I haven’t been to BUILD, but I always follow it as Microsoft makes a bunch of really cool announcements throughout that pump me up.

I know there are plenty of people talking about BUILD, but I thought I’d take a moment to share my favourite bits that came out of day one.

IE11 on Windows Phone 8.1

If you’re not a WP owner, then you won’t care about this. You’ll just be missing out.

I use the browser on my phone often. It’s a continuous disappointment to me that phone browsers are limited in so many ways. Now that IE11 will be part of my Windows Phone, I won’t need to be disappointed.

Plus, Cortana doesn’t hurt either.

Reference – IEBlog

Enhanced F12 Developer Tools

IE11 introduced a complete refresh of the F12 Developer Tools. With the IE11 update for Windows 7 and 8.1, we developers get some enhancements including:

• Source Maps
• Ability to identify library files (to skip them when debugging)
• Updates to the JavaScript Console and CSS Editor

You can get a more in-depth review of the dev tools from this post from Aaron Powell and this one about the JavaScript console, and finally this one about the CSS editor.

Status.modern.ie

I blogged about it already.

I am a huge fan of transparency when it comes to technology, and so I found this site to be fantastic.

Enterprise Mode

Old versions of IE lingering around the machines in a big enterprise has been a thorn in my side since I started up with the whole HTML5 thing.

IE has something of an answer. It’s called Enterprise Mode and it allows for the IT (not developers) to configure through group policy how IE should render certain URLs, for example to an old HR application that only renders in IE8.

You can learn more about from this post from Chris Love.

WinJS Goes Open Source

Although I’m not a big non-web developer these days, I like watching how I can leverage my HTML and JavaScript skills outside of the browser.

I’ve always thought WinJS was a cool idea, but wasn’t quite what it needed to be.

Today, Microsoft announced that WinJS is going open source. This will allow for the JavaScript community to actually get involved with development and possibly help form the furture of cross-platform development both on and off the web.

This, combined with universal apps, makes HTML and JavaScript a very helpful set of skills when it comes to developing Windows-based apps.

Check out the library on Github or on MSDN.

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This is just the tip of the iceburg, but this has been quite the day for HTML and JavaScript developers.

Looking forward to see what happens on day two!