In this roundtable discussion Rabellino, the Senior Director of Open Source communities at Microsoft, talks about why he joined Microsoft after a long career in open source, and his upcoming ‘listening and learning’ tour across Europe.
He is joined by Stephen Walli, the Technical Director for the Outercurve Foundation, and Garrett Serack, an Open Source Developer in the Open Source Technology Center.

The data in OSM comes from people who record it using GPS devices as well as from free satellite imagery. Once online, it can then be edited by anyone who may know more about a particular area or spots an error. At present, there are around 250,000 users contributing to the project.

By adding OSM as a layer in Bing Maps, you can now easily access this rich data from a familiar source: Bing. The data hasn’t been modified in any way, except to fit into the “tile schema” of Bing Maps, explains Chris Pendleton via blog post. Also of note, the data is being hosted on Windows Azure CDN, which is designed to support globally distributed apps such as this.

Now that documentation has been made publicly available. On MSDN, anyone can read through all the details about the PST Structure Specification, including all the data structures it uses, examples, considerations, data algorithms, and product behavior.

Armed with this info, developers will be able to interoperate with PST data in both server and client scenarios on the platform of their choice. You can access the full spec details here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff387869.aspx.

According to the release notes, this new version of Oxite offers the following:

• New Model, Services and Repositories
• Dependency Injection (Routes, Controllers, Services, Repositories, etc)
• ActionFilter Registry
• Better test coverage
• New validation class added
• Improved background services architecture
• Projects cleaned up and consolidated
• Views cleaned up
• No more *.cs or *.cs.designer for views in web project
• Now works in a sub directory
• New admin dashboard
• New and update (from last version) SQL scripts included
• Many other small features, improvements and bug fixes

In addition, as our own Duncan Mackenzie notes on his blog, Unity was implemented to provide Dependency Injection, xUnit was used as the test runner to remove a dependency on the higher level SKUs of Visual Studio, and a great deal of work was put into restructuring the data layer to completely abstract the Linq 2 SQL code from our actual objects.

We mainly have Erik, Sampy and Nathan to thank for the work involved in making these changes happen, these are the hard-working folks behind the code at Channel 9 and Channel 10 (and Channel 8, VisitMix, and Edge).

For more information on Oxite, check out the discussions, issues and wiki pages on Codeplex.

The four available visualizations are as follows:

1. The Obesity Epidemic: this one addresses concerns about the ever growing obesity problem in the U.S. It uses Silverlight to show Tee-Shirt sizes as a way to help people visualize obesity. The Silverlight application relays statistical information via the DOM to the web page for display. Selection of the obesity rate data is done using LINQ queries on an external XML data file.
2. Their First Words displays incidences of word usage for a given word search of presidential inaugural addresses. This sample shows tight the integration between Silverlight and the HTML DOM, and they show search results using the advanced text rendering capabilities of the browser. A squarified TreeMap displays word search results by employing advanced LINQ queries against the inaugural data.
3. A Website Named Desire is an interactive infographic of the amorphous web site creation process, began as a real world poster that we wished to move onto the web. This project enhances the real world experience by enabling annotation of high resolution graphical content with markers, Canvases which scale, slide and are interactive, in a compelling and intuitive way.
4. The Social Timeline is an interactive visualization which allows users to download FriendFeed entries for a particular FriendFeed user, view them on a timeline and pivot on this data in several ways. This sample demonstrates some advanced control concepts such as virtualization and theming.

On a personal level as a FriendFeed user, I’m loving that last one. I can see all my friends’ posts on a timeline, filter the friend list, filter posts to only see those with likes or comments, filter by services, and more. Although it may not be the way I’ll go an read through FriendFeed every day, it’s a pretty amazing real-time visualization of my network.  

Sound familiar? Probably because it’s very much like Cam-Trax, which I mentioned earlier this year.  The difference is that unlike Cam-Trax, with Touchless there is an open source application and SDK available, which anyone can see, use, and contribute to.

The app features four demos of the technology: 1) Snake – where you control a snake with a marker, 2) Defender – an up to 4-player pong game, 3) Map – where you can rotate, zoom and move a map with 2 markers, and 4) Draw - where you can draw with a marker.

Check out Touchless in action in the video below: