At this week’s Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft is set to make a slew of announcements about its product lines, and hopefully show a glimpse of some exciting new ones. One of the first gems to, um, surface is that the company is about to give a broad group of developers the ability to create applications for its Surface tabletop computer for the first time.
Everyone who attends the Surface session (later today) will apparently be able to get an exclusive email invitation for joining the Surface developer community website where the Surface SDK & Surface Simulator tool can be downloaded.
Based on an interview Seattle Tech Report did with Brad Carpenter, general manager of the Microsoft Surface team, it seems Microsoft has targeted five areas for the computer and Surface applications: entertainment, healthcare, banking, automotive, and retail.
Carpenter said that for now only 1,200 developers would be able to download the Surface’s software development kit. Earlier this month, Microsoft had already released an SDK for the “Touchless” software under an open-source license.
You can see the upcoming SDK in action in the video embedded below (kudos to Application Development):
Great move by Microsoft. Finally MS is recognizing the power of Open source and community.
Microsoft has always been about the developers. OpenSource is just a licensing mechanism, but if you look at Visual Studio and all of their developer products, they have a long history of making developers successful.
You clearly misunderstood the headline of the article….
There’s no mention of “Open Source” here. Just that Microsoft will “open Surface for developers.”
It’s just an SDK.
Surface is nothing like an open source operation like Android…
Oops! In haste to post the first comment… I missed I misunderstood the story.
Hmm… I don’t know anyone who has tried Microsoft Surface. Is it good?
It’s not a consumer product, at least not yet. Most of these babies are installed on hotels, stores, etc.
After downloading the “air hockey” app on my ipod touch, I began to think how great of an app that would be on a microsoft surface.
The syntax seems so familiar to MXML, is that Silverlight that runs the Surface?
It’s XAML. Yeah It’s kinda like MXML.
It’s WPF, Silverlight’s big brother,
You can see the upcoming SDK in action in the video embedded below
Here we go!!
Hit hijacker
Why do they call it “Surface” when it looks like a bathtub??
We have a porn site ready for it. It worked for VHS, it worked for DVD so what are microsoft waiting for. Come on MS dev team, drop me a line xx
The Microsoft Surface is very cool. I got a chance to play with it at TechCrunch 50. I think it would be a super addition to any office lobby or living room as it could definitely entertain you for hours.
Porn where the actresses (or actors if thats what u want) react to the touch of the screen haha. that could work, you will need to get that expensive table to consumer level tough
Yeah, and I guess the idea is to touch the G-point.
that guy should be fired for releasing that shitty video. omg for him to even be linked with microsoft speaks volume.
Good move MS
WOW !!!
just got a nice email from MS-MS, seems like we might be getting somewhere.
x