Photosynth from Microsoft Live Labs

Looks like Microsoft is taking a page from Google's playbook with their approach to R&D. At least, they're buying-up cool technologies and releasing them via Microsoft Live Labs. Some of you may have already heard of Photosynth, but for those who haven't, here's Microsoft's description.

"The Photosynth Technology Preview is a taste of the newest - and, we hope, most exciting - way to view photos on a computer. Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next.

In our collections, you can access gigabytes of photos in seconds, view a scene from nearly any angle, find similar photos with a single click, and zoom in to make the smallest detail as big as your monitor."

If it's even half as cool as their claims, then this could be a really fun and useful application. I literally just started playing with it, so no real opinion yet.

Pre-TechEd 1

So, the Microsoft TechEd conference is quickly approaching. For those who don't know what that is, check out the website. As in 2005, the conference is being held in the 2.1 million square foot Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, FL. There should be roughly 12000 people in attendance this year, and I'm really looking forward to it. I will be traveling down there with a friend and, as time permits, keeping a daily photo diary here on my blog. Stay tuned for more information.

Windows Home Server

For those that haven't yet heard about it, Windows Home Server is a very interesting new operating system offering from Microsoft. As suggested by its name, the target audience is home users, but it is built upon the business-proven Windows Server 2003 SP2. Its goal is to simplify mass storage, backup/recovery, health monitoring, and more for the home user with multiple PCs. Check out this Wikipedia page for more information. I've been participating as a tester on the Beta 2 version for the last month or so and have been pretty impressed so far. If you want to sign up to participate, visit the Windows Home Server page on Microsoft's Connect site.

Exporting/Importing Settings in Visual Studio 2005 - Part 2

As a follow-up to my February 5th post....

I must be getting a little slower with age, but I eventually realized that the reason the Visual Studio 2005 installation on my tablet PC was so different from the one on my desktop was because it was the Standard Edition, versus Professional on the desktop. According to this chart, the Standard Edition features "Simplified menu options and defaults". I guess that's what I was running up against. Well, since importing the settings from my Professional installation, the Standard edition has been "transformed" with most of the menu and toolbar options that were previously unavailable. It's solved all of my issues, at least. Seems like another instance of Microsoft simply hiding functionality instead of eliminating it for lower versions. I just stumbled upon a way of unlocking it, I suppose.

Interesting Free Software from Microsoft

Here is a list of a few interesting pieces of development-related software from Microsoft in no particular order. Each is either free or at least has a free version available.

• Microsoft Express Editions (Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005, Visual Web Developer 2005) - "Free, lightweight, easy-to-use, and easy-to-learn tools for the hobbyist, novice, and student developer."

• Microsoft Robotics Studio - "The Microsoft Robotics Studio is a Windows-based environment for academic, hobbyist and commercial developers to easily create robotics applications across a wide variety of hardware."

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System Second Edition - "Install VSTO 2005 SE to create new application-level add-ins for six applications in the 2007 Microsoft Office system and five in Microsoft Office 2003. Use managed code to customize task panes and the Ribbon in the 2007 Microsoft Office system applications."

• ASP.NET AJAX (formerly ATLAS) - "ASP.NET AJAX is a free framework for quickly creating a new generation of more efficient, more interactive and highly-personalized Web experiences that work across all the most popular browsers."

• Microsoft CodePlex (think SourceForge for .NET) - "CodePlex is Microsoft's open source project hosting web site. You can use CodePlex to create new projects to share with the world, join others who have already started their own projects, or use the applications on this site and provide feedback."

• XNA Game Studio Express - "The XNA team is proud to announce the availability of the 1.0 release of XNA Game Studio Express and the XNA Framework, aimed at helping students and hobbyists build games for Windows and the Xbox 360. This release supports both Windows game development and Xbox 360 development (subscription to the XNA Creators Club is required in order to run XNA-based games on the Xbox 360)"

• Microsoft Expression - "Expression Studio, a key component of Microsoft's strategy for improving the user experience delivered by applications, provides designers with an end-to-end tools platform that boosts collaboration with developers in the delivery of next-generation user experiences for the Web, Windows Vista™ applications and beyond."

Exporting/Importing Settings in Visual Studio 2005

OK, so maybe I'm cheating with this post by referencing ScottGu's Blog, but I just love it when you do a web search and find exactly what you are looking for.

I was getting annoyed with the fact that my toolbars and other settings were different on my tablet PC than my work PC. Even more annoying was trying to figure out exactly where the settings were to change them. Add to that the fact that my tablet was using one setting to assume a default location for all projects and wouldn't allow me to specify different folders for each.... As an aside, I realize that it's really my fault and not my PCs. :) But if anybody asks, the computer did it!

Anyway, at this link, you will find Scott's tips on setting up, exporting, and importing custom profiles for the Visual Studio 2005 IDE. Over time, I had forgotten all the changes I had made to my work PC to get it to a point where I was happy. Simply exporting the settings and importing them into my tablet saved me quite a bit of time. Thanks, Scott!

One Note 2007 / Adobe Reader 8 Bug

So, I recently finished installing Office 2007 Ultimate on my desktop and tablet. Very nice piece of software so far. I spent a few hours configuring One Note 2007. I use it for taking notes and scanning/organizing/searching technical articles, recipes, and projects from woodworking magazines. I should say that I use One Note 2007 for this. Prior to this version, it's capabilities were a lot more limited, and I was struggling with ScanSoft PaperPort 11 for my scanning/organizing needs. At any rate, I'm not writing this to give a review of Office. Instead, I would like to point out a bug that I found that may help others out there.

One Note 2007 has the ability to import various different types of documents. There are several ways, but I like to simply drag the document into a page in One Note and select the "Insert the file as printout so I can add notes to it" option. The result is that you get a "printed" copy of the document on the page in One Note. Then, you can scribble notes, full-text index it, etc. Behind the scenes, it appears that One Note actually launches the program it knows can read the file (e.g. Adobe Reader for PDFs) and then simply prints using a special driver that results in the file going into One Note. The bug I found was with Version 8 of Adobe Reader. I tried various things to get it to work. It seemed like it was printing, but the document never showed up in One Note. Then, I happened to go into my office and saw that there was a stack of paper in the printer outfeed, all copies of the same thing. Apparently, the PDF was going to the printer instead of One Note. I had an older version of Acrobat (6.0.1) on a different PC that was working just fine, so I ended up just uninstalling 8 and installing 6. Everything worked just fine after that. Other than simply reading PDF files, I don't use Adobe Reader for anything else. So, I wasn't deriving much benefit from 8 over 6 anyways. You can download older versions of Acrobat from Adobe's website.