We hope that everyone had a great holiday and New Year!

I am looking forward to another exciting year, to meeting many of you in the modeling and simulation community and seeing what people are creating with the Microsoft ESP platform. As a group, we are getting back into the swing of things after the break. Hopefully, we can get to all the great questions on the ESP developer forum in a timely manner. There is a lot of great content planned for the Microsoft ESP developer center. We will continue to create content based on questions posted in our developer forum. Suggestions for code samples are welcomed.

It certainly was a busy fall with a lot of conferences and great responses to our developer training days in November, both in Orlando FL and in London UK. The developer training days were a fantastic way for our team representatives to share developer details and to get feedback from the community. We appreciate all the feedback that we received in the form of questions, remarks, tips and survey responses. Thank you very much! I have to say that the Imperial War Museum in London was probably the coolest venue that I've presented at. The museum opened early for us to host everyone who attended and provided everyone a chance to see some great aircraft, vehicles and history.

The year rounded out in the first week of December with our largest conference presence of the year at I/ITSEC in Orlando FL. Wow, what a show! Many of you in the community were there, as well as countless others. Microsoft hosted a booth that was shared by several technologies including Virtual Earth, Surface Computing (as demonstrated by Northrop Grumman), HPC, GeoSynth/PhotoSynth and of course Microsoft ESP. If you weren't there to see it, check out this press article: Microsoft ESP Showcases the Future of Immersive Simulation Experiences). All of our ESP stations were heavily visited and many of us in the booth nearly lost our voices speaking with so many attendees. :) I was very impressed with all of the booths at the conference. It was great seeing how many other organizations were showing ESP integration in their booths.

Best wishes to everyone for 2009!

- Todd Landstad on behalf of the Microsoft ESP team.