Those of you who have downloaded IE7 Beta or Beta 2 knows that IE7 actually makes life more difficult for you as a Gadget developer. This is because previous builds of IE7 has very strict cross-domain XMLHttpRequest restrictions, so you will not be able to run your Gadget while hosting it on localhost. That's actually one of the reasons why I ended up uninstalling IE7 on my developer box.

Here is the good news: I have spoken with the IE team recently, and they have confirmed that the cross-domain XMLHttpRequest restriction model has been reverted to the same model as IE6 since they shipped the last public Beta. So Gadget developers will be able to continue to debug and test their Gadgets while having it hosted locally. I think this is really good news for Gadget developers and I am excited to share this news with you!

- James Lau