Not sure if you caught the mention of this last week, but the Syndicated Client Experience Starter Kit Beta & Reader SDK was released last week.  This is a "a Starter Kit designed to make it easy to create rich, syndicated multimedia and content experiences which engage the user, from documents and photos to videos and podcasts."

If you've seen the Architecture Journal Reader, the Times Reader, or the MSDN Reader you're already  familiar with what this starter kit can do for you. If you want a rich presentation of RSS content (regardless of whether it's coming from outside or inside the firewall), it's definately worth a look.

You can find out more details on it here:

http://windowsclient.net/wpf/starter-kits/sce.aspx

It's not quite the end of January, but there's already alot of "new" in my new year.  There's a  new car, some new gadgets, and on the work front a new project and a new team.

As you may have heard, Charles Fitzgerald, left Microsoft to head to a startup. Charles was the GM that my old team, platform incubation, reported into. Charles set the mission for that team, and was the major stakeholder for Tafiti and several other internal facing projects that I worked on. Charles was a great GM, and while this is a loss for MS, I'm confident we haven't heard the last of him.

With Charles' departure, Scott and I will be moving to different roles in the company. I am happy to report that I am now officially part of Simon Guest's team.   

One of the few negatives about my last role in incubation was that it was inherently secretive, as parts of the work could be patented. As a result, after delivering my book on CardSpace I mostly dropped off the public scene, save for promoting Tafiti. With Simon's team having a key focus on talking about architecture with the broader community, this is something that will change, and you'll see me engaging more publicly on architecture related subjects. Simon's team has a big focus on Software+Services, which if you've read the blog for awhile know is something I've been looking at for some time in and outside of Microsoft. Expect to see me blogging more, podcasting/screencasting more, and writing the odd article or two. (No more books for awhile, though. Having written or co-written 3 books in 2 years, I've committed to my wife not to start another one until 2009)

I also mentioned there's a new project. I'll be carrying over a project with me from incubation to Simon's team as well. Nothing I can share at the moment, other than it will be public focused and it's going to be a key focus for me for a good portion of 2008.

While this project is big, there's another project I'll be working on that's even bigger.  This is a longer term project, estimated to last decades with a budget estimated to be in the seven figures. Oh, and it has nothing to do with software. My wife and I are expected our first child, a son, to literally arrive any day now. While there's alot of great 'new's in 2008 already, this will surely be the best.

Here's hoping your 2008 is going well, and I look forward to engaging with the community more broadly once again.  If there's anything you'd like to see me engage on - be it in blog, article, or podcast, let me know. As always, I can be reached at mmercuri@microsoft.com

I wanted to give you an update on Tafiti, Microsoft’s experimental site that explores the intersection between Silverlight and Windows Live Search.  Tafiti, which means "do research" in Swahili, is an experimental search front-end from Microsoft, designed to help people use the Web for research projects that span multiple search queries and sessions by helping visualize, store, and share research results. Tafiti uses both Microsoft Silverlight and Live Search to explore the intersection of richer experiences on the Web and the increasing specialization of search.

When the Tafiti.com site went live, I did a couple of interviews where I said that we would make the code public if people were interested. We recieved a fair amount of interest, and linked up with Angus Logan's Windows Live Apps team to do just that.

Today, I'm happy to announce the release of the Tafiti Search Visualization source code to CodePlex which means developers can download, modify, and resell the code (see MS-PL License for all the details).

The CodePlex project provides access to all of the source, which you can use in it's entirety or piece meal based on your needs. The project includes a number of Silverlight controls, code that wraps the Live Search SOAP API, contains code for posting to your Live Space blog, and is also working example of how to incorporate Windows Live ID into your apps. We've also included the code for the tree screensaver that so many people commented on.

If you've just bought my new book and were looking for the completed exercises, I've posted them at the link below:

http://www.marcmercuri.com/downloads/beginningcardspacecode.zip

As some of the code focuses on and/or builds upon code that exists in existing projects (that evolve outside the book), refer to the links in those chapters for links to where the base projects can be found. 

This download should be available on the APress website next week as well.