Saturday, December 4, 2010

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

Sunday, November 28, 2010

NCBI BLAST on Windows Azure

Making Bioinformatics Data More Accessible to Researchers Worldwid

BLAST on Windows Azure enables cloud-based analysis of vast proteomics and genomic data.Built on Windows Azure, NCBI BLAST on Windows Azure enables researchers to take advantage of the scalability of the Windows Azure platform to perform analysis of vast proteomics and genomic data in the cloud.

BLAST on Windows Azure is a cloud-based implementation of the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). BLAST is a suite of programs that is designed to search all available sequence databases for similarities between a protein or DNA query and known sequences. BLAST allows quick matching of near and distant sequence relationships, providing scores that allow the user to distinguish real matches from background hits with a high degree of statistical accuracy. Scientists frequently use such searches to gain insight into the function and biological importance of gene products.

BLAST on Windows Azure extends the power of the BLAST suite of programs by allowing researchers to rent processing time on the Windows Azure cloud platform. The availability of these programs over the cloud allows laboratories, or even individuals, to have large-scale computational resources at their disposal at a very low cost per run. For researchers who don’t have access to large computer resources, this greatly increases the options to analyze their data. They can now undertake more complex analyses or try different approaches that were simply not feasible before. more

Thursday, November 18, 2010

iRobot & Kinect Sensor



While there have already been a lot of great proof-of-concepts for the Kinect, what we're really excited for are the actual applications that will come from it. On the top of our list? Robots. The Personal Robots Group at MIT has put a battery-powered Kinect sensor on top of the iRobot Create platform, and is beaming the camera and depth sensor data to a remote computer for processing into a 3D map -- which in turn can be used for navigation by the bot. They're also using the data for human recognition, which allows for controlling the bot using natural gestures. Looking to do something similar with your own robot? Well, the ROS folks have a Kinect driver in the works that will presumably allow you to feed all that great Kinect data into ROS's already impressive libraries for machine vision. Tie in the Kinect's multi-array microphones, accelerometer, and tilt motor and you've got a highly aware, semi-anthropomorphic "three-eyed" robot just waiting to happen. We hope it will be friends with us. Video of the ROS experimentation is after the break.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

IE 9: Test Drive Samples






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Rob Mauceri, Group Program Manager for Internet Explorer, shows some of the new developer samples available in the seventh build of the IE9 Platform Preview available on the IE Test Drive.

Windows Mobile 7: Top Hot Apps






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This is a new show that will feature 5 of the hottest apps each week for the Windows Phone 7. In this first episode Laura takes a look at:

  • Photos
  • Productivity
  • Movies
  • Music
  • FREE FUN!

Please leave suggestions for cool apps that should be featured in the comments section, thanks!

Monday, November 1, 2010

Google Instant


Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type.

The most obvious change is that you get to the right content much faster than before because you don’t have to finish typing your full search term, or even press “search.” Another shift is that seeing results as you type helps you formulate a better search term by providing instant feedback. You can now adapt your search on the fly until the results match exactly what you want. In time, we may wonder how search ever worked in any other way.

Benefits

Faster Searches: By predicting your search and showing results before you finish typing, Google Instant can save 2-5 seconds per search.

Smarter Predictions: Even when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, predictions help guide your search. The top prediction is shown in grey text directly in the search box, so you can stop typing as soon as you see what you need.

Instant Results: Start typing and results appear right before your eyes. Until now, you had to type a full search term, hit return, and hope for the right results. Now results appear instantly as you type, helping you see where you’re headed, every step of the way


Friday, October 29, 2010

Driverless Electric Van Cruises from Italy to China

Driverless electric van cruises 8,000 miles from Italy to China without stopping to ask directions

They made it. The team from Visilab, which left way back in July, has arrived in China and will now take its place among the various other random things going on at the Shanghai World Expo. As you may or may not recall, a gaggle of autonomous orange EVs left Italy three months ago on a trip that would take them through cities like Moscow and wastelands like the Gobi Desert, all thanks to an array of laser scanners, cameras, and of course GPS. It was a 13,000km journey (8,078 miles) that was made with minimal driver intervention and, thanks to the EV-nature of the vehicles, without stopping once for gasoline -- though they were limited to about four hours of travel each day before having to recharge. Now, remember when you were impressed that Google's autonomous car managed about 1,000 miles on its own? more

