Well.. here I am .. running in IE8 , freshly released, along with a host of other goodies, from MIX08 happening right now somewhere in Las Vegas. Ive never really got on with Firefox .. I know, I know .. shoot me .. but I find the temptation to install all those plugins a bit too much and soon poor firefox is crawling to a halt. So I was quite excited to get my hands on IE8.
Developer Tools
At first I thought they had just included the regular developer toolbar into the main program but on further investigation the developer tools they've added have some very powerful features and should make many developers very happy (me included!)
You will now find a lot of the debugging and CSS analysis features found in the new Visual Studio 2008 sitting in the 'Developer Tools' console.
Open it up and you find you can now set breakpoints in your javascript code the step through line by line
You can create watches, see autos and effect variables directly with the immediate console. All great stuff ! Also locating problems in CSS got a whole bunch easier (now I dont need have to switch back to Firefox just to use FireBug hehe)
Web Slices
One thing I quite like are the addition of Web Slices I just wanted to quickly note how to get them up and running :) As afr as I can see they are a way to wrap your normal feed in some custom HTML so it looks like it came from your site (so mine would have bad spelling and lots of transformers icons everywhere)
Its essentially creating a small piece of HTML within a page with the correct classes applied. IE8 then picks up these and allows you to subscribe to the 'slice' (jazzed up RSS)
(The important classes are in bold)
<div id="myblogupdates" class="hslice" >
<div style="display:none;">
<a href="#" class="entry-title">Ultramagnus Blog Updates</a> ~
<a href="#" class="entry-content"> </a>
<a href="http://www.ultramagnus.org/syndication.axd" class="feedurl" rel="feedurl"> </a>
</div>
</div>
If all is working, when you view the page you will see a new little swirly purple icon (where your RSS feeds normally appear) with the name of your WebSlice in it...
... clicking on the link will bring up a dialog asking if you want to subscribe to this webslice ..
.. once done the 'slice' will appear as a link in your toolbar.
You do need to tweak the code in your RSS feed to include a new namespace ..
<rss version="2.0"xmlns:mon="http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/rss/monitoring/2007">
.. it will then use the HTML you defined originally to display the slice in the browser drop-down .. so you can now add a bit of personalisation your RSS feed :)