At an MSDN Roadshow event presented earlier this week in Burlington (and then other locations in the Northeast) by Microsoft New England Developer Evangelists Chris Bowen and Jim O'Neil, I finally got a look at IE8. Lately I've stayed focused on writing my book, Programming Entity Framework , and therefore have not had the fun of playing with many of the new toys coming out, so had even missed IE8.

Oddly, I had seen some videos on Google's new browser (in the works) called Chrome which touts the fact that each browser tab runs in it's own process and if one web app crashes, all of the others that you have open are safe. Google makes a big deal about how they came up with this awesome idea.

What I didn't know was that IE8 already has this feature!

There is a lot of really cool stuff in there and I was definitely taken aback because I hadn't been paying attention previously.

The cool stuff is not only for end users (application protection, Web Slices, Accelerators, zooming so slick I can't figure out how it even works (!) and more) but also for developers. For those of  you who have used Fiddler (and may not realize that it was written by Eric Lawrence who works on the IE team at Microsoft) , all of the Fiddler goodness multiplied by ... well, a lot... is now built right into IE. And the same Web Slices and Accelerators that are on the end-user "cool" list are on the developer "cool" list too! Because developers can create these tools.

There was one important caveat about backwards compatibility. If you build some of the IE8 features into your sites, there are some special tweaks you'll need to make in order to be sure that folks using IE7 (or earlier) don't end up with broken apps.

While the IE8 site has lots of marketing videos aimed at end users, you might find more interesting developer related content from the MIX08 presentations at www.visitmix.com.

Don't forget the IEBlog from the IE team, and the Microsoft IE Developer Center.

I was really surprised at how impressed I was with what Chris showed us in IE8; a bit annoyed that I had not taken the time to check this out earlier and getting ready to finally download the Beta on to my "daily workhorse" computer.