Tuesday, January 31, 2006

IE7 Beta 2 Preview Available


IE BLOG: If you’re a developer, an IT Pro, or just plain interested, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie7/ to try the IE7 Beta 2 Preview.

What’s a beta preview? It’s a release for everyone involved in making the Internet work.

Before we release a consumer-focused beta, we want to make sure anyone with a website can look at the changes we’ve made to our layout engine and the stricter user experience around security certificates. Developers should try out their toolbars, ActiveX controls, and applications that host or rely on the IE platform. IT Pros have their own concerns when a new browser is coming, as do domain registrars (especially with the IDN support), network operators, and many, many other groups. The site has some checklists we’ve written to help people exercise IE7 with their sites and applications. If we missed items you think we should call out, please let us know. We’re looking forward to feedback that will help us deliver a great, consumer-focused beta.

Should everyone install? First and foremost, all the usual warnings about "beta" software apply. Also, while most of the functionality is in place, the user experience is not done. That said -- we welcome your feedback if you try it. The next post will cover the best ways to send us that feedback.

And in case you haven’t been there, http://www.mix06.com/ is still a good site to check out.

- Dean

P.S. Please remember to uninstall any previous IE7 builds before installing this one: Control Panel, Add / Remove Programs, Show Updates, scroll to the bottom.

Published Tuesday, January 31, 2006 9:16 AM by ieblog Filed Under: , , .

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posted by Ronnie Rocket @ 8:10 PM   1 comments

1 Comments:

At 7:49 AM, Blogger Ronnie Rocket said...

Hello, Walter from the land of IE Program Managers here. You might have seen or read about the RSS functionality in the user interface of IE7 Beta 2 Preview. There is a bit more to it then just letting users subscribe and read feeds from the IE7 user interface. The RSS functionality in IE7 is "powered" by the Windows RSS Platform. The Windows RSS Platform API encapsulates 3 main components: Common Feed List, Feed Synchronization Engine, and Feed Store.

The RSS functionality in IE7 is built on top of these components. While we previously announced that the Windows RSS Platform would be available for Windows Vista, we are extremely pleased to announce that the Windows RSS Platform will also be available as part of Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1 and Windows XP 64-bit.

The Windows RSS Platform is available to any application. The idea is that applications can utilize the Windows RSS Platform to become RSS enabled without having to re-implement basic RSS building blocks. This can significantly reduce the time and effort application developers have to invest in order to integrate RSS into their programs.

That’s all great, but what does that mean? And why is a Windows RSS Platform a good idea? Glad I asked ;) Let me tell you about that.

Like many of you, I’ve been running several RSS applications (aggregators, pod casters, etc…) for some time and am subscribed to close to 100 feeds. Each time I start using another RSS application I play the "game" of OPML export and import. This quickly becomes a hassle, especially when I lose track of feeds because I subscribed to or deleted feeds in different applications and hence my feed lists are no longer in sync.

This is where the Common Feed List of the Windows RSS Platform can help. Multiple applications can read, add, or delete from the Common Feed List and hence are "sharing" the user’s list of subscribed feeds. IE7 is one such application. When you discover and subscribe to feeds in IE7, it adds them to the Common Feed List and the new subscription is available to other applications. Not only can the user benefit from multiple applications using the Common Feed List, but we expect that over time, online services will provide tools that synchronize the Common Feed List with their services. This will allow roaming of the user’s subscription list not only between applications, but also between computers.

But wait, there’s more!

I mentioned two other components above: Feed Synchronization Engine and Feed Store. Together with the Common Feed List, these components allow application developers to include support for RSS feeds without having to becomes an expert in RSS formats, synchronization schedules, enclosure downloads – or even XML(!).

Here’s what the Windows RSS Platform provides for developers:

Support for every major RSS and Atom format, as well as many popular extensions.
Background scheduled updates.
Support for server-friendly technologies like conditional GETs and RFC 3229 for feeds.
Bandwidth-friendly enclosure downloads using Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS).
API exposing a simple object model for feeds as well as direct access to the raw XML stream.
All of this functionality is available as shared technology as part of IE7 on Windows Vista and down-level. As a developer, including RSS support in your application can be amazingly easy.

I’m sure that many of you are interested in more details of the API, features, and implementation. Over the next few weeks we will post about those on the RSS team blog. Head on over and leave us your comments and questions.

- Walter



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