At the MIX10 conference, Microsoft released the developer preview of Internet Explorer 9. This isn’t a full web browser like IE8 is - just a taste of what’s to come in IE9. Developers who have the preview browser installed, though, will receive updates bringing new code every 2 months until the beta release of IE9.

As previously announced, the new browser will support HTML5, CSS3, and hardware acceleration. It also sports a new JavaScript engine called “Chakra.” You can read more about its improvements and how to send feedback over on the IE blog here.

When you first launch the IE9 preview browser, you’re taken to the IE9 Test Drive website where you’ll find a series of tests ready to be run. There are speed demos for testing browser performance, graphics demos, and HTML5 demos for testing border radius, CSS2, DOM Style, and DOM events. There’s also an “HTML 5 T-Shirt Designer” app that uses HTML5 and XHTML to let you create your own shirt.

With the kickoff of the designer and developer conference MIX10 yesterday, the Silverlight team made several announcements, including the release of a Silverlight Pivot control and the announcement of the Silverlight 4 RC, which is now available for download.

So what’s new with the latest version of Silverlight? Quite a few things, actually – the full list is here if you’re interested (scroll down on that page). However, these are the top items that stood out for me:

• Webcam and microphone support
• Multicast streaming
• Multi-touch support
• Copy & Paste and Drag & Drop
• Offline DRM powered by PlayReady technology
• Control over aspects of the UI
• Read and write files to your My Documents, My Music, My Pictures, and My Videos folders
• Ability to run other desktop programs (e.g. Office)
• Full Visual Studio integration
• Performance optimizations – starts faster and runs 200% faster than Silverlight 3
• Silverlight for Windows Phones

As that last item shows, Silverlight will be available on Windows Phones, which will bring the following:

• High quality video and audio using a wide range of codecs, DRM and IIS Smooth Streaming
• Deep Zoom for enhanced reading and photo browsing experiences
• Vector and Bitmap Graphics and animation
• Hardware acceleration for video and graphics
• Accelerometer for motion sensing
• Multi-touch
• Camera and microphone
• Location awareness
• Push notifications
• Native phone functionality
• Silverlight can also utilize the XNA Framework to support games using 3D and 2D sprite graphics.

Also new is the Silverlight Pivot control. Pivot, a data visualization technology demonstrated first at PDC, will be available as a Silverlight control by this summer. Silverlight developers interested in using this technology can begin the prototyping process using the Live Labs Pivot app which is available now.

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At yesterday’s MIX10 conference, we got a lot of new information about the upcoming Windows Phone 7 Series devices, including features, options for developers, how applications will be handled and marketed and more. If you weren’t able to attend the conference yourself or tune into the live stream, here’s what you missed:

Windows 7 Phone Series Features

According to the official press release, we learned that the phones would offer accelerometer support, a Microsoft Location Service, a Microsoft Notification Service (aka push notifications), hardware-accelerated video playback with DRM, IIS Smooth Streaming for live video, multitouch, camera and mic support.

For Developers:

Then later, from the conference itself, we learned that the phones will  support .NET, XNA, and Silverlight. Also, it was announced that developers can use the following tools to build their WP7S apps: Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, XNA Game Studio 4.0 for Windows Phone, a Window Phone 7 add-in for Visual Studio 2010 RC, Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone (tech preview), and a Windows Phone 7 Series emulator for testing.

Mary-Jo Foley from ZDNet scoured for answers to some of your “burning questions” regarding these new devices. You can learn more about things like multitask support and the App Marketplace from her post here.

Apps Announced

Microsoft also announced a huge list of initial partners for the new phones, including:

Associated Press, Citrix, EA Mobile, Foursquare, Namco, Pageonce, Pandora, Seesmic, Shazam, Sling, Archetype International, AWS Convergence Technologies (WeatherBug), Clarity Consulting, Cypress Consulting, Fandango, frog design, Glu Mobile, Graphic.ly, Hudson Entertainment, IdentityMine, IMDb.com, Larva Labs, Match.com, Matchbox Mobile, Microsoft Game Studios, Oberon Media, Photobucket, PopCap Games, SPB Software, stimulant, TeleCommunications Systems, Touchality LLC and Vertigo Software.

The App Marketplace

Microsoft unveiled details about how the new Windows Phone 7 Series applications will be sold via the Windows Phone Marketplace. The full post is here, but here are a few highlights:

• The Marketplace will organize apps from Mobile Operators and OEMs, all in one integrated experience.
• It will offer Xbox LIVE games, applications based on latest Silverlight runtime, and millions of songs and podcasts from Zune
• The Marketplace will be its own “hub” featuring content-specific marketplaces, the available application updates, and view a selection of editorially placed application, game and music content.
• Marketplace now adds a new Trial API that gives every application or game developer the option, but not the requirement, to enable a single instance of their code to include trial usage limitations (like time or level) so that users can test drive the app/game they are considering.

At this week’s MIX10 conference, Seesmic showed off their new Silverlight-powered Twitter applications, one a desktop app and the other a mobile app designed for Windows Phone 7 Series devices.

