NASA World Wind

Nasa World Wind is an amazing program that allows any user to zoom from high altitude to any place on the Earth's surface. The data comes from high-resolution LandSat and USGS data.

Some of images are literally jaw-dropping; in particular the USGS high-resolution ortho-imagery. (To view this, use the Layer Manager, select "High-Resolution Terrain Mapped Imagery" and deselect all but "USGS Urban Area Ortho-Imagery".) Several major US cities are covered at 0.25m. Good examples are Washington D.C., Houston, Chicago and Tampa Bay. For a list of ortho-imagery data see here.

The final cool part to World Wind is that it is implemented in C# and includes full source code.

ClearType Tuner

ClearType Tuner is a new Windows XP PowerToy that makes it easier to calibrate the ClearType technology. This installer adds the utility to the Control Panel.

Is Windows Forms Dead?

Mike Harsh is a PM on Microsoft's Windows Forms team. He answers the question: Is Windows Forms Dead?

This seems to give the clearest intent (short of a Microsoft press-release) of what will happen with Windows Forms. It is interesting since, even though it is intended to calm the community’s worries about Windows Forms, it goes further than any other article I've seen. It indicates that Windows Forms has a very limited lifetime! Furthermore the recent news that Avalon is to be retrofitted to Windows XP soon, seems to imply that the only reason to write in WinForms going forward is for Windows 2000 compatibility (or WinNT4/Win98 etc.).

I presume that we can expect Visual Studio 2005 ("Whidbey") or an upgrade release (presumably pre-"Orcas" since that is tied to the full "Longhorn" release) to include declarative (XAML) and programmatic support for Avalon in the near future.

Daniel C. Robbins: Prototype UI Elements

Daniel C. Robbins, a User Interface Designer working at Microsoft Research, has come up with a number of UI prototypes.

Fun Flash game: Yeti Olympics

See: ylympics

Microsoft DevDays 2004 Streaming Sessions and Code Online

See Microsoft DevDays 2004 Streaming Sessions to access recordings and source code.

Windows Media Player 10 released

Windows Media Player 10 has been released along with some new visualizations.

Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 Refresh with Visual Studio 2005 Team System

Microsoft has released the Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Visual Studio 2005 Team System to MSDN subscribers. This is a 3.39 GB download.