The first Photosynth technology preview has hit the web! Today, you can visit the Photosynth site to explore four different collections of photos in 3D space. Back in August, the Photosynth team announced their work at the SIGGRAPH 2006 conference, along with a lot of amazing Microsoft research into visualization . And now, just a few months later, if you're using IE6 or IE7 you can try it yourself! (Let me pre-empt the inevitable comment: the Photosynth team makes very clear that they intend to

I touched down yesterday in Toronto, Canada, where I'm going to spend Christmas with my family in their home about two hours north of the city. The suburbs of Toronto are covered now with a beautiful, classically Canadian dusting of snow. Thanks to all of you for your part in an incredible year. I'm too sappy right now to go into detail (must be the effects of maple syrup), but it's been a pleasure to meet and work with such talented, diverse and interesting people. I wish you all a very enjoyable

At long last, I've posted the photos of some of the many participants who tried out the Mind Balance brain-computer interface at the Dublin launch event. I previously chronicled the story of the resurrection of Cerebus, our wireless brain-computer interface, prior to the launch event. Many participants at the event, including Clare (as pictured below) had a chance to try Mind Balance, and successfully used only the electrical activity at the surface of their head to control the Mawg as he walked

In this week's MSDN Flash Ireland editorial, I reflected on Steve Ballmer's visit to Dublin and looked toward our next focus: the November launch events. I've been eagerly awaiting the official photos from the SteveB visit. Here are a few half-decent photos here I took of the various SteveB events I attended. Flash Ireland contains a bi-weekly summary of what we're up to here in the Developer and Platform group, and also includes customizable links to new MSDN articles of interest. Sign up for it

I'm down to Waterford tonight to talk about SQL Server 2005 at the local INDA usergroup . If you're down in the southeast, come on out and I look forward to seeing you at Dooley's Hotel. Just a bit of personal interest to round out my blog for today. Gamasutra (a site devoted to the art and science of making games) has an interesting write-up on the Games for Health conference . The piece works as a thoughtful survey paper on a number of ways people are using interactive techniques to contribute

The internet is abuzz with news from the early proceedings here at the PDC in Los Angeles. Keep up with all the announcements at the MSDN PDC site . I posted my first set of PDC photos up at my MSN Space . Most of the shots are from the 2 keynotes. I thought it may be nice for some of you to put faces to famous names. The Office 12 Interface caused a splash yesterday; here are some images of Office 12 that have already hit the web [NOTE: External link, not official content]. The server side of Office

I've been distracted from my attempts to finish my wrap-up to last week's TechEd Europe, and in the interim, Marcus has been very eloquent , and Clare called out my favourite moment from the latter half of the week: Senior VP and CTO David Vaskevitch , in his keynote, observing that we tend to overestimate what’s possible in a two-year time span, but underestimate what we can collectively accomplish in ten years. That makes intuitive sense to me (and I realized afterwards that it applies equally

The .NET Academic Library has arrived! This is the collection of books we'll be sending this week to the 20 largest Universities and IT Colleges in Ireland and Northern Ireland. Thanks again to all of you who helped us arrive at this collection! 24 copies of 21 books of about 500 pages each... we guesstimated about 100,000,000 words in the whole shebang. Somehow that seems a bit high. What's your guesstimate? Here is the book list, arranged by category: Introductory/Reference .NET intro: Introducing

This is just too cool not to blog: MSN Virtual Earth is announced by Bill Gates at the D3 conference in San Francisco. In addition to overlaid satellite and street map data, Virtual Earth can generate 45-degree-views of locations. To quote one writer , watching Virtual Earth flip from satellite overhead view to a 45-degree close-up of a building produced "the first 'ohhhhhhhhhhhh' moment of the conference." [ Update: Here's a writeup in the blog of one of the Virtual Earth Developers!]

As Paschal reports, Monday night’s INDA discussion topic was the use of the CLR in SQL Server 2005 . Nick Grattan gave a characteristically thoughtful talk that walked us through the steps involved in hosting .Net assemblies on SQL Server. Nick’s also already blogged the answer to my burning question, which was: what are the proposed best practices for when I should use this new feature ? How does CLR Assembly hosting fit in to the big picture alongside TSQL? It turns out it's a case of with rather