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MIX 2011 Keynote Day 1 - Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview, ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Refresh, Entity Framework 4.1

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Microsoft's MIX 2011 conference began this morning with Dean Hachamovich, Microsoft Corporate VP Internet Explorer, talking about the more beautiful Web that users are now experiencing using Windows Internet Explorer 9.

HTML5 has given Web developers an amazing set of tools to design experiences never before possible on the Web without extensive us of plug-in architectures. Windows Internet Explorer 9 provides hardware accelerated JavaScript, support for HTML5 and CSS3, and through these technologies a more beautiful Web has emerged.

Web developers at the MIX 2011 keynote, and around the world experiencing the conference online, were then given a preview of what's coming in the future of Internet Explorer. Dean Hachamovich announced the platform preview of Internet Explorer 10 and showed a new version of the famous fish tank demonstration running within Internet Explorer 10. You can download the Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 10 from the IE10 Test Drive website now and the preview will install alongside Windows Internet Explorer 9. Using the platform preview will allow you to observe innovation from the IE team as they work on the next version of Internet Explorer while preserving your PC’s core browser.

IE10 Platform Preview 2

Dean Hachamovich was then joined on stage by Steven Sinofsky who presented the Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview running on an ARM-based SoC architecture. announcing also that the Microsoft PDC would be coming to Anaheim, CA from September 13-16 2011!

Scott Guthrie followed the announcements about the Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview by announcing the release of a tools update for ASP.NET MVC 3 (download) as well as the release of the Entity Framework 4.1 (download).

With the tools update for ASP.NET MVC 3, developers now have access to an improved “ASP.NET MVC 3 New Project” dialog box in Visual Studio allowing them to select the Razor view engine and HTML5 semantic markup.

MVC3ToolsUpdate

Web developers will also appreciate the addition of Modernizr 1.7, providing compatibility support for HTML5 and CSS3 in legacy browsers.

You can read more about the ASP.NET MVC 3 tools update on Phil Haack’s blog here.

With the release of the Entity Framework 4.1 the team has provided two major enhancements:

  • The DbContext API provides an abstraction over the ObjectContext and a number of other types that were included in previous releases of the ADO.NET Entity Framework. The DbContext API surface is optimized for common tasks and coding patterns. DbContext can be used with Database First, Model First and Code First development.
  • Code First is a new development pattern for the ADO.NET Entity Framework and provides an alternative to the existing Database First and Model First patterns. Code First is focused around defining your model using C#/VB.NET classes, these classes can then be mapped to an existing database or be used to generate a database schema. Additional configuration can be supplied using Data Annotations or via a fluent API.

Stay tuned for more updates from MIX 2011 and be sure to watch the keynotes and sessions online at the MIX 2011 Website.