The great thing about developing on Microsoft Surface is that it's based on standard Microsoft tools and practices. If you're a .NET developer working with WPF or familiar with XNA, you can get up and running on Microsoft Surface relatively quickly.

Once you've purchased Microsoft Surface, the first thing developers will want to do is get access to our customer community site. If you are a Microsoft Partner, you can get an early start by using your Microsoft Partner Program ID to sign into the Microsoft Surface QuickStart site.

Whether or not you are ready or able to get up and running on the steps above, here are some resources for getting started in developing on Microsoft Surface.

Jennifer Marsman just completed a series of five helpful posts on development:

1. What is Microsoft Surface?
2. Surface Controls
3. ScatterView
4. Reacting to Physical Objects
5. Future and Resources

In addition, here are just some of the many other great resources from Microsoft colleagues in their blogs and from talks at conferences.

• Getting started Developing Microsoft Surface Applications by Luis Cabrera
• How creating Microsoft Surface apps is different, by Kevin Kennedy. [Part 1] [Part 2]
• Resources for Microsoft Surface WPF development by Mark Hopkins
• Surface Grand Piano sample application by Robert Levy
• Porting WPF Applications to Microsoft Surface by Scott Hanselman
• Integrating Virtual Earth 3D into WPF and Microsoft Surface by Marc Schweigert
• VIDEO: If you were at TechEd 09, you can see the session video on SP1.
• VIDEO: Developing for Microsoft Surface on video at PDC08.

Our all-time most popular development videos was one of the first by Robert Levy showing how to create a simple Microsoft Surface application. It gets referenced again and again in blog posts on the topic. So, here it is:

Cheers!
Eric

Here we've got a video from RAPP Cannes-Cast filed under "comedy". I think the comedy label comes from riffing on the fact that Microsoft Surface is not just a giant iPhone, and not our own James Maki's demoing ability. James takes us through our Concierge application and the debut of a new application we're calling Conference Connector. Conference Connector blends Twitter and Flickr feeds with a way for conference goers to connect and share contact information. (Don't forget to follow our Twitter feed.)

Thanks RAPP Cannes-cast for the video and to James for the great demo job! Enjoying yourself in the relaxed Cannes lifestyle?

As some of you may know Microsoft Surface arrived in Europe just a few months ago, on March 2^nd.

At http://pauldendulk.com/  Paul den Dulk shows BruTile, an open source tiling library for geo data.  From Paul’s blog, it looks like this was their first encounter with the Microsoft Surface SDK. Pretty neat!