiler in Developer Tools, which provides critical JScript related performance data to a web developer that helps identify and fix performance related issues. We believe the Profiler is going to be a very helpful tool to fine tune the performance of the scripts in a web application. It is lightweight, easy-to-use and provides the following features:

Provides performance data for JScript functions in two views:
- Functions View – a flat listing of all the functions
- Call Tree view – a hierarchical listing of the functions based on the call flow
Supports exporting the data to a file
Provides an inferred name for anonymous functions
Profiles built-in JScript functions
Supports multiple profile reports
Supports profiling across page navigation and refreshes

This post gives an overview of the Profiler and highlights some of its features. We hope you will try it out and give us your feedback.

Using the Profiler

Launch the Developer Tools in Internet Explorer 8 either by pressing F12 or selecting ‘Developer Tools’ from the Tools dropdown on the command bar. Switch to the Profiler Tab, and you can see the new Script Profiler. Click the ‘Start Profiling’ button to begin a new profiling session.

Now, you can perform the scenario you want to profile, and JScript performance data will be collected by the profiler automatically in the background. Note that the text of the button changes to ‘Stop Profiling’ to indicate profiling is going on. To stop profiling, click the ‘Stop Profiling’ button. The profiler will process the collected performance data and display a profile report for the session just concluded.

Viewing the Profile Report

The report presents the data in two views which can be selected from the Current View dropdown:

Functions view: This is a flat listing of all the functions with the corresponding performance data.
Call Tree view: This is a hierarchical listing of the functions based on the call execution sequence. Each node corresponds to a function and lists all the functions it called and the performance data for those calls. The Call Tree view is useful in finding the call stack trace that has the greatest performance impact in your script.

In both views, each row corresponds to a JScript function, with the various performance data in different columns. The view can be customized to show different columns. Right-click a column header and select ‘Add / Remove Columns’ to select the columns you want to view.

You can sort on any of the columns by clicking the corresponding column headers or by selecting the column from the ‘Sort By’ menu items in the right-click context menu.

The available columns are:

Function: The name of the function
Count: The total number of calls made to this function
Inclusive Time (ms): The time spent in this function and its children in milliseconds
Inclusive Time %: The percentage of time spent in this function and its children
Exclusive Time (ms): The time spent in this function in milliseconds
Exclusive Time %: The percentage of time spent in this function
Avg Time (ms): The average time spent in this function and its children in milliseconds
Max Time (ms): The maximum time spent in this function and its children in milliseconds
Min Time (ms): The minimum time spent in this function and its children in milliseconds
URL: The URL of the source file where this function is defined
Line Number: The line number of the beginning of this function in the source file

Double-click a row to view the source code definition of the corresponding function in the Script Tab. This is available only if the performance data collects the URL information and the source file is currently loaded in the Script Tab. You need to enable script debugging in Internet Explorer for the profiler to collect the URL information. [Note: You can enable script debugging from the Tools > Internet Options > Advanced Tab.]

Exporting Data

Sometimes, we may want to analyze the profile report further, create graphs, or share it with another application. To facilitate this, the Profiler allows the data to be exported to a file in a Comma Separated Values (CSV) format. The data can then be opened in other applications (like Microsoft® Office Excel®) and can be shared. Simply click the ‘Export Data’ button and give a filename to save the profile data of the current report to a file. Note that presently only the Functions view is exported and not the Call Tree view.

Inferred name

In Javascript, the function name is optional. You can define a function (called anonymous function) with no name. In practice, this is quite common. Many real-world Javascript functions are defined in the context of an object literal, and more often than not, these are anonymous. This presents a problem in the profile report. When we have multiple anonymous entries, the only way to differentiate the anonymous functions is to look up the actual source definition of the functions from the URL and Line number information. This is far from being convenient and makes the profile report hard to read and confusing.

To overcome this problem, the JScript profiler tries to infer a name for each anonymous function based on the context where the function is defined. Let me illustrate how this works with the following example:

var Shape = {
Area : function () { . . . } // anonymous function 1
};
Foo = function () { . . . } // anonymous function 2

When we profile this code, these functions will show up in the report as “Area” and “Foo” respectively, instead of both being listed as anonymous functions. This way, you can quickly identify which function is being referred to in the profile report without having to open the source code. The heuristic logic used to infer the name is simple enough to limit the performance overhead. In some cases, this might fail to infer a name, in which case, the function is listed with the special name “[Anonymous]”.

We hope the profiler comes handy when improving Javascript performance of your web applications in Internet Explorer.

Source