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Posts about IE9:

How to turn your SharePoint site into a native app with 5 lines of code

The web has changed and things have moved on, not really a shock, but the evolution of the latest web browsers is changing things.  In particular Internet Explorer 9 allows you to take any site you see on the web and turn it into a native application by simply dragging a tab down to the task bar.  If you think that pinning a site isn’t overly useful consider some of the stats that the process drives, Huffington post drove views by users visiting their site through pinning up by 11%…now translate that to your SharePoint site, your intranet.  Your users could be finding more stuff through the intranet, saving them some time.  The cost? a few lines of simple code.

What you need to do

Rather obviously I’m only going to describe the steps for SharePoint 2010, you can probably work them out for other versions just fine.

Open your SharePoint site using SharePoint designer (you’ll need to get SharePoint designer from here if you don’t already have it) and open your site.  Then you’ll need to:

  1. Select Master Pages from the left Site Object pane
  2. Select the v4.master document and check it out to change it
  3. Select the code view
  4. Enter the code, which you’ll see listed below the picture.

How to turn your SharePoint site into a native app with 5 lines of code

So this is the code you need to enter and it needs to go within the <head> and </head> tags, I’d suggest placing this code towards the end of the HTML header. 

  1. <meta name="application-name" content="Fourth Coffee Intranet" />
  2. <meta name="msapplication-tooltip" content="All the latest info @ 4th" />
  3. <meta name="msapplication-window" content="width=1200;height=600" />
  4. <meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=Main Page;action-uri=http://sharepoint;icon-uri=http://sharepoint/SiteAssets/SitePages/Home/4th.ico"" /
  5. <meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=FAST Search;action-uri=http://sharepoint/fast;icon-uri=http://sharepoint/SiteAssets/SitePages/Home/4th.ico"" />
  6. <meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=My Site;action-uri=http://sharepoint/my;icon-uri=http://sharepoint/SiteAssets/SitePages/Home/4th.ico" />

Now that you know where it goes, lets walk through the code, line by line to understand what it does.

  1. We provide a name for the application, all Windows apps need something to identify them after all
  2. We configure a tool tip that will appear when hovering over the pinned icon before it’s launched
  3. We setup the size of the window when it initially opens
  4. Now for the meat, lines 1 to 3 are enough to be able to pin the app, but it’s time to do something more…  Jump lists! that increased page usage involves having fast access to pages from jump lists, so in lines 4-6 we configure the Jump lists.  Lets break down the line:
  • meta name="msapplication-task" tells IE that we’re defining a jump list item.
  • content="name=Main Page;  tells IE what to name the jump list item, the user sees this.
  • action-uri=http://sharepoint; tells IE what address the jump list points to.
  • icon-uri=http://sharepoint/SiteAssets/SitePages/Home/4th.ico tells IE what icon to use for the jump list item….ahh we’re into favicons…

You will also need to create a favicon, I use icoFX which is free and can take a normal image and turn it into an ico file.  You’ll also want to do the same thing to create a nice custom icon for the SharePoint site, so simply do that and ensure you save it with a 256×256 pixel size.  Finally to make this icon the favicon for your site you’ll need to edit one more line…

<SharePoint:SPShortcutIcon runat=”server” IconUrl=”xxxx”>

Here you need to change the IconUrl value to be the location of the new favicon on your SharePoint server, this will be the same icon that is used on the toolbar and in the top left of the browser window.

Going further

In a future post I’ll show you how to take this simple code and do more with it, isolate it from browsers that don’t support it and create overlays of the icon on the task bar to show you there new things.

How to turn your SharePoint site into a native app with 5 lines of code

IE9 will control who can track you

IE9 will control who can track you

When you hit a web page you send lots of requests to lots of places to get all the content for the page be it images, scripts embedded videos or adverts.  When that request happens the people who you’re requesting that stuff from also get to learn what you’re viewing when you send the request…that’s how you get adverts specific to what you’re looking at (or have looked at) and sometimes specific to your location.  Being a tech savvy TechNet reader you probably know that, but do the users in your organisation?