A prototype of the cross-platform desktop client, which is similar to the current "Seesmic for Windows" app was demoed at the conference on Monday. Unlike the native Windows app, the Silverlight version works on both Windows and Mac platforms, allowing you to access multiple Twitter accounts, your Facebook account and LinkedIn.

The company also announced the launch of their Seesmic Desktop Platform (SDP), which will allow developers to build features or integrate their services into Seesmic’s suite of clients. For example, a new Bing mapping control plugin allows you to track geo-location and integrates trackable links at bing.com, notes Seesmic on their company blog.

Seesmic for Windows Phone was announced at the conference, too. Like the desktop client, the mobile app will use Silverlight technology and will fully integrate Bing maps and its geo-location features for plotting tweets on a map.

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Over on the (unofficial) SevenForums site, one user has come up with a way to insert spaces into your Windows 7 taskbar so you can create separated icon groups. The trick involves creating some blank shortcuts that lead to a fake program and pinning those shortcuts to the taskbar.

To facilitate the process, he provided a zip file containing multiple “blank shortcuts” and blank.exe files. (Don’t worry – we scanned them with Microsoft Security Essentials – they’re safe. Other forum users tested them too).

After extracting the files, you’ll have a folder called “Blank” and a ReadMe.txt. Before pinning the Shortcuts to the taskbar, you have to move the entire “Blank” folder to C:\Windows. Then grab a shortcut and drag it to the taskbar. Now, instead of seeing a blank (white) icon, you’ll just see a space! The zip file contains four different “blank” shortcuts and you can only use one of each.

What a great trick!

According to a recent post from the Bing Search Team, the Twitter Maps application in the Bing Maps Application Gallery has been updated to allow for map embeds. The Twitter Maps app, if you’re unfamiliar, is a “mapplication” (map + app) that lets you see nearby tweets overlaid on top of a Bing Map. After loading the Twitter map on the screen, you can used Search Filters that let you narrow down tweets by location (address, location, or landmark), keywords or phrases, and Twitter usernames. You can also check a box to see tweets with an attached photo only.

Once you have the Twitter map displaying the way you want it, just follow these steps to get the embed code for your website or blog:

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At the Game Developers Conference, Microsoft has been giving attendees a deeper look at the Windows Phone 7 Series platform, specifically as it relates to gaming. Already we’ve seen how games can be developed using Visual Studio to run on Windows PCs, the Xbox 360, and Windows Phones. 

Now, thanks to this video upload from the conference itself, we can learn more about push notifications on Windows Phone 7 Series devices. There are three kinds of push notifications available: raw, tile, and toast.

Raw notifications are when a cloud service notifies an application. If the app isn’t running the notification is discarded. The second type, tile notifications, are used when a user pins a tile to the Quick Launch menu (tiles are the new squares on the main screen). In this case, the cloud service will update that tile with an image URI. Finally, there are toast notifications which is when the cloud service send a title and a subtitle. You see toast notifications on the Xbox 360 today – it’s when a little pop-up appears to let you know one of your friends is online.

After giving an overview, the rest of the talk is devoted to explaining the technical aspects in more detail and providing examples of how developers can use these notifications with their games. The entire video is only a little over 6 minutes long, so it’s definitely worth a look if you’re thinking about developing for the new Windows Phone.

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According to recent news posted on the Microsoft Research site, there’s a new build of the Kodu game creator now available and with the release there comes a lot of new features. Some of the more notable changes include improved mouse controls, a new hint system and an automatic update mechanism. There are also a number of bug fixes and minor improvements which will make the overall Kodu experience even better than before.

The full list of changes includes the following:

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Gist, the company behind the email mashup service of the same name, just updated their Outlook plugin. The new plugin now lets you see a contact’s profile information prior to sending them an email. To use this feature, you simply start creating a new message, and the profile info will display next to the email itself, in a sidebar pane. Specifically, the profile info shows things like name, title, company, and links to your contacts’ social network profiles on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Other plugin features include the ability to get updates on your contacts and their companies within Outlook, a search feature for easily locating email, links, and attachments, and a drag-and-drop method for sharing news from your contacts via email or Twitter.

Click here to in you’re interested in trying the new Outlook plugin. Note that you’ll need to have signed up with Gist first before you can use it.

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Rob Margel recently discovered a great March theme for Windows 7 users at download.live.com which features shamrocks and other spring-related imagery. I thought I’d go check out the Windows 7 Personalization gallery to grab it and whatever else was new, too. However, for some reason, the Shamrock theme isn’t there. No matter, since Rob posted the direct link for the download. However, I was surprised to see the gallery had a ton of new themes since my last visit only a couple of months ago. There are now several regional themes like Canada, Australia, Czech Spring, China, Baltic Beaches, France, India, Hungary, Germany, Italy, and a dozen or so others. Plus, there are new animal themes like “dogs in summer,” “cats everywhere,” and “Year of the Tiger.”

But lately, I have to admit that I’ve found myself addicted to Smashing Magazine’s Windows 7 theme collections which they release monthly. They offer themes made up of artistic backgrounds that come packaged as two different options – those with an embedded calendar and those without. I like to grab those without the calendar myself so I can reuse them later on when I’m ready for a change. You can grab the last collection here.

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