Many of our customer have been using Microsoft Robotics Studio in non-robotics applications ranging from business processes, major web sites, retail automation, command and control systems, scientific computing, sensor-nets and much more. Of course you can use Microsoft Robotics Studio for cool stuff like driving autonomous cars, flying unmanned vehicles, and sailing autonomous underwater vehicles. But at the core of Microsoft Robotics Studio lies a powerful concurrent and distributed engine consisting of the two components CCR and DSS that enable users to write generic applications that coordinate messages between loosely coupled components within and across nodes. For online information about Microsoft Robotics Studio, please see the Microsoft Robotics Studio Developer Center.
Today Microsoft unveils RoboChamps (www.robochamps.com), a simulated robotics league that is open to academics, hobbyists and developers from around the world, that demonstrates the power of the Microsoft platform to enable a broad range of developers to explore new ways to use .NET for robotics programming.
RoboChamps is built on top of the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio(MSRDS) 2008 CTP, and uses that product’s robust, physics enabled simulation environment to remove the barriers of entry that exist for many today. This simulated league provides individuals with immersive 3D environments, simulated versions of robots, and compelling scenario-specific challenges where they can win real robots.
| If you would like to program a real robot, instead of one in simulation, take a look at the Lego Mindstorms NXT Robot. This is a great starter robot that includes a 32-bit microprocessor, 3 Interactive Servo motors, a sound sensor, ultrasonic visual sensor, touch sensor, and a light sensor. The kit also features 519 specially selected LEGO TECHNIC elements for sturdy and durable building and improved functionality and movement, 4 input ports, 3 output ports and 7 6-wire cords Matrix display, Piezo speakers, USB 2.0 and Bluetooth support. It comes with a visual programming environment called LabVIEW which is developed by National Instruments, but now you can program it using MSRDS. |   |
More information:
 | We at GE only have two sources of competitive advantage: 1) the ability to learn more about our customers faster than the competition, and 2) the ability to turn that learning into action faster than the competition. |  |
| | Jack Welch | |
To commemorate Earth Day, April 22nd, Internet Explorer has launched an environmentally themed campaign called Carbon Grove.
Windows Internet Explorer has partnered with a carbon reduction reminder service to help increase awareness around one of Earth’s most precious resources. You can reduce your carbon footprint and have fun growing your own virtual forest at the same time! Browse three endangered forests while learning how to become a better steward of the environment.
The Carbon Grove campaign highlights what each of us can do to help improve our Earth’s ecosystem and via IE7/8 browser requirement, fosters a safer internet ecosystem. The more people upgrading to Internet Explorer 7 and eventually IE8, the safer our overall internet ecosystem. The campaign launches in US today and will extend into Germany, Poland and France on May 22nd.
Highlighting IE and Silverlight
Built on Windows technology and Silverlight, www.carbongrove.com is a way to reduce your carbon footprint and help move the web forward. The site will only work with Internet Explorer 7 or IE8 Beta. IE6 or alternative browser users will be prompted to download Internet Explorer 7. In addition, the site also showcases IE8’s WebSlice feature and Silverlight technology when planting virtual trees and displaying endangered forests.
How it Works
By answering a short set of questions about your impact on the environment and committing to change one or two behaviors, you earn the right to plant a “seed” in your choice of three endangered virtual forests. Over time, as you confirm via a weekly reminder email that you are working to change your behaviors, your tree will grow and even become shelter for animals native to your forest environment. You can embed your virtual tree in your blog or website, sharing this site with others, and for those running IE8 Beta 1, watch your tree grow in a WebSlice no matter where you happen to be browsing.
Call to Action:
- Visit www.carbongrove.com take the quiz on reducing your carbon footprint
- Plant your tree and explore the 3 endangered forests
- Download IE8 Beta 1 and add the virtual tree WebSlice
- Share the site with others so that together we can impact the earth positively.
- Do your part for the environment and watch your tree grow!