It’s a guess but some possible do, most probably don’t.  Why would it matter that someone serves up an advert to someone in your organisation based on what they’re looking at?  Well generally it wouldn’t but they also get information about your browsing habits and (if one were to don a conspiracy theorists hat) one might say that it was possible to gain intelligence about what your company were considering doing.  For example if a job advert site found that lots of your employees were browsing for new roles a week before you announced your profit and loss would that or could that be used to imply financial uncertainty at your company and therefore affect the stock price?  It’s a way out there but it could happen.

Internet Explorer 9 will have features to help you manage this type of risk and a couple of days ago we announced something new, Tracking Protection.  In essence this means that you can define a list of sites that you only want to send information to if you EXPLICITY visit them (or you can subscribe to a list of sites so you don’t have to micromanage it).  By explicitly visit I mean if you click a link to a site or if you type the site into the address bar.   Practically this will result in you seeing less advertising and lower the risk of phishing attacks or other types of attacks that haven’t even been thought of yet occurring.

It’s another example of the exceptionally high level of innovation in the IE team that the moment.  We had something similar in IE 8 with InPrivate Filtering which was dynamic and based on heuristics (or learned behaviour) but, whilst it’s pretty darn good, the end user experience can be unpredictable and you couldn’t control it.  Tracking Protection will bring the ability to subscribe to multiple RSS based tracking filter lists and as a result nothing stops you from defining a corporate one and layering it over a public one.

You can read more on the feature at the IE blog but you should be giving IE9 a try now in your test environments (hint moving to IE9 is going to be a cinch!)

IE9 will control who can track you

Internet Explorer 9: the most standards compliant browser on the block – a post by Simon May

Internet Explorer 9: the most standards compliant browser on the block a post by Simon May

I have to say I was very pleasantly surprised to read this post on el reg that highlights that IE9 is currently the most standards compliant beta browser on the block.  I’m really proud of the work the IE9 team is doing to nail the the things that were previously levelled at Internet Explorer for being a “bad browser”.  IE8 brought stellar levels of security and privacy, preventing your company data from being shared with people outside your company…like your search provider.  IE9 is building upon that and nailing the standards debate.  Reading this, you probably don’t believe me though…

…. So here’s the proof.

Internet Explorer 9: the most standards compliant browser on the block a post by Simon May

The W3C HTML 5 Test Suite tests to see how well browsers render HTML5 elements, it’s not all inclusive of the spec (probably because the spec’s not final) but the results are none the less interesting.  IE9 is showing promise as the most compliant browser in beta, but it’s an interesting idea being more standards compliant than than everyone else…it shows that the IE9 team are striking the path that lots of people have wished them to follow for a long time.  It’s also another marker of how innovative the team is being, other markers being OneBox, Chakra, Tab pinning to name a few.

The real winner with standards is that it allows developers to create just one beautiful website and have it render in exactly the same way everywhere.  It seems that for that dream to become reality there’s some catching up to do by others for a change. 

What’s becoming more and more clear is that Internet Explorer 9 is going to be a must for most businesses, security, reliability, standards, ease of use and not only that but there’s update and settings management built in at the core not just as an afterthought with a few settings that can be centrally managed.

It’s nice to be able to leave you with this final thought, expressed through the wonder of the WC3 test harness:

Internet Explorer 9: the most standards compliant browser on the block a post by Simon May

 

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Internet Explorer 9: the most standards compliant browser on the block a post by Simon May

Internet Explorer 9 – the most standards compliant browser on the block

I have to say I was very pleasantly surprised to read this post on el reg that highlights that IE9 is currently the most standards compliant beta browser on the block.  I’m really proud of the work the IE9 team is doing to nail the the things that were previously levelled at Internet Explorer for being a “bad browser”.  IE8 brought stellar levels of security and privacy, preventing your company data from being shared with people outside your company…like your search provider.  IE9 is building upon that and nailing the standards debate.  Reading this, you probably don’t believe me though…

…. So here’s the proof.

Internet Explorer 9 the most standards compliant browser on the block

The W3C HTML 5 Test Suite tests to see how well browsers render HTML5 elements, it’s not all inclusive of the spec (probably because the spec’s not final) but the results are none the less interesting.  IE9 is showing promise as the most compliant browser in beta, but it’s an interesting idea being more standards compliant than than everyone else…it shows that the IE9 team are striking the path that lots of people have wished them to follow for a long time.  It’s also another marker of how innovative the team is being, other markers being OneBox, Chakra, Tab pinning to name a few.

