Microsoft Photosynth is a cool application / service.  What does it do?  Microsoft says "Photosynth creates an amazing new experience with nothing more than a bunch of photos. Creating a synth allows you to share the places and things you love using the cinematic quality of a movie, the control of a video game, and the mind-blowing detail of the real world."  Though a nice description, it does not really tell you what it does.

Simply put, it takes a number of photos you provide to create as complete of a composite as possible.  In good examples making the some of the photos a much more complete picture than any individua... [More]

I just completed the setup of BugTracker.NET at The Bureau.  Patrick had found it and though it lacks UI candy, it looked like a very good tool / resource.  It is a web based bug tracking tool for software development teams.  It is free and simple to use.  At first glance, it looks a bit ugly, there is definately room for a lot of enhancement to the user interface.  That being said it very elagantly accomplishes what is necessary to track bugs, issues, feature opportunities, etc. within the application development process.

It took a little longer than I had wanted; however, it is done and ready.  You can download version 1.0.0.0 of the PasswordGenerator Widget from this post below.  This widget is designed to work with Blogengine.  I have tested it on version 1.4.5.14 with both a back end MS SQL database and the xml backend.  Both seem to work fine.  The widget is very simple, but handy.  I hope it will help others figure out how to write there own widgets and extensions.  It is available for free (however, I offer no guarantee that it will funciton).  Please feel free to do with it what you will.  If you do find pro... [More]

GUA 2009 Conference is coming fast.  May 17th is just around the corner.  It is not to late to get the early bird registration.  You have until May 1st.  On the conference site you will find all kinds of updates to the speakers and sessions being featured at this year's conference.  It should be a good conference in Orlando this year.  On top of a good conference, it is going to be at a great location.  The Grand Lakes Orlando looks like it will be a great location with lots of ammenties.  I am looking forward to it.

I took a few minutes last night and figured out the admin management / edit page and data storage for a widget.  In the end, very easy.  Blogengine stores the data in either the database or xml based on your provider settings for your site.  Everything I am doing is with an MSSQL database backend so in my case blogengine store that data to the be_DataStoreSettings table.  It very simply stores all of the settings for a widget in that table identifying the id of the widget and the settings for the widget in seperate fields.  In the settings field, all settings for the widget are stored as xml.  In the end the datastore table only has one record per widget.&nbs... [More]

Greetings.  The password generator has been working well and a number of folks have found it.  I just recently added a checkbox for making a password mixed case.  Next I am going to write the admin edit page for the widget.  From that page the site admin will be able to constrain the character list for each type of password.  Once I complete that page I will provide a packaged widget available to anyone interested in how it works with some of my notes.  I have been very impressed by how simple the process is to develop a BlogEngine widget.

I spent some time today playing with some of the newer photo tools available.  I must say, I am surprised by how many tools are available for free.  Some of the ones I played around with include:

• Microsofts Deep Zoom Composer (Sea Dragon / Silverlight)
• Microsoft Photosynth
• Microsoft ICE (Image Composition Editor)
• Adobe Lightroom 2 / Photoshop 4

Below you will find some of my initial thoughts and reactions to each of the tools / technologies. I will be following up with a post about each of these individually with more detail and an example.

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