A Joint Technical Committee of the International Standardization Organization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) has concluded its formal process to evaluate Ecma International’s submission of the Draft International Standard (DIS) 29500: Office Open XML (Open XML).
While the final vote has not yet been announced formally, publicly available information shows overwhelming support for Open XML. According to documents available on the Internet, 86% of all national body members support ISO/IEC standardization, well above the 75% requirement for formal acceptance under ISO and IEC rules. In addition, 75% of the Participating national body members (known as P-members) support standardization, also well above the required 66.67% requirement for this group.
Open XML, IS29500, now joins HTML, PDF and ODF as ISO- and IEC-recognized open document format standards.
The ratification of Open XML is proof that the consensus-building process worked. With input from an unprecedented number of technical experts from around the world, the Open XML specification has been greatly improved for the benefit of ISVs, customers and governments. Microsoft is committed to supporting this newly approved specification in its products, and will continue to work with standards bodies, governments and the industry to promote greater interoperability and innovation.
Links
Nothing works on the Web like a beautiful woman with an attitude telling you something silly or stupid or just plain funny before offering you some Web links to get your information search going. Ms. Dewey, the sexy librarian with a brilliantly toothsome smile, offers Web searchers a display of manners by turns goofy, impish, outlandish, coy, and charming. The Ms. Dewey campaign, with her own URL that gives her an uncertain pedigree, helped drive media attention and traffic to MSN while giving it cache among bored Web searchers looking for an attractive soul mate to instruct them on their query journey.
Ms. Dewey premiered on the Web on October 6, 2006, but her story started more than a year before when a marketing group at Microsoft responsible for driving buzz was assigned the task of creating some kind of online avatar to attract users to MSN.
The group had come off a successful Windows Live Messenger campaign featuring video scenes and an interactive online adventure related to the release of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. Sean Carver, then group marketing manager for Windows Live, concedes the Pirates campaign was a lot easier than trying to drum up interest in “algorithmic searches.” Carver also did he see the MSN audience as particularly open to a traditional online marketing campaign—even a clever one.
 | There’s an increasingly prominent consumer who is immune to traditional marketing. They never open an advertising e-mail, they turn off the pop-up ads, they’re not going to click on banner ads, and they’re not going to register online for anything. |  |
| | Sean Carver, Group Marketing Manager, Windows Live |
This same group of marketing cynics may have tried live search and not liked it. Getting them to like anything with a patina of marketing would be challenging, he figured, if not daunting. The concept of avatars began to look attractive, because Microsoft had a history of using them and they have made a comeback: Sun Microsystems even had a press conference in Second Life featuring journalistic avatars last year.
Carver wanted to get users to MSN for search without them having any sense they were being marketed to. With video streaming coming into its own, his team assumed they could create an avatar with full-motion video and several hundred canned responses to typical and atypical searches. “You can now serve up video much faster for a richer experience,” he points out.
Ms. Dewey was born. The team had debated whether to have the avatar change with different searches: Abraham Lincoln could do one search, an avatar for another famous person might do the next one. They scrapped the idea instead for one fictional icon—Ms. Dewey—who would pay homage to the Dewey Decimal System.
The team arrived at an Web site called MsDewey.com featuring Janina Gavankar, an actress best known for playing Papi on Showtime’s The L Word. McCann-Erickson’s graphic designers and the developer EVB created the site.
Gavankar spent three days on a set. Her gig involves taking props from behind her desk, making random comments, and calling users back to the site when they haven’t used it for a few minutes but left it up in their browsers. All told, she has around 600 video responses to queries. Some relate to the query; others seem intentionally obscure, often bizarrely funny.
The backdrop of the set features highways and skyscrapers and changes from day to night, depending on where a visitor to the site lives. The search results show up, shaded, on the right-hand side of the screen. It’s a pretty package.
On March 13th, 2008, Microsoft announced a roadmap for the Open XML SDK. The Open XML SDK, originally announced at TechEd in June 2007, is designed to help developers create client and server solutions that take advantage of the Ecma Office Open XML Formats (ECMA-376).
