Posts tagged TechEd

IE9: A Lap Around For Developers

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June 10, 2010
by Pete in , ,

First, a disclaimer: The code in the slides for this demo isn’t perfect, in fact, it’s a little messy, but I wanted to get the information that I shared with folks out as quickly as I could, and that means I haven’t cleaned it up, or used any kind of best practices to get it to look nice!  Like the IE Test Drive site, it’s more meant to show some neat stuff off, instead of provide coding best practices.

TechEd 2010 in New Orleans is almost a wrap, I think all that’s left is the attendee party (and that’s taking place right now), the last session are over, the TLC stations are closed and folks are starting to head home.  My flight leaving in just over 12 hours – 6 hours of flying and time to get caught up on email.  It was awesome to meet so many new folks and see the excitement around Internet Explorer 9. 

One of the sessions I presented at TechEd this year was the IE9: A Lap Around For Developers.  It was an overview of all the new features and support that we’ve announced and lots of live demos.  In fact, it was entirely a demo.  I created a simple AJAX application that filled in a DIV with “slides” that were actually HTML snippets. 

I focused on three areas in my presentation…

  • Performance
    • Performance improvements across all systems, not just the JavaScript engine.
    • The new JavaScript engine
  • Same Mark Up
    • How the team engineering team designs, develops and tests the browser
    • How the team works with the W3C to ensure that the same mark-up you write works in all browsers
    • The announced features, including demos and code (I didn’t announce anything, I’ll save that for the IE Blog!)
  • GPU Accelerated HTML
    • Why acceleration matters, and what it’s doing
    • How hardware acceleration will make your sites work better, without any changes to your code

As part of one of the demos, I’m using CSS3 Media Queries and set the page to only display when the browser window is between 1200px and 1300px wide.  If your browser window isn’t wide enough, it will show a different set of CSS that sets most of the content to display:none;.

You can find the deck online at http://petelepage.com/presentations/teched2010/ie9pp2/

As I said above, the code isn’t perfect, and I haven’t tested it in other browsers.  I’ll put money down that if things don’t work quite right,it a problem with my html.

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20 Tips and Tricks For Writing Fast Web Applications

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June 10, 2010
by Pete in ,

I’m about 30 minutes from walking on stage to present my last session here at TechEd 2010 in New Orleans and I wanted to share this presentation early, just in case the session room fills up and folks can’t make it in or for those of you who weren’t able to make it.  If you’re a TechEd attendee, the slides are up on the Schedule Builder, otherwise, you can find my deck here [8meg PPTX].

The Internet Explorer engineering team spends a lot of time working to understand what developers and doing when building their websites, where the bottle necks are (both in the browser and in the code that developers write).  With all of the information that they gathered, they built set of 20 tips and tricks that will help your site run faster, and more efficiently.  While the research they did used Internet Explorer as the base, almost all of these tips and tricks apply to all browsers.

Jason Weber presented these tips and tricks at MIX2010 this year – the session web page is at http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/CL29 and you can also download the slides, or the video in MP4, Windows Media Format or High Quality Windows Media Format.  It runs about 80 minutes and should be required watching for every developer out there I think. I know I learned a few things and I think my site breaks some of the best practices that I’ve got listed below!  (I guess I’ve got some work to do! Smile)

Without any further ado, I present to you…

20 Tips & Tricks To Improve Your Website Performance

  1. Ensure server side compression is enabled on “text” like files
  2. Use conditional requests
  3. Provide cacheable content
  4. Minify your JavaScript
  5. Don’t scale images (I’m really guilty of this one)
  6. Use image sprites
  7. Link JavaScript at the bottom of your file, and avoid inline JavaScript
  8. Add the “defer” tag when you have to link to JavaScript at the top of your page
  9. Link Style Sheets at the top of your page
  10. Avoid using @import
  11. Minimize Walking Look Up Chain
  12. Cache Function Pointers
  13. Use the Native JSON object
  14. Remove duplicate scripts
  15. Minimize DOM interactions
  16. Use efficient DOM Methods
  17. Use querySelectorAll for groups
  18. Only send required styles
  19. Simplify your selectors
  20. Minimize page layouts

PS: If you want a little laugh, go to the TechEd site, and look at my bio – it wasn’t quite supposed to read like that Smile

[UPDATED 6/10/10 1:25pm PST] Fixed the link to the slides, sorry about that!

Design Mistakes Made By Web Developers

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May 31, 2010
by Pete in ,

I mentioned in a previous blog post that I’m doing one of my favorite sessions at TechEd again this year – Top 10 Design Mistakes Made By Web Developers.  I would consider myself a web developer, not so much a web designer.  I can make something that doesn’t look bad, but it’s typically doesn’t have the same shine that a good web designer can do. 