The real winner with standards is that it allows developers to create just one beautiful website and have it render in exactly the same way everywhere.  It seems that for that dream to become reality there’s some catching up to do by others for a change. 

What’s becoming more and more clear is that Internet Explorer 9 is going to be a must for most businesses, security, reliability, standards, ease of use and not only that but there’s update and settings management built in at the core not just as an afterthought with a few settings that can be centrally managed.

It’s nice to be able to leave you with this final thought, expressed through the wonder of the WC3 test harness:

Internet Explorer 9 the most standards compliant browser on the block

Internet Explorer 9 the most standards compliant browser on the block

PDC10 for the IT Professional – the view from #ukpdc10

Thanks to Simon May for writing this post and being as bouncy as ever the morning after UKPDC10, when the rest of us are just about managing to operate at all. You can also read this post on Simon’s blog.

PDC10 for the IT Professional – the view from #ukpdc10

I love it when we put on a good show, geeks, streams, quizzes, phones and most importantly TECH!  Last night we played host to a whole bunch of people at the Microsoft Campus in Reading who all left happy (twitter says so #ukpdc10) and who all learnt some new stuff about Azure, Windows Phone 7, and IE9.  There were some stonking announcements on the HD feed from Redmond given by a Steve Ballmer, and Bob Muglia and special guest stars like Pixar studios and Buzz Light-year.  This was a developer conference so what’s important to the IT Pro in what was announced?

Windows Azure

TIP: If you don’t know what Azure is yet jump to my blog and subscribe where I’ll be explaining it next week but…

Windows Azure is true PaaS self scale-able (elastic) computing that grows and shrinks as the application needs to.  At PDC10 we announced new Virtual Machine(VM) role which is a rock star move because with the VM role you can move an existing application to the cloud.  How is such a feat achieved?  Simple, take your application, install it on Windows 2008 R2 and take an image to a VHD file (super easy if you’re using Hyper-V ‘cos you already have the file) then copy-and-paste to file to the cloud server.  With this new VM role you can do pretty much what you want, run the services you want and run scheduled tasks if you want to.  Because it’s your server in the cloud you get to be the race car driver, make the decisions and be involved in the engineering process.  I can’t stress how excited this role makes me as an IT Professional…but it gets even better.

Next your the VM role will be able to take your Windows 2003 Servers (but do yourself a favour and go to 2008 R2, you might as well) and you’ll be able to build the VMs in the cloud rather than just on premise.

The Web Role gets the enhancement of full features IIS, meaning that one role can run multiple sites and you can install IIS modules…oh yeah and management becomes familiar with Remote Desktop (RDP) and by elevating privileges you can do more complex deployments.  So it’s now possible to install MSI files on a web role for example.  By the way the PDC site and even Channel 9 are running on Azure.

The announcement of Windows Azure Connect means you can plumb Windows Azure into your internal network.  That’s right you can domain join your Azure server roles so it’s just like it’s on premise, in your private data centre.  Just by way of an example that means you could deploy your Intranet site to a Web Role or your expenses application to a VM Role and bosh it’s just there…you can probably use the VM Role to poke a DC up there too!  It’s all done using familiar IP networking and VPN like connections.  That sounds like a job for the IT Professional to me.  Next year will bring SSL/TLS encryption for the pipes and Dynamic content caching so less stuff goes over the pipes (a bit like branch cache for the cloud) and a build out of the networking infrastructure.

Azure Licensing can be seen as too costly for some people so we’ve downsized!  There’s a new Extra Small instance that costs just $0.05 per hour for a 1Ghz CPU, 768MB RAM and 20GB of storage…that sounds like the perfect kit to base my first instance on of an elastic application.  All the Windows Azure Roles are Compute Instances and so are charged the same.  There’s no CAL requirement to connect to an Azure VM role (awesome) and the Azure role license is covered through the compute costs…making it as cheap as (silicone) chips!

