Saturday, December 4, 2010

Image Composite Editor

Microsoft Image Composite Editor is an advanced panoramic image stitcher. Given a set of overlapping photographs of a scene shot from a single camera location, the application creates a high-resolution panorama that seamlessly combines the original images. The stitched panorama can be shared with friends and viewed in 3D by uploading it to the Photosynth web site. Or the panorama can be saved in a wide variety of image formats, from common formats like JPEG and TIFF to the multiresolution tiled format used by Silverlight's Deep Zoom and by the HD View andHD View SL panorama viewers.

Click here to watch video.

New features through version 1.3.5

  • Accelerated stitching on multiple CPU cores
  • Ability to publish, view, and share panoramas on the Photosynth web site
  • Support for "structured panoramas" — panoramas consisting of hundreds of photos taken in a rectangular grid of rows and columns (usually by a robotic device like the GigaPan tripod heads)
  • No image size limitation — stitch gigapixel panoramas
  • Support for input images with 8 or 16 bits per component
  • Ability to read raw images using WIC codecs
  • Photoshop layer and large document support

Additional features

  • State-of-the-art stitching engine
  • Automatic exposure blending
  • Choice of planar, cylindrical, or spherical projection
  • Orientation tool for adjusting panorama rotation
  • Automatic cropping to maximum image area
  • Native support for 64-bit operating systems
  • Wide range of output formats, including JPEG, TIFF, BMP, PNG, HD Photo, and Silverlight Deep Zoom

Support

Microsoft Image Composite Editor is provided free of charge and without official support. However, if you have questions or issues with Image Composite Editor, you may find help at the Image Composite Editor Forum, which is monitored by the developers and provides community-based support.

Microsoft Research: Zentity

ZentityWith Zentity, researchers can extend existing data models by adding additional relationships and properties to these relationships. Zentity is flexible and extensible, taking advantage of the optimization and performance available from Microsoft SQL Server. Zentity provides a built-in ScholarlyWorks data model with pre-defined entities—such as lecture, publication, paper, presentation, video, file, person, and tag—along with basic properties for each of these and well known relationships—such as author, city, and version. The platform also provides support to create custom entities and design custom data models by using our Extensibility API. Learn more...

New Features

Here’s what’s new in this release:

  • New services: Pivot Collection Service and Zentity Data Service
  • New client applications:
    • Pivot Viewer and ODATA Viewer, in collaboration with Microsoft Live Labs
    • Visual Explorer, in collaboration with MSR Asia
    • PowerShell admin console
  • .NET 4.0 support
  • ODATA support
  • Data model agnostic
  • Multi-tier application support
  • Zentity SDK
  • Improved deployment experience

System Requirements

To run this software, you’ll need the following:

  • Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7 Ultimate or Enterprise
  • Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0, IIS 7 or above, Application Server role installed, Silverlight version 4, Windows SDK for Windows 7, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Native client, Windows PowerShell 2.0
  • SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition or above, SQL Server 2008 R2, SQL Server Express with Advanced Services (with file stream, full-text search and named pipes enabled)

For more detailed information, see the system requirements section in the Installation Instructions document (also included with the downloaded .zip file).

Installation Instructions

To install Zentity 2.0, do the following:

  1. Extract the contents of the .zip file to a folder.
  2. Open the folder containting the extracted files, and then run the corresponding client or server MSI installation wizard.
  3. Follow the onscreen instructions to install Zentity 2.0.

For more detailed information, see the Installation Instructions document (also included with the downloaded .zip file).

Chrome to Windows Phone 7 Now Available

Approved and waiting for your download, Chrome to Windows Phone 7 is now available in the mobile OS' operating system. True to its name, once you download both this app and the applicable Chrome extension, a quick click on the Windows logo in your otherwise Google browser will send links or selected text to your Microsoft mobile. Join your Android friends in embracing the Continuous Clientlifestyle.

Microsoft Research: Zentity

With Zentity, researchers can extend existing data models by adding additional relationships and properties to these relationships. Zentity is flexible and extensible, taking advantage of the optimization and performance available from Microsoft SQL Server. Zentity provides a built-in ScholarlyWorks data model with pre-defined entities—such as lecture, publication, paper, presentation, video, file, person, and tag—along with basic properties for each of these and well known relationships—such as author, city, and version. The platform also provides support to create custom entities and design custom data models by using our Extensibility API. Learn more...

New Features

Here’s what’s new in this release:

  • New services: Pivot Collection Service and Zentity Data Service
  • New client applications:
    • Pivot Viewer and ODATA Viewer, in collaboration with Microsoft Live Labs
    • Visual Explorer, in collaboration with MSR Asia
    • PowerShell admin console
  • .NET 4.0 support
  • ODATA support
  • Data model agnostic
  • Multi-tier application support
  • Zentity SDK
  • Improved deployment experience

System Requirements

To run this software, you’ll need the following:

  • Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7 Ultimate or Enterprise
  • Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0, IIS 7 or above, Application Server role installed, Silverlight version 4, Windows SDK for Windows 7, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Native client, Windows PowerShell 2.0
  • SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition or above, SQL Server 2008 R2, SQL Server Express with Advanced Services (with file stream, full-text search and named pipes enabled)

For more detailed information, see the system requirements section in the Installation Instructions document (also included with the downloaded .zip file).

Installation Instructions

To install Zentity 2.0, do the following:

  1. Extract the contents of the .zip file to a folder.
  2. Open the folder containting the extracted files, and then run the corresponding client or server MSI installation wizard.
  3. Follow the onscreen instructions to install Zentity 2.0.

For more detailed information, see the Installation Instructions document (also included with the downloaded .zip file).

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Research in Software Engineering (RiSE)

coordinates Microsoft's Research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA. There mission is to advance the state of the art in SE, to bring those advances to Microsoft’s business, and to take care of those SE technologies that are critical to the company, but not inherently linked to particular products.


http://rise4fun.com/Fine