Last week the Microsoft Live Labs team released the first version of Photosynth that allows you to make your own synths! Just log in and throw a bunch of images at it and they "automatically reconstruct a three-dimensional space from a collection of photos of a place or an object."
I took a large pool of photos when I was in Thailand earlier this year and built my first synth with it. It turned out fairly well. This is the courtyard of Wat Benchamabophit in Bangkok. Of course, mine is only 76% synthy. This seems to be a measure of how well it is able to stitch the photos together in the 3D space. They also have some tutorials on how best to take photos to make them more synthy.
You can create your own or explore others synths.
They have a number of really good examples from National Geographic.
In order to expand testing of the underlying technology, the Mesh team continues to expand the availability of the platform experience preview. You can now sign-up without a wait list in Canada, India and Ireland also (although you still need to run with an English locale for now.)
Angus Logan put together a map of all the countries where it is available for quick reference.
As announced in the Live Mesh Forum, anyone in the U.S. can now use Live Mesh. Just sign in to www.mesh.com with a valid Windows Live ID.
This is great news as the limited invites available earlier made me think a lot harder about using this to share data. No more "Hmmm, are you Mesh Invite worthy?" :)
I love that even though its a Tech Preview, they keep rolling out updates with new features. Especially the ones that people keep asking about.
My favorite for this release - Sync Live Mesh folders peer-to-peer only, excluding your Live Desktop. This means if you don't want your files stored in the cloud they won't be. They will just sync from device to device.
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Live Mesh
1) One common request I have seen over and over both internally and externally is "How do I get a direct HTTP link to my video?" Well ask and ye shall receive. Just use the following format:
http://silverlight.services.live.com/accountId/fileSet/fileName.wmv
2) Plus a new robust, restartable video uploader. Have you ever tried to upload a large video only to have a network problem cause it to fail when it was 90% completed? No worries. Just resume and finish that last 10%!
Wilson posted a note with a little more info and screen shots on what the SRV entry really means if you are using Windows Live Admin Center to manage your domain within Windows Live and want our IM federation to work properly. Thanks Wilson!
Anyone I've talked to knows I'm a huge fan of the Live Admin Center functionality, but unfortunately the service I use to host my DNS doesn't allow SRV entries : (
The ads pilot is finally available for Silverlight Streaming. You can fill out the form to indicate interest in taking part in the program.
And it looks like they yanked the new deployment mechanism (HTAs) for SLS apps so they can address it properly in a cross-browser friendly manner later.
I made it home from the Windows Live training and stayed awake long enough last night to post some of the pictures from the trip on my space. So for the guys from the class, cheers!
http://thegrassynull.spaces.live.com/photos/cns!76F1A650FBDC1801!264/
I have spent the last few days in Bangkok training a great group of Microsoft folk and partners on the basic ins and outs of the Windows Live Platform. Its really great to see a bunch or people who get it. We have had some excellent discussion and they are ready to go out and help bring the Windows Live Platform to the region!
I really need a better video camera than my smartphone, but anyway - "Hello from Thailand!"
Sweet! The update to Virtual Earth last week has my home town's skyline icon rendered correctly at last. When they first rolled out the 3-D models, Reunion Tower (the distinctive "ball" in the Dallas skyline) was just a stick with no ball.
Of course the release had plenty of cool new goodies but this is what made my day about it.
Silverlight Streaming has had an update pushed out. You can read the details but the summary is
- a new invocation method: link to an HTA package of your Silverlight app.
- performance improvement for the accounts that use a large number of file sets
- more liberal naming convention for applications (the better to use internationally, my dear)
- some bug fixes
I may test out the perf changes. I have a Deep Zoom app which is a 40x40 tileset. I just need enough bandwidth to actually upload it!
So I discovered a limit in Visual Studio. It apparently doesn't handle 1.4 GB of data in 40,000 files in a web site very well. I killed the process after it was "Validating the web site..." for over an hour. I finally figured out I needed to build a smaller Deep Zoom image for testing just to get the build time reasonable.
I wish there was a way to make it ignore that directory for the compile step.
I'm building a Deep Zoom application and have been frustrated when it often has some stupid bug (my own of course) and the whole app just disappears. Eventually I realized a quick and dirty snippet I plan to drop into every future Silverlight app. Its not a replacement for the debugger, but its great when you hit an unanticipated snarl and dont have the debugger attached.
In the application file (typically App.xaml.cs) just hook the unhandled exception handler into the browsers alert function.
private void Application_UnhandledException(object sender, ApplicationUnhandledExceptionEventArgs e)
{
System.Windows.Browser.HtmlPage.Window.Alert(e.ExceptionObject.ToString());
}
A very simple change, but anything you dont anticipate gets popped up in the browser. Of course, you might want to wrap it in a "#if DEBUG" statement to prevent accidentally shipping the final version that way!
Well I've finally given in. After numerous smaller starts and stops, I've finally jumped into the deep end of the blogosphere. Sink or swim time.
Hello. My name is Ben Williams and I have been an Application Development Consultant in the Microsoft Services organization for nearly 8 years working with a wide variety of customers to help them best use Microsoft technologies. For the last few years I have been focused on Visual Studio Team Foundation Server and ALM in general but recently have been knee deep helping customers use all the stuff coming out of the Windows Live Platform team.
So for the most part this blog should be technical snippets and information that I find along the way as I move through the technological landscape. While I mostly deal with Windows Live and TFS my interests tend to be pretty broad so nearly anything can and will pop up here. Hopefully something will help someone along the way. You may also find me in the Windows Live Development forums.