It’s all about to go Beta and we at UK TechNet will let you know when we drop the beta bomb.

So IT Pro’s need to skill up on:

  • Server 2008 R2
  • Hyper-V
  • IP
  • IIS7

You’ll be wanting to Azure to get your head around it…trials are included as part of your MSDN subscription too.

SQL Azure

Community Technology Previews were announced for a bunch of new features including Reporting so reports can be authored using SQL Services Reporting tools and embedded in the database.  Data Sync CTP 2 can sync databases across datacentres and with the data on your premises in your own SQL Server.  That means you can have multiple geo-redundant SQL database or even just keep the data closest to the people who need it.  So say you have your business has 10 people in Japan, 10 people in Europe and 100 people data mining in India the guys in Japan and Europe can access the DB from SQL Azure from their fastest local DC and the guys in India receive a “caching” effect of having the data sync to their local SQL Server saving on the cost of the main Internet pipe to the office.

The lightweight Database Manager formerly known as “Houston” (stunning Siverlight based app if you have  a look) has entered CTP too and will become part of the developer portal.

DBAs and IT Pros doing SQL stuff need to skill up on:

  • not a whole lot…but if you aren’t on SQL 2008 you need to nail that.

You’ll be wanting to Try SQL Azure to get your head around it…trials are included as part of your MSDN subscription too.

IE9

Platform Preview 6 of Internet Explorer 9 was introduced at PDC10 and whilst the Beta is out and has rocked 10 million downloads already PP6 is important.  It’s what you need to run to assess your stuff against IE9 whilst still using IE8 – which is exactly what you need to do right now, you’d don’t want to be deploying Beta code (even if it’s awesome) to your user base.  There’s not a huge amount of IT Professional stuff in IE9 just yet, but this video (which is HTML5 by the way if your browser is capable) shows off the new platform preview and IE Test Drive Site.

Windows Phone 7

Oh boy was there a lot of love in the room for this last night.  We gave a couple away, more devs came with their own phones…everyone loved them!

You might not know who Scott Guthrie is but he’s a demo-god, dev-god and he’s famed for his red shirts.  He live built a Windows Phone 7 app that dynamically searches eBay using odata to help you buy red shirts…it took about 5 minutes.  Do that on another mobile device.

We’ve only just released the phone so there were no new announcements other than the inclusion of oData.  I’ll be releasing some info on how WP7 can be used by business and by IT Pros next week so stay tuned to my blog.

Summary

I’m excited by the VM Role, it adds a whole new dimension to Azure, Windows Phone 7 is amazing and the developer experience, just like the user experience is 2nd to none , IE9 is beautifying the web for 10 million people already.  Oh yeah, we also had a Kinect at the event and this is what people had to say about it (#nowhereneardeadyet!):

@pauliom: Trying to decide what to concentrate on after #ukpdc10. Better wp7 storage/tombstoning, tfs in azure, rx, or getting an xbox kinect? about 5 hours ago via TweetStation

@pauliom: RT @mtaulty: I only played with kinect at #ukpdc10 tonight for 5 minutes and it won me over - seems just as natural as it looks on the demos. about 5 hours ago via MetroTwit

@JonAlb: Thanks to all organisers of #ukpdc10 a fantastic evening PDC10 for the IT Professional – the view from #ukpdc10 just two requests... can I have a phone and can I have an xbox kinect? about 14 hours ago via MetroTwit

@ajnt: Xbox Kinect is amazing! Great idea having it at #UKPDC10. 3d person tracking including face recognition. 10th November UK launch. about 14 hours ago via web

@JonAlb: playing on the xbox kinect was very cool, the ping pong game (wiff waff) was ace! you REALLY get into it, realistic tennis elbow! #Ukpdc10 about 14 hours ago via MetroTwit

@GrahamWilmott: #ukpdc10 just played with #kinect about 15 hours ago via HTC Peep

s@tack72: RT @simonster: can I just ask, who at #ukpdc10 thinks Kinect is AWESOME? about 16 hours ago via MetroTwit

@gthevenot: OK Microsoft, no free #WP7 at #ukpdc10, what about free #kinect then ? about 16 hours ago via web

