14 DAY TRIAL // The "Developers! Developers! Developers!" chant is a trademark of Steve Ballmer, Microsoft Chief Executive Officer. In fact, I have tracked down a Soapbox video of Ballmer in the respective moment and embedded it at the bottom for your viewing pleasure. There is no doubt in my mind that most of you are already familiar with it, but in this sense, it is a classic that's worth a second look.
And since Microsoft is all about developers, the final version of the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar was made available for download yesterday, May 10, 2007. The product has been through a couple of beta builds and the final version can be downloaded via this link. "At PDC in 2005, we announced the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar and made the first build available shortly after. Since then, we've released two additional betas; thanks to your testing and feedback, we've improved the quality and added new functionality like formatted source viewing and CSS selector matching. I'd like to announce that v1 of the IE Developer Toolbar is complete," stated John Hrvatin, Microsoft Progam Manager.
Users already familiar with the beta releases of the toolbar will find that the final release fails to bring to the stage functionality upgrades. Microsoft has focused instead on delivering a set of reliability and "fit-and-finish" enhancements.
The deployment process of the IE Dev Toolbar has been streamlined with this version. Installing the product will automatically uninstall the beta 2 and post beta 2 builds of the toolbar. "For those of you running Windows Vista, you will not have to log off and back in to make the toolbar visible. However, you do need to restart IE and then click the IE Developer Toolbar icon in the IE6 toolbar or IE7 command bar," Hrvatin added.
The Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar is a result of the user demand for free web developer tools. Hrvatin announced that the toolbar is simply the first step undertaken by Microsoft on the company's way to deliver additional resources to streamline IE development.