Mount Everest now 'wired' for Internet, ready for Starbucks

TeliaSonera subsidiary Ncell has just completed installation of a 3G base station at 5,200 meters (17,000 feet) that will reach the 8,848-meter peak of Mount Everest. Mind you, we've already seena cellphone call made from the world's highest peak using a temporary base station in a Motorola publicity stunt. This time, however, it's permanent and faster allowing climbers to surf the internet or make 3G video calls. Why would Ncell want to build a base station in such a sparsely populated area? Because it is there. more

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Microsoft Adaptive Keyboard - UIST






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You may recall us thinking outloud about the idea of an advanced keyboard using LCD displays for each key and a touch LCD panel across the top. We call it our Adaptive Keyboard and it's an idea that Steven Bathiche has been thinking about for many years in our Applied Sciences Group. This year we gave prototype hardware to a group of students and asked them to present their ideas at this year's User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) symposium.

I headed out to New York to see what the students had come up with and there were plenty of good ideas. You can see the official winners here. A couple that stood out to me included WHACK, a system to dynamically remap keys so your passwords are always different and can't be captured by keyloggers, several visual clipboard applications,and one application that allowed the keyboard to be a visual interface for editing videos.

Watch the Microsoft Hardware Blog for more information.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

.NET Gadgeteer






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At Maker Faire 2010 New York, the .NET Micro Framework team and Microsoft Research (Cambridge) showed off their new device: the .NET Gadgeteer. It's like LEGO for electronics.

In this video, Colin Miller explains some of the details on the board. The board itself has a multitude of connectors, and each is labeled with a letter. A sensor is then used to tell the end user which port to plug into, and all of this allows Collin to create a basic camera using only about three lines of code!

Colin did misspeak, however. He referred to the Device Solutions board as the Embedded Fusion board. That was the old name.

Dare to Dream Different Winner






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Dare to Dream Different was a contest held to see what cool ideas people could come up with using a standard hardware reference board using .NET Micro Framework. During the final judging, I got together with the finalists and talked to them about the projects they submitted.


First Place winner James Ng shows us his very cool (though in this iteration - large) wearable system for controlling automation and replacing things like car keys, credit cards, and passwords. He even made a carbon fiber shell for the reference board.

Building devices with .NET Gadgeteer

Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer is a rapid prototyping platform for small electronic gadgets and embedded hardware devices. Individual .NET Gadgeteer modules can be easily connected and programmed using C# to make fully functional devices.

This video shows how easily .NET Gadgeteer modules can be connected together to build devices, including a simple MP3 player and digital camera.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Microsoft LightSpace

Microsoft LightSpace brings Surface (plus shadows) to any table (video)
It's hard not to love the crazy stuff happening at Microsoft Research, but it's also hard to imagine when any of it is going to actually start changing the way we interact with our PCs. Surface was bested bySecondLight as the coolest tech we can't buy, and now here comes another successor: LightSpace. This gets rid of the expensive table in favor of a (surely not cheap) series of projectors hanging from the ceiling paired to a 3D camera. The camera detects the relative position of things and instructs a projector to apply a Surface-like interface onto any flat surface. From there a user can literally grab any file they like and carry it over to another surface, where it will be displayed. It's all demonstrated quite handily in the video below, and while the system does look a wee bit rough at the moment, the potential is surely there. Just like it was with SecondLight, and Surface, and Courier...more

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Google Street View Now Available in Ireland


View Larger Map
A big bone of contention in many countries, Google's Street View mapping service today goes live in Brazil, Ireland and Antarctica, meaning Street View now has a presence in all seven continents.
Launched in May 2007 in five US cities, the panoramic imaging service has gone on to map cities on every corner of the planet, attracting ire and admiration along the way.
Brian McClendon, vice-president of engineering at Google Earth and Maps, wrote on the company's blog: "We often consider Street View to be the last zoom layer on the map, and a way to show you what a place looks like as if you were there in person – whether you're checking out a coffee shop across town or planning a vacation across the globe. We hope this new imagery will help people in Ireland, Brazil, and even the penguins of Antarctica to navigate nearby, as well as enable people around the world to learn more about these areas." more

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

CCEnhancer Makes CCleaner Even Better

CCleaner is one of the most popular programs for cleaning up the extra files and leftover data on your PC. Although I haven’t had much use for it on my more modern PCs (Windows 7 apparently does its own maintenance regularly) I know I’ve used it in the past to restore friends’ older and somewhat abused PCs to a fresh and clean state, sometimes even dramatically boosting performance in the process.