Top Ten Design Mistakes Made By Web Developers (WEB04-INT)

We’ve all seen those sites where it’s obvious the developer didn’t consult a designer. There’s no user experience flow, the colors clash, you don’t quite know what to do on the site. During this session, we take a look at the top mistakes made by Web developers when they don’t have access to Web designers; and hopefully learn a few techniques for making sure your sites look great!
Monday June 7th, 2010 @ 1:00pm – 2:15pm – Room 350

I feel guilty listing the non-Microsoft sites here because I don’t really want to call anyone out in public, so instead, I’ll share a few of my “favorite” Microsoft sites.  If you make it to my TechEd session, I promise to make you laugh or maybe cry…

What are your favorite sites (either Microsoft or not) that you think think need the help of a good web designer?

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TechEd 2010 in New Orleans

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May 30, 2010
by Pete in ,

CCL_audio_books.inddI’m spending part of my memorial day weekend preparing for TechEd next week because I want to try something new and it’s going to require some extra work.  Thankfully the weather is pretty crumby here in Seattle this weekend, so it’s not like I’m missing a great weather weekend.  Ah well!  I guess I get to make up for it by hitting Orlando before I head down to New Orleans.

The Top 10 Design Mistakes session is probably one of my favorites!  It’s really fun and interactive, we look at some of my favorite sites, and have an opportunity to look at your favorites  The Lap Around Internet Explorer 9 session is the one that I’m most excited about.  First of all, I’m forgoing PowerPoint completely, and am instead going to do everything in Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 2!  I’m working to build an AJAX application that will give me some of the same features as PowerPoint, but since it’s in HTML, it’ll be easier and more fun to show the samples, sources and such. 

Here’s a list of the sessions that I’ll be presenting at TechEd this year…

Top Ten Design Mistakes Made By Web Developers (WEB04-INT)

We’ve all seen those sites where it’s obvious the developer didn’t consult a designer. There’s no user experience flow, the colors clash, you don’t quite know what to do on the site. During this session, we take a look at the top mistakes made by Web developers when they don’t have access to Web designers; and hopefully learn a few techniques for making sure your sites look great!
Monday June 7th, 2010 @ 1:00pm – 2:15pm – Room 350

A Lap Around Internet Explorer 9 For Developers (WEB302)

Internet Explorer 9 contains many new features that give developers many new options for building rich Web applications. From enhanced features like the developer tools and or support for more DOM interactivity – Internet Explorer 9 is the browser you’ve been asking for. We take a dive into these features and learn how you can take advantage of brand new APIs like HTML5, SVG, and Direct2D Graphics support.
Tuesday June 8th, 2010 @ 9:45am – 11:00am – Room 276 

Using HTML5 Features In Internet Explorer 8 (WEB06-INT)

Internet Explorer 8 has support for many HTML5 features, but do you know what they are or how to use them? We provide a quick overview of those features, see how they’re supported, and then dive into the code and see real examples of how they work. We take an existing Web site, and implement HTML5 features to make the Web site more performant, and powerful in Internet Explorer 8, and other browsers that have support for some HTML5 features.
Wednesday June 9th, 2010 @ 8:00am – 9:15am – Room 349

Protecting You Web Applications (WEB301)

Every day, hackers try to compromise users and Web sites. How can you protect your users from phishing attacks, or cross site scripting, SQL injection attacks, and all of the other risks on the Internet. Keeping your users protected requires an end-to-end solution, which starts with the browser, and ends with your applications. We pull back the covers on the best practices for building secure Web applications whether they live on the Internet or the Intranet and features offered by modern browsers that help ensure your application isn’t going to be the next “story at 11”.
Wednesday June 9th, 2010 @ 11:45am – 1:00pm – Room 388

Best Practices For Building Fast Web Applications (WEB05-INT)

Building high performance Web applications takes skill and some unique know how. Come learn about some of the common pitfalls we’ve learned in JavaScript, CSS, HTML and HTTP requests that could drastically improve the performance of your Web applications. While the session focuses on using Windows Internet Explorer as the tool to get there, these lessons apply to all browsers!
Thursday June 10th, 2010 @ 1:30pm – 2:45pm – Room 350

If I’m not presenting, you can probably find me in the Internet Explorer TLC area in the blue section of the Exhibit Hall.  We’ll have a bunch of folks from the team there to help answer questions, and show some cool Internet Explorer 9 demos!

Will I see you there?  Hope so!

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