The Open XML API will be released in two versions:
- The Open XML API “version 1.0” will include an updated version of the CTP that was released in June 2007 and will contain the Open XML Packaging API. The next version of the CTP will be released in April 2008 and the final release of the Open XML API “version 1.0” in May 2008.
- The Open XML API “version 2.0” will contain all the necessary components of the Open XML API architecture, including WordprocessingML, SpreadsheetML, PresentationML and Shared ML API. The first CTP will be available in July 2008 with the final release of the Open XML API “version 2.0” timed to the release of Office 14.
Hundreds of solutions have been created by developers worldwide building on the 2007 Microsoft Office system. Through the Open XML SDK’s sample code and how-to articles on the programming object model, developers will be able to decrease their development time for scenarios such as: - Creating documents programmatically
- Customizing parts within documents
- Adding and inspecting custom XML within documents
- Working with and customizing document properties
Customers and partners interested in learning more should visit http://openxmldeveloper.org/archive/2008/03/13/OpenXMLSDK.aspx
Additional information:
Today Microsoft is announcing that it has joined DataPortability.org, a group committed to advancing the conversation about the portability, security and privacy of individuals’ information online. There are important security and privacy issues to solve as the internet evolves, and we are committed to being an integral part of the industry conversation on behalf of our users.
The decision to join DataPortability.org is an outgrowth of a deeper theme that technology and the internet should be deployed to help people be at the center of their online worlds, a theme that has begun to permeate our products and services over the past few years. We believe the logical evolution of the internet is to enable the removal of barriers to provide integrated, seamless experiences, but to do so in a manner that ensures that users retain full control over the security and privacy of their information.
Windows Live is focused on providing tools and a platform to enable these types of seamless experiences. Windows Live has more than 420 million active Live IDs that work across our services and across partner sites. Through each Windows Live advancement we’re making technical investments to ensure users’ information is available to them in the places they want, even across the networks they use every day. Windows Live Writer, Mail, Photo Gallery and Spaces, for example, allow users to get access and publish to the places they want, even outside Microsoft’s network. And the Windows Live Platform and Terms of Use offer a set of APIs and controls that allow for the growth of an ecosystem based on the premise of user control and portability.
Microsoft feels strongly that getting the right balance for data portability, security and privacy is critical for the industry, and doing it well requires the participation of all the major web services. We are no stranger to these types of broad industry dialogues, and the one that is taking shape at DataPortability will be very effective in furthering users’ interests.
Mac versus Windows vulnerability stats for 2007 by ZDNet's George Ou -- The year 2007 has been an interesting year that brought us improved security with Windows Vista and Mac OS X Leopard (10.5). But to get some perspective of how many publicly known holes found in these two operating systems, I’ve compiled all the security flaws in Mac OS X and Windows XP and Vista and [...]
For organizations that want to reap the benefits of rich interactive applications(RIA) in a cost effective and efficient manner, we are pleased to announce the release to Web of Silverlight 1.0. To make it easier to deliver Silverlight experiences, we are also announcing the RTW of Expression Encoder 1.0.
A number of customers and partners are already planning Silverlight deployments, including:
- External customers: “Entertainment Tonight,” HSN and WWE are ready to light up their Web presences with Silverlight and more customer applications are in the works.
- Internal customers (Microsoft): MSN Extra, Halo3 Preview, Tafiti, MSN Podium ’08.
- Industry partners: More than 35 companies are on board to support Silverlight via the new Silverlight Partner Initiative which encompasses agencies, tools providers, solution providers and CDNs.
Silverlight and Expression Studio are core technologies enabling better user experiences on the desktop, Web and beyond. Microsoft’s user experience approach is part of the broader Microsoft Application Platform strategy, formed with the goal of helping customers realize the benefits from more dynamic applications.