But I did not know of this: CCEnhancer can add to CCleaner’s capabilities by providing support for hundreds of extra programs beyond those supported by default.

According to FreewareGenius, the add-on app supports 270 extra programs including things like Quicktime and Flash, for example, it works even as a portable app, offers 1-click operation and is simple to use. Nice - who knew? You can try CCenhancer for yourself, just download it from here. It’s free, but donations are accepted.

Panasonic Toughbook S9

Panasonic's Toughbook line hasn't only been impressing in extreme durability lately, but also in extremeweight-loss. Joining the 3.2-pound Tougbook C1, is the newest 12.1-inch Toughbook S9, which weighs just three pounds. And yes, Panny's claiming it's the lightest 12-incher with an optical drive, and our quick research seems to prove that claim right. Even more impressive is the power that's packed into the featherweight chassis -- it's got a Core i5-520M processor, 2GB of RAM, and a shock-mounted 320GB hard drive. Thought that Panasonic gave up the durability for that weightage? You'd be wrong -- the magnesium alloy case can still withstand a 2.5-foot operating drop, meets all the Mil Spec 810-G drop procedures, has a spill-resistant keyboard, and can take more than 220 pounds of pressure on its lid and base. It does sound great for when someone drops it off the airport security belt, but that's until you hear about the physical beating it'll take on your bank account -- it'll retail for $2,499. Yeah, we wish we had better news to end on, but perhaps the press release and pictures below will turn that frown upside down. More

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Netduino Plus


The two new Arduinos should spell good things for the Arduino heads out there, but meanwhile, on the other side of the tracks... Secret Labs is launching its .NET-friendly Netduino Plus, which adds Ethernet and microSD to a regular Netduino board (which in itself is a sort of high powered, Visual Studio-compatible Arduino, with a 32-bit 48MHz ARM7 processor, instead of Arduino's 8-bit number, but pin compatible with Arduino "shields"). Unfortunately, the networking code eats of a good majority of the board's already meager code storage and RAM, but you can always flash the original Netduino's firmware on here if you'd like. Right now the board is in a "public beta" while the firmware gets some extra tweaks, but you should be able to drop $60 on the final model by the holidays.

Buy a Netduino Plus from here...
Download development kit here...
See few sample projects here...

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Microsoft Research Lab: Z3 - An Efficient SMT Solver

Z3 is a high-performance theorem prover being developed at Microsoft Research. Z3 supports linear real and integer arithmetic, fixed-size bit-vectors, extensional arrays, uninterpreted functions, and quantifiers. Z3 is integrated with a number of program analysis, testing, and verification tools from Microsoft Research. These include: Spec#/Boogie, Pex, Yogi, Vigilante, SLAM, F7, SAGE, VS3, FORMULA, and HAVOC. It can read problems in SMT-LIB and Simplifyformats.

Links:

Azure Throughput Analyzer


The Microsoft Research eXtreme Computing Group cloud-research engagement team supports researchers in the field who use Windows Azure to conduct their research. As part of this effort, we have built a desktop utility that measures the upload and download throughput achievable from your on-premise client machine to Azure cloud storage (blobs, tables and queue). The download contains the desktop utility and an accompanying user guide. You simply install this tool on your on-premise machine, select a data center for the evaluation, and enter the account details of any storage service created within it. The utility will perform a series of data-upload and -download tests using sample data and collect measurements of throughput, which are displayed at the end of the test, along with other statistics.
Download

Currently rated

Thursday, September 23, 2010

U1 With Sunlight Viewable Screen

Remember Panasonic's Toughbook CF-U1? Yeah, so it's been a while (2008, in fact) since it was unveiledand then reviewed, which is exactly why Panny thought the time had come to update the rugged UMPC. Its Toughbook U1 has the same magnesium alloy chassis -- we're told it's still the most rugged Toughbook of them all -- but has been updated with "enhanced sunlight viewability." It's no PixelQi display, but the TransflectivePlus screen can be cranked up to 6000 nits for checking e-mails and other pertinent information in the bright light of day. Internally, the U1 has acquired a newer 1.6GHz Atom Z530 processor, 2GB of RAM, and a larger 64GB SSD with Windows 7. The optional two megapixel front-facing camera has also been tweaked with better auto-focus and white balance features. However, the updates aren't just hardware-based: screen icons have been enlarged, and there's a new virtual right click button and larger virtual keyboard with a zoom mode. Of course, military grade doesn't come cheap -- the street price has been set at whopping $2,799. That still makes it one of the most expensive Atom device out there, but then again can you really put a price on something that's Rammer-resistant? We didn't think so.

