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

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).

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).

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

NCBI BLAST on Windows Azure

Making Bioinformatics Data More Accessible to Researchers Worldwid

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

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.

IE 9: Test Drive Samples

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

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!

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