In this article, we’ll cover how you can build your own customized 3D tour with no code using Bing Search.  This is a great way to share your local points of interest (like the stunning Burj Al Arab – warm sun bathing photo taken two days ago my frigid friends) with friends and family. This is particularly helpful if you moved halfway across the globe and need to fly friends shortens a 12 hour flight into 12 seconds.  Let’s explore how I created my own Bing collection to fly my NYC friends to Dubai and back.

Build a 3D Tour of your favorite POI (not the kind you eat in Lanai)

• Go to Bing.com – sign in with your live ID (this way you can save all the customization into your account)
• Click on the Maps tab
• Type in : Dubai Marina (or whatever neighborhood you call home)
• Change the view to be Aerial Satellite

Fred lives Underwater (no, not a new band)

• Here you have two options to add a point of interest (POI).
  1. Zoom and pan around until you get to a point of interest. For me, I choose the Burj Al-Arab. OR
  2. If your POI is something fairly well known, it is easier to load the lists create by other users. In the left hand side, click on the link for “Explore user-contributed places” The results will include news, Wiki articles, and other URLs contributed by users. Like our friend Fred, who apparently lives under water. You will see pushpins next to these points and you can adopt them as your own by clicking on the pushpin link.  Once you do that, a small window opens up with more information and metadata about the POI. From there you can click on the Save button to save it to your own personal collection (Again, you need to be signed in first, in order to see this option).
  3. Keep adding POIs until you are satisfied with your list.

Create a custom Tour

• Create a custom itinerary or tour, by adding several POIs to My Places Editor. Each time you save a location, it gets added to your list.
• Click on the My Places button to create new lists and tours by clicking on the “New List” button.
• You can also import and explore other people’s lists. 

Fly first class with Photosynths

• You also have the option to filter the user contributions by toggling the options at the top of the list. You can choose only to see items with photos, 3D buildings, MapCruncher, or Photosynthwhich enables you to combine multiple photos into one first person type view, as you can see by visiting Times Squareor by visiting the observation deck of the tallest building in the world, Burj Khalifa

Create a 3D tour to fly your friends to Dubai

• After you are satisfied with the order of the locations in your list, close the My Places editor and select the Actions drop down button. Now you are ready to fly your friends over by creating a 3D tour. Choose the “Tour & make videos in 3D” link .
• When you play the tour, the globe will spin as your friends fly over to visit.
• When the video plays, the user flies from spot to spot. You can even customize the flying behavior to include panoramic spin around and speed up or slow down the animations.  Hit  the “Go To” Play button when you and change the drop down from Asli’s favorite building to Home in New York to fly from Dubai to New York in 12 seconds.
• You can right click on a pushpin in the map and choose Edit, and then modify the behavior of the 3D animation in the 3D Tour tab. You can change the viewpoint – to be from ground level or above or circle a building clockwise. You can do this for each POI and really create a unique experience for your friends and family.
• When you are ready, you can share your map via link or email.  

Most of us at Microsoft spend most of our time in Outlook and the flow of email sometimes can get overwhelming. Categories, Rules and Alerts are one way to prioritize the flow. You can take this one step further and color code your inbox as such:

Outlook 2010 moved the location for Automatic Formatting. Although I had set this up on my previous machine, today when my teammate, MM asked me where it was, it took me a bit of time to remember.  Instead of Tools, Options, it is now located under the View menu. Click on the View Settings menu to begin.

Click the Conditional Formatting button

You can change any of the existing ones for Unread messages (bold), Expired messages (strike through). Or you can add your own. Let’s do that! Click the Add button.

Now you need to add “rules” or in this case they are called – conditions. Click the condition button. In my case, I want to change the “Where I am” option. I choose the “on the To line with other people” option. You can create as many of these as you would like.

Select a formatting font for these messages – Click on the Font button and then adjust the settings for the Font. In my example, I opted to see any emails that have me in the To with other people as red:

Now I can see any email sent directly to me in red:

A fun one to add is “Not to me” – I code those in light grey. This takes a bit more advanced work to set up.  Follow the same steps as above, and after you click on the Condition button, instead of selecting “Where I am” choose Advanced. Then in the Fields box, select All Mail Fields and pick To.  And another criteria that uses the CC field and doesn’t contain your name. Then select “doesn’t contain” and type in your name. For Font, choose Silver.

It’s not often you run into a Chihuahua powered by a beta version of the richest design framework available in the world.  Littles the Chihuahua’s object model takes full advantage of Expression Blend’s frame, trigger and time based animations. Methods include Wave{}; PlayDead{}; FetchSlippers{}; and many more.

Littles was first programmed using Silverlight 2.0, and is best known for serving for 7 years as the United States Development & Evangelism Platform Team Mascot.  Some may infamously know her from her ill-fated demo during Mix07.  Secretly sprearheaded by Australian Evangelists such as  Michael KordahiLittles was due to burst onto the stage with an accelerometerstrapped on to her back, sending signals via Bluetooth to hijack the opening keynote demo as such:

Her movements would trigger the screen on the computer to tilt and shift, moving a virtual ball around a small maze.  Unfortunately, the non-dog friendly and ADD ridden gambling nature of Vegas hotels on the strip caused the effort to be prematurely abandoned.

