So far in the last couple hours I have found 3 great benefits of IE8 beta 2.

First IE8 is launching really fast. This is great since I am doing a lot of Silverlight stuff lately… Build and run gets painful when you are doing it hundreds of times a day. IE 8 boots up noticeably faster for me.

Second the Developer Tools are great. Ive already gotten a few debug messages that were more descriptive and useful than what I was getting with the stock IE7 install. (suppose I should have had the dev tools installed on IE7)

And lastly, “Compatibility View” rocks! Or should I say that IE complying with CSS standards rocks… Makes it easier when I am testing across Firefox, Safari and IE.

Two thumbs up from me

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/worldwide-sites.aspx?icid=ie8_asdf123

I’m going to be at PDC again this year. Can’t wait to see what Microsoft has to show! I’ve been to the last couple of PDC’s so now its starting to feel like things just won’t be right if I miss out.

It will probably be my first outing since my twin girls were born so I will still be starved to be talking “integrator/developer/designer/workflow/user experience/windows technology”. (as hard as I try I can’t seem to get my wife to be excited about silverlight and wpf… she is pretty excited about our Surface work though)…

If you wanna chat and see what IdentityMine is up to whilst you are in LA, give me a holler at my  “nathan at designerslove dot net” email address.

Josh Wagoner is blogging. http://blog.dobaginski.com/josh/

Josh is a “experience software engineer” at IdentityMine and he doesnt have any secret identities that I know of so I can openly brag about how good he is.  I worked with him on the snowboard app that was shown at CES among many other projects. He’s also the mastermind behind the really sweet 3D layout solutions that make up our blendables 3D mix.

Josh just posted a sweet attached property solution to custom cursors in Silverlight 2. I already ran with this and was able to get Blend editing support for the cursor by creating a usercontrol that I placed in CustomCursor property. I couldn’t figure out how to get Blend to see the property in the Properties Panel but I’m pretty sure I couldn’t edit it there anyway so my UserControl solution seems legit enough for now. I will probably create a custom control for cursors so I can switch out the template on my cursors…mmm sweet custom cursors with ControlTemplates and VSM.

Next I just gotta get InkPresenter working… Havent found any good Beta 2 solutions yet.

First I wake up to the news that Laurent Bugnion (the code trotter himself) will be working with identity mine. This is fantastic news for us as Laurent is amazingly talented and incredibly fun to work with. Read his post here.

I’m so excited about it I wore my identity mine logo wear (untucked of course, but I still look ready to golf with the company colors

Add to that this news about our listing in INC.’s Top 5000:

I’m pretty sure we will pass up Queen Anne Window & Door in the near future.