IE8 Passes the ACID2 Test!

Well the word is out. The IE8 Team has just officially announced that they have rendered the "ACID 2 Face" in I8 Standards mode. This is HUGE!! Finally no more workarounds or hacks on your CSS. Passing the ACID 2 test basically means that the browser follows the W3C HTML and CSS 2.0 specifications. The announcement also talked about supporting the many different types of users and older web pages. I think the IE8 Team has another trick up its sleeve and will later reveal a backward compatibility mode for older sites so that standards and nonstandard sites will work in IE8.

Good job IE8 Team!

SharpDevelop IDE

About 2 years ago I went on a search for a zip library because the .NET Framework at the time did not have one. I found this really nice zip library that came from the SharpDevelop IDE project. At the time the SharpDevelop project was pretty basic and they were at version 1.1. Well things have really changed since then. They have added some really cool features such as multiple framework support, refactoring, Subversion integration and Mono support.

Here's a list of some of the features...

• Open source, LGPL licensed


• Write C#, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, XML, HTML code


• Forms designer for C#, VB.NET and Boo


• Code completion for C#, VB.NET and Boo (including Ctrl+Space support)


• Integrated NUnit support plus code coverage (NCover)


• Multi-framework support (.NET 1.1 and 2.0, Mono, Compact Framework)


• XML Editing (source and tree view) with XPath search


• Subversion integration


• Code template support


• Easily extensible with external tools


• Re-host SharpDevelop with SDA


• Easily extensible with Plug-Ins

If your looking for a Free alternative to Visual Studio or even a Windows Mono IDE this is a very good alternative.