Deep Earth Released Into the Wild
The open source project dubbed Deep Earth has been officially released. The project puts Microsoft Virtual Earth in a Silverlight UX allowing for incredible visual and scalable geospatial data visualization.
DeepEarth is a mapping control powered by the combination of Microsoft’s Silverlight 2.0 platform and the DeepZoom (MuliScaleImage) control. At its core, it builds on these innovative technologies to provide an architecture for bringing together layers for services, data providers, and your own custom mapping elements together into an impressive user experience. Also featured are in depth examples of how you can leverage Virtual Earth Web Services to take advantage of advanced GIS service functionality. This is what you need to get an interactive, native Silverlight 2.0, map into your application today.
You can see a working version of the application on the Deep Earth Soul Solutions web site.
Here are some of the features:
- Fully implemented map control with property and event model
- Fully templated set of map navigation controls
- Layers for inclusion of Points, LineStrings and Polygons (OGS)
- Conversion library for Geography to Screen coordinated systems.
- Geocoding (find an address)
- Reverse Geocoding (getting an address from a point on the map)
- Routing (Directions)
- Marque zoom selection (default Ctrl-click and drag or from menu toggle)
- Map rotation
Source- MSDN Blog
Microsoft Expands Exchange ActiveSync Licensing Program
Microsoft Corp. today announced it is expanding its Exchange ActiveSync Intellectual Property (IP) Licensing program, facilitated by Version 1.0 releases of technical documentation for protocols built into Exchange ActiveSync, which Microsoft posted on the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) earlier this month. The posting of this documentation completes the set of Exchange ActiveSync protocols Microsoft committed to publish as part of its Interoperability Principles announced in February 2008 (http://www.microsoft.com/interop/principles/default.mspx).
“The Exchange ActiveSync IP Licensing program is another example of how we are continuing to deliver on our commitment to increased openness and collaboration,” said Horacio Gutierrez, vice president of intellectual property and licensing at Microsoft. “This technology is being sought out by our partners and competitors alike because it enhances their value proposition to their customers, and we believe that to be a testament to the innovation taking place at Microsoft.”
Source- Microsoft Press Release
IE December Out-of-Band release
Internet Explorer is releasing an out-of-band update available via Windows Update. Alternatively, you can receive this and all other Microsoft updates via the new Microsoft Update. I encourage you to upgrade to Microsoft Update if you haven’t already to ensure that you receive the latest updates for all Microsoft products.
This update addresses one remote code execution vulnerability. The security update addresses the vulnerability by modifying the way Internet Explorer validates data binding parameters and handles the error resulting in the exploitable condition. For detailed information on the contents of this update, please see the following documentation:
This security update is rated Critical for all released versions of Internet Explorer.
Source- IE blog
E7: Continuing our discussion on performance
We’ve talked some about performance in this blog and recently many folks have been blogging and writing about the topic as well. We thought it would be a good time to offer some more behind the scenes views on how we have been working on and thinking about performance because it such an interesting topic for the folks reading this blog. Of course I’ve been using some pretty low-powered machines lately so performance is top of mind for me as well. But for fun I am writing this on my early holiday present–my new home machine is a 64-bit all-in-one desktop machine with a quad core CPU, discrete graphics, 8GB of memory, and hardware RAID all running a pretty new build of Windows 7 upgraded as soon as I finished the out of box experience. Michael Fortin and I authored this post. –Steven
Writing about performance in this blog is nearly as tricky as measuring it. As we’ve seen directional statements are taken further than we might intend and at the same time there are seemingly infinite ways to measure performance and just as many ways to perceive the same data. Ultimately, performance is something each individual feels is right–whether than means adequate or stellar might vary scenario to scenario, individual to individual. Some of the mail we’ve received has been clear about performance:
- Boot-very very fast in all applications ( open-load applications) especially so many simultaneously!!!!! Hence, massive multicore ( quad-octa core cpu) , gpgpu for all!!!!!!!!!!!!
- This is right time to do this properly, the users want speed, we’ll give them speed.