Emirates Hill Chihuahua Right to Left Language Support

Now in Silverlight 4, Littles can take her routines (play dead) and subroutines (drape paw dramatically over eye) even further. In previous versions of Silverlight, Littles did have the capability to render her barks in many lanaguges. For example, in Turkish, Miniko (a.k.a. Littles)  does not bark or go “woof”, but simply says “hov hov”.  In France Mininoa (a.k.a. Litttles) issues a dainty “vaf vaf” with a certain “je ne sais quoi - je suis Chiwa” disdain.

With the Right to Left language support, Littles can now render her barks in RTL languages such as Arabic – a perfect enhancement for the newly transplanted & newly translated Emirates Hill Chihuahua.  We can only look to Silverlight 5 to make Chihuahua transplants as easy as translations. In the next post, we’ll compare the relocation of a human versus Chihuahua from New York City to Dubai. Which is easier? The results will surprise even you.

Although most of you may know my former teammate Sam Chenaur for his role as the acclaimed Policeman #2, he is actually now better known for his role on Nike’s Cloud Computing effort -  the Mosaic 23/25 project- a poster child for social networked media – and a shining example of how a company can take branding to the next level – by building a tribe of fansumers around a powerful brand such as Nike. Windows Azure and Silverlight provides a level of dynamic interactivity between a company and its fans, creating site stickiness - (e.g. how long a user stays on a page, and how often the user comes back to visit).

The Moasic 23/25 project leverages Silverlight’s DeepZoom technology to build a giga-mosaic using photos submitted by fans. Once the photo is uploaded, Azure runs a computation in the cloud to calculate where  to best place the photo as a micro-image to form the mosaic pattern of Michael Jordan catching air.  Fans can then click on the Michael Jordan image and keep zooming, zooming, zooming until they drill deep into their very own uploaded photo.

Is your photo wrapped around Michael Jordan’s waist?

At 713% you can still see the pick out the image of Michael Jordan’s waistband while beginning to make out the individual photos that comprise the colors.

Send a Secret Valentine Using Windows Azure

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Windows Azure is ready to play Cupid! At 6000% we can see a lovely couple in love (naturally they are from France), along with a rating of the photo and their favorite shoe.

With Azure Cloud computations running constantly in the background, the mosaic is ever changing, so the steps to zooming into this picture will change. You can search for this photo using the metadata – for example: type in Aeight to the search box and see that it constantly keeps moving throughout the main image. I like the idea of embedding a secret message into Michael Jordan using your personal photos as Easter Eggs- you can create a scavenger hunt for a loved one! Now imagine if this photo had a little sign that said “Marry me?”  Maybe we will see that demo’ed at Mix10? Gives a whole ‘nother meaning to being on Cloud 9.

Another usage of Silverlight’s Deep Zoom technology was showcased 2 years ago on the Hard Rock site, which highlights a memorabilia collection of over 70,000 items – including guitars played by U2 and Jimi Hendrix to the Beatle's tour bus.  At Mix08, the Silverlight demo zoomed into a photograph of a guitar and kept zooming until it showed the fingerprint of Bo Diddley on the guitar casing. Walk through the steps to see the fingerprint yourself

And that was 2 versions ago – stayed tuned to see what Silverlight 4 has to offer – expect amazing demos during Mix10 in Las Vegas March 15-17 2010 - register by Feb 7 to save money on your pass.

TechDays Sweden 2010 (March 23-24 2010) is proud to host a pre-conference WomenBuild workshop on March 22, 2010 at 6.30pm.

Join us for our first 2010 WomenBuild session in Sweden! The WomenBuild program is specifically designed to address the decline of female talent and leadership in the computer science industry. Microsoft partnered with LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY (LSP) through Robert Rasmussen & Associates to create a unique interactive workshop, using LEGO® Bricks to model solutions for growing strong female leaders in the software industry.

WomenBuild is not only a program but a growing community that provides accessibility to female role models, access to resources, and an open communication path to the Microsoft Women in Technology community.

The WomenBuild program incorporates a hands-on process that draws on the power of creative thinking to shift group conversation from talking heads to focused minds. Each team will be run as a facilitated conversation with physical Lego brick constructions that will powerfully shift a group to more productive outcomes by accomplishing a deeper mining of the diverse wisdom within the group and a clearer shared conclusion on inspirational career paths for women in the technical field. Through this workshop, attendees will share real life experiences, discuss challenges, network & build on-going relationships with other women who are attending the PDC conference. Ultimately, attendees of this workshop will find ways to unleash their creative thinking and transform ideas into concrete concepts.

In this workshop, attendees participate in an environment of rich, interactive experiences by modeling real-life business challenges and solutions with LEGO® Bricks as part of the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY Program (LSP). WomenBuild opens minds to exciting and inspirational ideas on how to be a thought leader in the technical field. We work together in small groups to brainstorm and problem solve in a collaborative and productive way. The workshop includes people in various responsibility areas in teams. This way each role can impart their own unique perspective to the group, while collectively creating shared understandings that direct future activity effectively. WomenBuild workshops are not exclusive to women, as these topics apply both to men and women.

For those of you interested in attending the workshop in Sweden:

Datum och plats:
22 mars på Conventum i Örebro
Tid: 18:30 – 20:30
Ansvariga på plats: Danwei Tran, utvecklarevangelist på Microsoft och Robert Rasmussen från LEGO® Serious Play.
Vi bjuder på smörgås och dryck. Platserna är begränsade och deltagandet är kostnadsfritt.
Du anmäler ditt intresse genom att maila: danwei.tran@microsoft.com