Monday, September 20, 2010

Microsoft Visual Programming Language: Kodu



Kodu is a new visual programming language made specifically for creating games. It is designed to be accessible for children and enjoyable for anyone. The programming environment runs on the Xbox, allowing rapid design iteration using only a game controller for input. Download

Programming as a Creative Medium

The core of the Kodu project is the programming user interface. The language is simple and entirely icon-based. Programs are composed of pages, which are broken down into rules, which are further divided into conditions and actions. Conditions are evaluated simultaneously.

The Kodu language is designed specifically for game development and provides specialized primitives derived from gaming scenarios. Programs are expressed in physical terms, using concepts like vision, hearing, and time to control character behavior. While not as general-purpose as classical programming languages, Kodu can express advanced game design concepts in a simple, direct, and intuitive manner. mor
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Microsoft Research Labs: Joulemeter

Joulemeter is a software based mechanism to measure the energy usage of virtual machines (VMs), servers, desktops, laptops, and even individual softwares running on a computer.

Joulemeter estimates the energy usage of a VM, computer, or software by measuring the hardware resources (CPU, disk, memory, screen etc) being used and converting the resource usage to actual power usage based on automatically learned realistic power models.

Joulemeter can be used for gaining visibility into energy use and for making several power management and provisioning decisions in data centers, client computing, and software design.

The technology is especially helpful for IT leaders managing power management settings, PC users who wish to get fine grained visibility into their computing energy use, and enthusaist developers who wish to leverage power measurement for optimizing their software and hosted service design for power usage. The fundamental concepts behind how the technology works are available in this paper.

Download: A research preview, that allows advanced users to try out some of the features of the above technology is available for download. Please see the download page. This version supports only system energy metering (with break-downs for CPU, monitor, and disk), on Windows 7 machines.

A WattsUp power meter (WattsUp Pro with USB connection) is recommended for learning an accurate power model for your machine. The power meter can be shared among multiple machines and users as it is needed for only a few minutes per machine. The software will work without a power meter as well.

.NET Gadgeteer

Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer is a rapid prototyping platform for small electronic gadgets and embedded hardware devices. It combines the advantages of object-oriented programming, solderless assembly of electronics using a kit of hardware modules, and quick physical enclosure fabrication using computer-aided design.

Individual .NET Gadgeteer modules can be easily connected together to construct both simple and sophisticated devices. Each module adds some extra capabilities, such as the ability to display images, playback sounds, take pictures, sense the environment, communicate with other devices or enable user interaction.

The platform is built on the .NET Micro Framework, which allows small devices to be programmed in the C# language and make use of Visual Studio’s programming and debugging tools.

This powerful combination allows fully functional devices to be prototyped in a matter of hours rather than days or weeks. more

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Project Gustav: Immersive Digital Painting




Project Gustav is a realistic painting-system prototype that enables artists to become immersed in the digital painting experience. It achieves interactivity and realism by leveraging the computing power of modern GPUs, taking full advantage of multitouch and tablet input technology and our novel natural media-modeling and brush-simulation algorithms. Project Gustav is a great example of how Microsoft's research efforts are leading to exciting new technologies to support creativity.


About

Typically the experience of painting on a computer is nothing like painting in the real world. Real painting is actually a very complex phenomenon – a 3D brush consisting of thousands of individually deforming bristles, interacting with viscous fluid paint and a rough-surfaced canvas to create rich, complex strokes. Until fairly recently, the amount of computing power available on a typical home computer simply hasn't been sufficient to attempt simulating such a real-world painting experience in any detail. Project Gustav aims to leverage the increasing power of the PC and ever faster graphics processors and combine that with a natural user interface, to bring a rich painting experience to a wide audience including hobbyists and professionals alike. The result is a prototype system that contains some of the world’s most advanced algorithms for natural painting. more

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Spyware and viruses: What's the difference?

Spyware and viruses: What is the difference?


Spyware and viruses are both malicious software, but they're different.Learn how, and how Microsoft Security Essentials can help protect you from both. Then find answers to these common questions about Microsoft Security Essentials:

Suspect you have a virus? Get help fast at our newVirus and Security Solution Center, and learnsteps that you can take to help remove it.