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Today's MIX 2010 keynote focused on Internet Explorer 9.0, which is now available as a platform preview. IE9 adds native video playback (H.264) through HTML 5, hardware accelerated graphics using DirectX, has support for scalable vector graphics, and a new JavaScript Engine. The JS engine matches Firefox 3.7 alpha in performance - a marked improvement upon IE8. JavaScript performance does matter to Microsoft afterall.

Unlike it major competitors, Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 will not support HTML 5. Instead, the browser will be based upon Internet Explorer 7.0, said Larry Lieberman, senior product manager for Windows mobile. Microsoft is making its initial bet on Silverlight and XNA applications. Without HTML 5 support, alternatives for developing Web applications are more limited.

Incidentally, IE7 failed the Acid2 test, (which is now 5 years old) but Lieberman said that it would be comparable with other mobile browser experiences. iPhone Safari, Android Chrome fair much better. The Internet Explorer 8 browser does pass Acid2. When asked why Microsoft opted to use a dated browser, Lieberman explained that Microsoft has focused its resources on breaking with the past to provide a better user experience through Silverlight.

Today, Microsoft announced the availability of ASP.NET MVC Framework 2.0. The ASP.NET Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern will promote the creation of higher-quality software through greater componentization and testability in .NET Web apps. According to Microsoft new features in ASP.NET MVC 2 include:

• Client side validation: Automatic support for JavaScript validation in the Web browser. Developers can also extend it to use a client validation framework of their choice by simply writing an adapter which reads in the JSON metadata and calls into the client validation library.
• Enhanced model validation: Developers can use the DataAnnotation validation support built-into the Microsoft .NET Framework to declaratively define and add validation rules to business objects and properties.   
• Asynchronous controller: Support for asynchronous action methods that can be used to improve performance when dealing with long running operations.
• Support for areas including tooling:  Ability to organize ASP.NET MVC applications into multiple areas, each with its own models, views and controllers. Visual Studio tooling support is available to easily add new areas to applications.
• Auto-scaffold UI helpers with customizable templates: Helps to refactor common UI elements into reusable templates.

Microsoft is going to announce an analytics framework from the Silverlight runtime on Monday at its MIX conference in Las Vegas, according to a blog post by Microsoft evangelist Michael Scherotter. Here are some of the details that he let out of the bag:

• Support out-of-browser scenarios
• Support offline scenarios
• Support multiple analytics services simultaneously without impacting performance
• Support designers in Microsoft Expression Blend to instrument applications without coding
• Support A/B Testing
• Support SketchFlow Prototypes
• Support logging of video experiences with the Microsoft Silverlight Media Framework

Let's take a look at the important bits. Silverlight has worked out of the browser and offline ever since version 3.0. That would probably require an endpoint (for data) to be installed inside of the firewall. Microsoft ships code instrumentation tools from PreEmptive Software in Visual studio 2010. There is an opportunity for Microsoft partners such as PreEmptive to provide a multipurpose solution for Web analytics as well as developer analytics. Merging the two data sets together could prove interesting for developers: think code coverage, method level performance, etc.

If Microsoft wants customers to run multiple analytics services it must have developed a common data model. That is something that is lacking in analytics today. Microsoft has the opportunity to solve an industry problem should it decide to make its data model a CodePlex project.

Microsoft is publicizing some data from Geeknet that reveals a slight but steady increase in open source software that runs on Windows. "Windows is the only operating system that runs all of the top 10 all-time most downloaded projects on SourceForge: eMule, Azureus/Vuze, Ares Gallery, 7-Zip, Filezilla, GTK+ and Gimp Installer for Windows, Audacity, PortableApps.com: Portable Software/USB, DC++, and BitTorent," according to a spokesperson. "Also, of the top 25 all-time most-downloaded projects on SourceForge, 23 run on Windows, and 14 of them only run on Windows."

The data is being released ahead of the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco later this month, which the company will be attending. I expect that it will make a few minor announcements there.

If so, I want to hear from you. SD Times is profiling Azure and what it takes to get started on a project - the cost, pilots, etc. We often speak to the "experts" like analysts and program managers; now we want to hear from you. There is no substitute for experience. Feel free to contact me directly, and I will follow up with you. Dworthington AT bzmedia DOT com.

Today, Microsoft announced AppFabric beta 2, which incorporates its Velocity caching technology and the Dublin management technology for Workflow and Communication Foundation applications. AppFabric targets composite applications, and is intended to make the development, management of those applications easier for .NET developers. Microsoft also offers a hosted edition, Windows Azure platform AppFabric, which provides connectivity services (service bus and access control) for .NET applications in the cloud.
 

Fans of Erlang, a concurrent programming language and runtime, will be gathering for Erlang-Factory Mar. 25-26 in San Francisco. Speakers include Joe Armstrong (the "father of Erlang"), RabbitMQ CEO Alexis Richardson, and distributed systems expert Steve Vinoski, among others.

Erlang is not a new language - it was developed during the 1980's. But it has found new purpose with the emergence of many-core CPUs. Erlang removes the needs for locks, making it well-suited for concurrent programming (provided you want to learn a new language). Concurrent languages like Erlang are extremely important to the many-core era.

For more on Erlang check out Alex Handy's coverage.

On Monday, an alliance of 24 cellular service carriers and device makers announced the Wholesale Applications Community. The community is an effort to enable developers to write applications that run on as many phones as possible. While laudable, reducing fragmentation is a very ambitious goal, and I don't think that it will be easy.

The alliance has decided to use Web applications that are written to the JIL and BONDI specifications to achieve compatibility. That's great, but it doesn't cover the last mile; developers will still need to target many devices. Devices have different sized displays, some have track balls, and others use touch screen navigation - you get the picture. Then there is the issue of accessing native resources and applications such as address books and dialers.

Nokia has already gone down this path. It is a microcosm of the industry, having an incredibly diverse line up of products sold throughout the world. It really had not other option than Web applications. Either does the Wholesale Community (it would be worsening fragmentation if it tried to establish a standard package).

Nokia uses porting kits for its own OS with APIs for customizing applications for its phones. The Wholesale Applications Community will need to built similiar kits for developers. The user experience will be very limited otherwise. It will be interesting to see how appealing the final product is to developers. The last mile should be included.