@brandondjmurphy: Remember when wii was first released. Triple that and double that and you will come close to the kinect experience #ukpdc10 about 17 hours ago via Mobile Web

@Paul_Dunscombe: Playing with kinect. Looks like a wii killer. #ukpdc10 about 17 hours ago via Tweets60

@westleyl: Noooooo, our beer .. RT @petemill: Finally made it to #ukpdc10 - helping myself to beer. Played with the kinect. Recognition is incredbile! about 17 hours ago via Seesmic for Android

@CLaueR: RT @petemill: Finally made it to #ukpdc10 - helping myself to beer. Played with the kinect. Recognition is incredbile! Bowling arm hurts about 17 hours ago via Twitter for Windows Phone

@petemill: Finally made it to #ukpdc10 - helping myself to beer. Played with the kinect. Recognition is incredbile! Bowling arm hurts about 17 hours ago via Twitter for Windows Phonef

@blakepender: SB: Kinect is remarkable! Talking about it being great PDC10 for the IT Professional – the view from #ukpdc10 #ukpdc10 about 19 hours ago via txt

@pauliom: At #ukpdc10 as a backing dancer to lady gaga apparently #kinect making a t1t of myself about 20 hours ago via TweetStation

@brandondjmurphy: At #ukpdc10, impressed with the kinect. about 20 hours ago via Mobile Web

@johanbarnard: #UKPDC10. Dance Central on #Kinect http://twitpic.com/31lul4

PDC10 for the IT Professional – the view from #ukpdc10

PDC10 for the IT Professional – the view from #ukpdc10

PDC10 for the IT Professional – the view from #ukpdc10

I love it when we put on a good show, geeks, streams, quizzes, phones and most importantly TECH!  Last night we played host to a whole bunch of people at the Microsoft Campus in Reading who all left happy (twitter says so #ukpdc10) and who all learnt some new stuff about Azure, Windows Phone 7, and IE9.  There were some stonking announcements on the HD feed from Redmond given by a Steve Ballmer, and Bob Muglia and special guest stars like Pixar studios and Buzz Light-year.  This was a developer conference so what’s important to the IT Pro in what was announced?

Windows Azure

TIP: If you don’t know what Azure is yet jump to my blog and subscribe where I’ll be explaining it next week but…

Windows Azure is true PaaS self scale-able (elastic) computing that grows and shrinks as the application needs to.  At PDC10 we announced new Virtual Machine(VM) role which is a rock star move because with the VM role you can move an existing application to the cloud.  How is such a feat achieved?  Simple, take your application, install it on Windows 2008 R2 and take an image to a VHD file (super easy if you’re using Hyper-V ‘cos you already have the file) then copy-and-paste to file to the cloud server.  With this new VM role you can do pretty much what you want, run the services you want and run scheduled tasks if you want to.  Because it’s your server in the cloud you get to be the race car driver, make the decisions and be involved in the engineering process.  I can’t stress how excited this role makes me as an IT Professional…but it gets even better.

Next your the VM role will be able to take your Windows 2003 Servers (but do yourself a favour and go to 2008 R2, you might as well) and you’ll be able to build the VMs in the cloud rather than just on premise.

The Web Role gets the enhancement of full features IIS, meaning that one role can run multiple sites and you can install IIS modules…oh yeah and management becomes familiar with Remote Desktop (RDP) and by elevating privileges you can do more complex deployments.  So it’s now possible to install MSI files on a web role for example.  By the way the PDC site and even Channel 9 are running on Azure.

The announcement of Windows Azure Connect means you can plumb Windows Azure into your internal network.  That’s right you can domain join your Azure server roles so it’s just like it’s on premise, in your private data centre.  Just by way of an example that means you could deploy your Intranet site to a Web Role or your expenses application to a VM Role and bosh it’s just there…you can probably use the VM Role to poke a DC up there too!  It’s all done using familiar IP networking and VPN like connections.  That sounds like a job for the IT Professional to me.  Next year will bring SSL/TLS encryption for the pipes and Dynamic content caching so less stuff goes over the pipes (a bit like branch cache for the cloud) and a build out of the networking infrastructure.