- i want to be able to run windows 7 extremely fast and still look good graphically on a asus aspire one netbook with these specs-1.5 ghz intel atom processor (single core) 1gb of ram
- I hope that in addition to improvements in the gui and heart (I hope massive multicore + 64-bit + Directx 11 ..extreme performance, etc) for windows 7, modified the feature Flip 3d In Windows 7!!!!! Try to make a Flip 3D feature, really efficient and sensible in windows 7.
- With regard to the performance thing, could you look at ways to reduce the penalty of having a lot of fonts installed.
- From performance, boot up, explorer speed and UI experience , I hope the next version of windows delivers something new and innovating. I was playing with the new UI on the HP TouchPC and I have to say they did a great 1.0 job on the touch interface controls.
- I do keep my fingers crossed for Windows 7 to be dramatically better in its performance than Windows Vista.
- The biggest feature I see a lot of people wanting is performance.
Source- E7 Blog
Announcing the WSRP Toolkit for SharePoint
Today, the sharepoint team announced the release of the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) Toolkit for Office SharePoint Server 2007. The WSRP Toolkit for SharePoint provides sample code for producing WSRP conformant data from SharePoint lists and libraries. External portal platforms (e.g. BEA AquaLogic Portal, IBM WebSphere Portal, SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Portal etc.) can then render SharePoint data natively through their WSRP consumer portlets. The Toolkit is available now for download from the MSDN Code Gallery.
The WSRP Toolkit for SharePoint consists of the following assets:
- Visual Studio sample projects that demonstrate two different approaches to producing WSRP conformant output from SharePoint lists and libraries
- A whitepaper that provides details on the different architectural approaches of the two WSRP producer samples
- Screen casts showing the two WSRP producer samples in action
The Toolkit demonstrates two possible methods of exposing SharePoint data through the WSRP interface and is intended to provide a starting point for customers who are interested in surfacing SharePoint data in non Microsoft portal environments. The first method focuses on maintaining high fidelity with the SharePoint user interface and the second method focuses on providing flexibility and control over the rendered output. We are releasing the source code for the two methods under the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL), allowing developers to customize the solution to meet their specific requirements.
Source- MSDN Blog
Silverlight Toolkit - December Release
The Silverlight Toolkit is a project built by the Silverlight product team, which contains a lot of "out-of-release cycle" controls.
These are grouped into three parts:
- Controls
- Charts
- Themes
Controls include various nice controls (lots of them already part of WPF):
- Auto Complete Textbox
- DockPanel
- Expander
- Label
- NumericUpDown
- TreeView
- Viewbox
- WrapPanel
These controls are especially useful if you plan to write business applications. Also they have similar controls in WPF, so if you plan to port your apps from Silverlight to WPF they come in handy as well.
Download them from http://www.codeplex.com/Silverlight/.
Source- MSDN Blog
Announcing the release of SQL Server 2005 SP3
Microsoft released today SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3 (SP3). SQL 2005 version should now be 9.00.4035.
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3 (SP3) contains hotfixes that were included in cumulative update packages for SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 from cumulative update package 1 to cumulative update package 9, and fixes to issues that have been reported through our customer feedback platforms. It also includes supportability enhancements and issues that have been reported through Windows Error Reporting.
Related links:
- What’s New in SQL Server 2005 SP3
- List of the bugs that are fixed in SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3 (KB 955706)
Downloads:
Source- MSDN Blog
Sure Step Service Pack 1 Now Available
- Platform enhancements:
- The Sure Step setup tool has been enhanced to permit the user to select the destination location for Sure Step documents during installation.
- In the Documents and Projects views, phases show the number of files within them matching the filtering criteria.
- The Reference pages have been updated with our new support information.
- Content fixes:
- Corrections have been made to content in all language packs including fixes to filtering issues, broken or unavailable links, and minor changes to text.
- Some documents did not properly accept a user-supplied logo when the project logo wizard was applied. These documents have been identified and fixed.
- Bug fixes:
- A number of fixes have been instituted to regularize the experience of navigating the Sure Step client and viewing its content.
If you do not currently have Sure Step installed: Go to the Sure Step download page on PartnerSource.
Source- MSDN Blog
