Solo Technology

While most of the web world seems to be excited about the release of Internet Explorer 8 beta (for developers), another MS beta has caught my eye as something that might be a bit more useful (for me, at any rate).

While lost in the thunder of the IE8 announcement, Expression Web 2 beta was also announced today. This is much more interesting to me as I’m a fan of the current Expression Web, but have never been overjoyed with how PHP stuff was handled. But now not only does it offer syntax highlighting and Intellisense (command completion), it also supports “live” preview of PHP pages without needing a web server. Seriously, that’s pretty slick!

And finally:

Expression Web 2 supports interactive web content such as Silverlight and Flash, enabling you to easily include this content in your sites. Improved workflow enables you to import Adobe Photoshop designs into your sites with layer visibility control, and reimport changes with layer settings retained.

Great stuff. (previous mentions of Expression Web)

Oh sure, I’ll have a look at IE8 soon too… these notions of “WebSlices” and “Activities” are very intriguing. And frankly, it’s hard not to get caught up in the excitement of a new browser to play with — that’s what makes being a geek fun

If you’ve used either of the betas feel free to share your thoughts, I’d love to hear them.

2 Responses to “Microsoft Beta Day”

1. Biodun on March 6th, 2008 12:38 am
   

   Thanks for the info , hope IE8 will be available for Windows 2000 and XP versions.
   Then it will make web authors target browser versions and having an opt-out to trigger IE7 standards rendering mode and render standards mode by default.

2. Chris on March 6th, 2008 10:41 am
   

   IE8 is already available for XP.

   As IE7 wasn’t available for Win2k I suspect the same will be true for IE8.

   Interestingly, there’s an “IE7″ mode button on the IE8 toolbar…

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