According to the IE Blog, IE8 officially passes the Acid2 tests now. You can see it in action over on Channel9 and hear more about IE8 in an interview with the IE team.

From the sounds of it, you will need to opt into using the new rendering engine for backwards compatibility reasons. This will probably be done using some form of header tag in the HTML document. If it is indeed a completely new engine, that also means they essentially could design the entire version of that engine to be 100% compliance based with no backward compatibility at all. Meaning not only in terms of rendering, but also DOM/JavaScript support. Let's hope that's the case!

I've had access to it for a while, but just got around to installing it. The good news is now anyone can now because it became public today. The install experience went very smooth and I haven't had any problems since installing it (earlier today). I developed in VS2008 all day, used Outlook, browsed the web with IE, etc. YMMV.

Keep in mind this is an RC and not RTM, so you will have to uninstall/re-install when it does go live.

Plain and simple, Mass Effect is one of the greatest games I have ever had the pleasure of playing. The story is amazing (you become totally immersed in it), the graphics are supreme (in fact they push the 360 a bit too hard at times) and the gameplay is signature BioWare .

If you haven't already picked it up, do yourself a favor and pick it up tonight. Be careful though, it's seriously addictive. I've spent 26hrs playing it thus far. I've spent a lot of time on secondary assignments to get my XP up for the primary storyline. I've heard you can finish the main storyline in about 30 if you ignore the secondary stuff, but what fun is that? :P

Wow, Microsoft is really on a roll here these past couple weeks. First, IE8 is officially announced here on the IE Blog and then PeteL, a member of the IE team, announced he's already uploaded the VPCs and is just waiting for them to propagate to all of Microsoft's content servers. So, I guess we should expect to have a shiny new toy to play with starting some time tomorrow.

Please, for the web's sake, let alone Microsoft's poor IE team who is taking a public flogging, let this version put an end to all the missing standards. I don't care so much about proprietary things like supporting Canvas, because that can be provided through an abstraction to the VML engine or Silverlight or Flash, but please let this be the version that finally brings the DOM and CSS support up to spec and provides a better performing ECMAScript engine.

Fingers crossed, but I refuse to hold my breath. :)

Update:
It's possible this is a false alarm. Joe pointed out to me in the comments that PeteL was probably talking about IE6/7 VPCs in the same post that he mentioned IE8. Without having read his previous post I had no context to figure that out and he wasn't exactly very clear in his context switch. My apologies in advance if I got anyone's hopes up too soon if it turns out to not be IE8. :(

Well, I knew there had to be a reason that we haven't seen any real movement in the ASP.NET AJAX Futures realm for a while... say hello to Volta.

Basically it's Microsoft's approach to using .NET to emit client side code (JavaScript). It shouldn't be too big a surprise that Microsoft was working on this because Nikhil Kothari released a prototype called Script# that did something similar back when the ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 bits were in beta. Basically it uses reflection to emit JavaScript types based on your .NET types and, even cooler, will translate the MSIL that your C#/VB.NET/IronPython/etc. generated when it was compiled back into JavaScript for execution in the browser. There's also an entire set of intrinsic controls that represent the DOM that you act on in your code that will be translated into the property client side calls. For example, let's say you put an <input id="myTextBox" type="textbox" /> in your HTML. Here's how you would access the current value on the server:

string value = Document.GetById<Input>("myTextBox").Value;

That would then be translated to the following JavaScript on the client:

var value = document.getElementById("myTextBox").value;

Get it? I haven't had time to peruse all the details yet, but I must say that it's pretty cool stuff and looks to be done in a pretty neat way from the .NET perspective. Is it an entirely new concept? No. Google's Web Toolkit has done these same things for Java for a while now, but it's definitely a richer twist on the approach.

All my searching tells me that nobody out there has created a custom Session-State Store Provider for ASP.NET that sits on top of Memcache. Are people just hardcoding themselves to Memcache API directly rather than using the provider model? Or are most people just happy with ASP.NET's out of the box state server?

So sad that while Session-State has a provider model, the standard Cache does not. Obviously this drives you to use the Memcache API directly for shared state, so maybe that would explain why everyone just bites the bullet and manages their session state directly through Memcache as well.