Azure Licensing can be seen as too costly for some people so we’ve downsized!  There’s a new Extra Small instance that costs just $0.05 per hour for a 1Ghz CPU, 768MB RAM and 20GB of storage…that sounds like the perfect kit to base my first instance on of an elastic application.  All the Windows Azure Roles are Compute Instances and so are charged the same.  There’s no CAL requirement to connect to an Azure VM role (awesome) and the Azure role license is covered through the compute costs…making it as cheap as (silicone) chips!

It’s all about to go Beta and we at UK TechNet will let you know when we drop the beta bomb.

So IT Pro’s need to skill up on:

  • Server 2008 R2
  • Hyper-V
  • IP
  • IIS7

You’ll be wanting to Azure to get your head around it…trials are included as part of your MSDN subscription too.

SQL Azure

Community Technology Previews were announced for a bunch of new features including Reporting so reports can be authored using SQL Services Reporting tools and embedded in the database.  Data Sync CTP 2 can sync databases across datacentres and with the data on your premises in your own SQL Server.  That means you can have multiple geo-redundant SQL database or even just keep the data closest to the people who need it.  So say you have your business has 10 people in Japan, 10 people in Europe and 100 people data mining in India the guys in Japan and Europe can access the DB from SQL Azure from their fastest local DC and the guys in India receive a “caching” effect of having the data sync to their local SQL Server saving on the cost of the main Internet pipe to the office.

The lightweight Database Manager formerly known as “Houston” (stunning Siverlight based app if you have  a look) has entered CTP too and will become part of the developer portal.

DBAs and IT Pros doing SQL stuff need to skill up on:

  • not a whole lot…but if you aren’t on SQL 2008 you need to nail that.

You’ll be wanting to Try SQL Azure to get your head around it…trials are included as part of your MSDN subscription too.

IE9

Platform Preview 6 of Internet Explorer 9 was introduced at PDC10 and whilst the Beta is out and has rocked 10 million downloads already PP6 is important.  It’s what you need to run to assess your stuff against IE9 whilst still using IE8 – which is exactly what you need to do right now, you’d don’t want to be deploying Beta code (even if it’s awesome) to your user base.  There’s not a huge amount of IT Professional stuff in IE9 just yet, but this video (which is HTML5 by the way if your browser is capable) shows off the new platform preview and IE Test Drive Site.

Windows Phone 7

Oh boy was there a lot of love in the room for this last night.  We gave a couple away, more devs came with their own phones…everyone loved them!

You might not know who Scott Guthrie is but he’s a demo-god, dev-god and he’s famed for his red shirts.  He live built a Windows Phone 7 app that dynamically searches eBay using odata to help you buy red shirts…it took about 5 minutes.  Do that on another mobile device.

We’ve only just released the phone so there were no new announcements other than the inclusion of oData.  I’ll be releasing some info on how WP7 can be used by business and by IT Pros next week so stay tuned to my blog.

Summary

I’m excited by the VM Role, it adds a whole new dimension to Azure, Windows Phone 7 is amazing and the developer experience, just like the user experience is 2nd to none , IE9 is beautifying the web for 10 million people already.  Oh yeah, we also had a Kinect at the event and this is what people had to say about it (#nowhereneardeadyet!):

@pauliom: Trying to decide what to concentrate on after #ukpdc10. Better wp7 storage/tombstoning, tfs in azure, rx, or getting an xbox kinect? about 5 hours ago via TweetStation

@pauliom: RT @mtaulty: I only played with kinect at #ukpdc10 tonight for 5 minutes and it won me over - seems just as natural as it looks on the demos. about 5 hours ago via MetroTwit

@JonAlb: Thanks to all organisers of #ukpdc10 a fantastic evening PDC10 for the IT Professional – the view from #ukpdc10 just two requests... can I have a phone and can I have an xbox kinect? about 14 hours ago via MetroTwit

@ajnt: Xbox Kinect is amazing! Great idea having it at #UKPDC10. 3d person tracking including face recognition. 10th November UK launch. about 14 hours ago via web

@JonAlb: playing on the xbox kinect was very cool, the ping pong game (wiff waff) was ace! you REALLY get into it, realistic tennis elbow! #Ukpdc10 about 14 hours ago via MetroTwit

