Jennifer Marsman

Surface Development Part 5: Futures and Resources

Hopefully you've learned a little about Surface development this week!  I didn't originally intend to have a fifth section, but wanted to include the new announcements and some resources for further investigation. 

First, at TechEd last week, the Surface team announced Surface 1.0 SP1.  Cruise over to the Surface team blog to get all of the details on SP1, but here's a quick summary of some of the new features and improvements:

• Contact visualizations such as subtle UI trails in response to fingers on the Surface top
• International support including virtual keyboards in other languages
• New "LibraryStack" control - lets you neatly stack items, as opposed to the artful scattering of the ScatterView
• New "ElementMenu" control - circular UI on the top of an item that expands menu options
• Stress testing tool - how awesome is this!  Stress testing for the Surface is very difficult when you just have a mouse to work with.  This allows you to simulate lots of fingers, tags, and blobs touching the Surface top. 
• Object routing - launching applications via tagged objects
• ScatterView and TagVisualizer enhancements, including a DragDropScatterView control

Here is a video walkthrough of some of the new features:

Secondly, here are some resources to help you with Surface development:

• Surface website: http://www.microsoft.com/surface/
• Surface team blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/surface
• Video of Surface session at PDC: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC17/
• Video of Surface session at TechEd: http://www.msteched.com/online/view.aspx?tid=eb4cd73b-e08b-41f2-a241-727a043dbfec (This is only viewable by TechEd attendees.) 
• Surface community site: http://community.surface.com (This is the site that isn't open to the public; you need an invitation.  You can download the SDK from here and there are also forums for questions.) 

Other posts in this Surface Development series

Surface Development Part 1: What is the Microsoft Surface? 

Surface Development Part 2: Surface Controls

Surface Development Part 3: ScatterView

Surface Development Part 4: Reacting to Physical Objects

Published Friday, May 22, 2009 7:38 PM by jennmar