Silverlight has a flexible programming model that allows broad reuse of existing skills and Web investments.The programming model supports XHTML, AJAX, XAML, ASP.NET, and other popular languages and platforms including JavaScript, C#, VB, Python and Ruby. Developers can make use of existing skills while easily integrating Silverlight-based content with existing Web applications.
Silverlight 1.0 runs on Windows and Mac, but what about Linux? In response to customer feedback, we are partnering with Novell to deliver an implementation of Silverlight for Linux called Moonlight. By expanding the cross platform support, customers can experience the benefits of Silverlight regardless of the operating system.
For more information see http://www.microsoft.com and http://www.silverlight.net/.
Microsoft has acquired Stratature, a company that produces software for master data management (MDM). MDM is ciritcal to the effective implementation of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).
MDM can be described by the way that master data interacts with other data. Master data can be described by the way that it is created, read, updated, deleted and searched. For example, in transaction systems, master data is almost always involved with transactional data. A customer buys a product. A vendor sells a part, and a partner delivers a crate of materials to a location. An employee is hierarchically related to their manager who reports up through a manager (another employee). A product may be part of multiple hierarchies describing their placement within a store. This relationship between master data and transactional data may be fundamentally viewed as a noun/verb relationship. Transactional data capture the verbs, such as sale, delivery, purchase, email, and revocation; master data are the nouns. This is the same relationship data-warehouse facts and dimensions share.
For more information on MDM read Roger and Kirk's article on MSDN at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb190163.aspx.
This post refers to an amusing article titled "If building architects had to work like IT architects" (I don't know who the original author was, but you can read it here ).
Katheryn Morgan, a building architect and wife of a colleague of mine, Gabriel Morgan, provided an interesting perspective on the synergies and differences between the two fields.
"The article is misleading because your IT projects are better related to a commercial non- personal project. Your clients would be equivalent to a developer not an individual looking for a personal residence. It can be done different ways, but this way is very common:
Initial Design
If the client is really unsure of what he wants and only has a vague idea and he wants to see some ideas first then he is paying for the head designer's experience. The team is made up of different experienced architects and workers. Each person's time is charged to the client at a different rate. Just like consulting, we have to assign our time to each project. The head designer would charge more per hour than the person assigned to draw it up. The more re-draws based on the clients wishy-washy-ness the more money they are being charged. The client is charged for mileage for site visitations, city department visits etc. Once a design has been agreed on (the project can easily be, and often does get nixed because the client has not acquired the site for the project or the investors have backed out or there are problems with the city allowing such project etc. You can convert any of these problems into your IT world I'm sure) then there is a next phase of costs.
Documentation Phase
The client will be charged by how many sheets of documentation is required for the project to go to a contractor to get sufficient bids for cost of construction. The lead architect by experience should know how many sheets would be required based on the size of the project. The client is also charged for all printing and mailing costs.
Construction Documentation Bidding
The documents are sent to several prospective contractors chosen by the architects and sometime by the clients, as they have probably worked with some before and others chosen because of their direct experience with this particular type of project. The builders bid this project on the hopes they will receive the project and no money is charged by them. The winner is the one who comes back with the best realistic construction cost and can generally show a realistic construction time line with milestones that they are held accountable for and they receive partial payments as long as those milestones are reached. There can also be a bonus incentive for them to finish on time (which rarely happens). This process is kept in strict confidence and the architect never reveals to the other builders what the others bid was.
Construction
Here is a key point different to your world: the designers and the constructors (builders) are different entities. The architect’s role here is to see to the client’s BEST interest. the architects answers RFI's and does site visits to ensure the vision of the project is coming to fruition. The architect answers requests for payment by checking if the milestones have been met, reporting progress to the clients and if the client is satisfied he will approve payment, and the architect will pay the builder.
At the end of the project the architect does a walk thru with the client and builder and any things that need fixing are written and given to the builder. He has to finish these last things before a certificate of occupancy is issued and the builder is given his last payment and any incentive bonus. The architect is also in charge of getting all permits from the city and any official requirements so the client can easily transition."