@GrahamWilmott: #ukpdc10 just played with #kinect about 15 hours ago via HTC Peep

s@tack72: RT @simonster: can I just ask, who at #ukpdc10 thinks Kinect is AWESOME? about 16 hours ago via MetroTwit

@gthevenot: OK Microsoft, no free #WP7 at #ukpdc10, what about free #kinect then ? about 16 hours ago via web

@brandondjmurphy: Remember when wii was first released. Triple that and double that and you will come close to the kinect experience #ukpdc10 about 17 hours ago via Mobile Web

@Paul_Dunscombe: Playing with kinect. Looks like a wii killer. #ukpdc10 about 17 hours ago via Tweets60

@westleyl: Noooooo, our beer .. RT @petemill: Finally made it to #ukpdc10 - helping myself to beer. Played with the kinect. Recognition is incredbile! about 17 hours ago via Seesmic for Android

@CLaueR: RT @petemill: Finally made it to #ukpdc10 - helping myself to beer. Played with the kinect. Recognition is incredbile! Bowling arm hurts about 17 hours ago via Twitter for Windows Phone

@petemill: Finally made it to #ukpdc10 - helping myself to beer. Played with the kinect. Recognition is incredbile! Bowling arm hurts about 17 hours ago via Twitter for Windows Phonef

@blakepender: SB: Kinect is remarkable! Talking about it being great PDC10 for the IT Professional – the view from #ukpdc10 #ukpdc10 about 19 hours ago via txt

@pauliom: At #ukpdc10 as a backing dancer to lady gaga apparently #kinect making a t1t of myself about 20 hours ago via TweetStation

@brandondjmurphy: At #ukpdc10, impressed with the kinect. about 20 hours ago via Mobile Web

@johanbarnard: #UKPDC10. Dance Central on #Kinect http://twitpic.com/31lul4

PDC10 for the IT Professional – the view from #ukpdc10

IT Pros and IE9 what should you do

IT Pros and IE9 what should you do

There’s a lot going on with Internet Explorer at the moment with the IE9 Beta having just launched and you might be wondering what the best course of action is for your business.  Well we just published some guidance on what to do, but I’ll summarise it for you.  Roll out the Windows Optimized Desktop: Windows 7 with IE 8, Office 2010 and Silverlight using the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) to help.

What you shouldn’t do is wait for Internet Explorer 9 or delay your rollout in any way.  Why? 

Because your business will loose out in the short term when it could be making strides in efficiency.  And everyone* loves Windows 7 as this lifehacker poll shows.  And also, there will always be v-next.

Internet Explorer 8 is a great browser for the corporate desktop, it’s secure, it’s manageable and it’s really easy to roll out.  It will also be easy to move to IE9 when you have IE8 rolled out and we’ll have tools when we go to full release to help with that migration and additional group policy settings to help with management.  I’m reminded of iconic “Don’t Panic, Carry on” posters, mugs and other tut.

That said, evaluate everything with IE9 starting now – there’s no need to wait to make sure stuff works, like your intranet sites, it’s a pay it forward exercise.  Get to know HTML5 and other improvements and if you need to test sites along side IE8 then you can use the Platform Preview (version 5 was released at the same time as Beta)

*everyone is hyperbole but most people do

IT Pros and IE9 what should you do

Twitter.com is an IE9 Web Application and so is Facebook (#IE9)

Twitter.com is an IE9 Web Application and so is Facebook (#IE9)Twitter.com is an IE9 Web Application and so is Facebook (#IE9)

It seems the good folks @twitter have jumped out of the starting blocks and enhanced twitter.com to take advantage of the pinning technology in IE9.  As a twitter addict (@simonster on there) I love this, genius.

They aren’t the only ones Facebook have done something similar.  Be interesting to see if anyone else takes advantage of this functionality and more.

This is what it looks like when you take advantage of the technology. In a few lines of simple code they just turned twitter.com into an app.

Go to beautyoftheweb.com for more or watch my series of one minute videos on Internet Explorer 9 Beta

Twitter.com is an IE9 Web Application and so is Facebook (#IE9)