Eye on Earth is a joint venture between Microsoft and the European Environmental Agency (EEA) to make environmental information more accessible to European citizens. The application uses Windows Azure to gather information from 6,000 air quality monitoring stations and plot them to a Bing Map with a Sliverlight front end.

Microsoft Live Labs Pivot is amazing. Anyone have an invite? I’m really looking forward tto when they open this up and 3rd party developers can create collections.

Edit: I received an invite about an hour after I filled out the invite form.

Microsoft announced that Windows Embedded CE, now has Silverlight included. Full article @ arstechnica.com

The CodenameWindows blog has reposted a couple of recent job descriptions that give some hints about a rich client app based on Seadragon called Seahorse.

Your help can critically impact one of the most revolutionary new products being built at the company: Seahorse. We are a v1 product group within Live Labs – the people that brought you Seadragon and Photosynth . We typically don’t share much about the Seahorse vision; but we can share the following. As a sister team to Seadragon, the Seahorse vision involves building a new rich client application with deep ties to the web, web-services, Seadragon visualizations, and your client-side documents. We are – in a very real sense – hoping to redefine the way that people think about organizing, visualizing, saving, sharing and consuming large amounts of rich visual data. Succinctly, we hope to change the way people think about the internet.

Based on this blog post from 12/2007 it would appear that Seahorse has been brewing at live labs for a while.

The Expression Studio 3 Trial is now available for download. The full version which costs $599 (or $349 upgrade) is available for preorder.

Expression Studio 3 includes:

• Expression Blend 3 with SketchFlow
• Expression Web 3
• Expression Design 3
• Expression Encoder 3

Man, It’s been a while since I’ve done an update here. I’ve been completely slammed working on a Kiosk project.

Anyway… I came across this today and thought I’d post up a quick update. It’s a great video from Channel9 where Jaime Rodriguez and Anson Tsao discuss the new Multi-touch capabilities that will be available in WPF 4 Beta 1.

Michael Scherotter posts that MySpace and Microsoft will jointly release an SDK on Thursday, April 2.

The SDK will be available on CodePlex and consist of two Silverlight class library assemblies, OpenSocial.dll and MyOpenSpace.dll. Michael gives an example on his blog and there is a little more info on the MySpace Dveloper Wiki.

Wow, it seems like the web is a buzz about Blend 3 ever since I got back from MIX09. It’s great to see that the Silverlight community has a good head of steam leading up to the release of Silverlight 3.

Here’s a quick roundup of news, tips and tricks that I’ve happened upon this week.

Tutorials

• Introducing sample data support in Blend 3
• Communication between Silverlight applications on the client side
• Using Silverlight 3’s Writable Bitmap
• Using Behaviors : A Quick Walkthrough
• Silverlight Smooth Streaming: UX Simulator
• Controlling an object using the Keydown function in Silverlight
• Using Blur to make Dialogs Pop in Silverlight 3

Tips & Tricks

• Styling a slider control
• Using Integers for Layout Calculations
• Silverlight 3 Out-of-browser Update Model
• Having trouble connecting to localhost when running your application from Visual Studio?
• Team Foundation Server support in Blend 3

News

• What’s new on the DataGrid control in Silverlight 3 Beta
• SketchFlow – Sketching and Prototyping in Expression Blend

For those not fortunate enough to attend MIX09 I thought you’d like to see what came in the Schwag Bag.

It’s some nice stuff including Sketching User Experiences by keynote speaker Bill Buxton. But the crown jewel, in my humble opinion, is this sweet notebook complete with MIX schedule.

I really wish I had the energy to write a thoughtful piece about MIX09. But to be honest, it’s been more of a whirlwind than I had anticipated. After a 5 hour flight from Boston put us in Las Vegas at 1:30am, there was a mixup with my room. As it turned out, the first two rooms that I was assigned were already occupied. Of course I didn’t find this out until I walked into each one. It did teach me that people don’t appreciate strangers walking into their hotel rooms at 2:00 am though. Oops.

On the upside, after 2 return trips to the front desk I was upgraded to a pimp suite on the 32nd floor. As I’m writing this I’m sitting in the living room of a 4 room suite with 3 HD TV’s, 3 sinks, 2 bathrooms a Jacuzzi and full bar. Life is good.

One thing I can say is that the most impressive part of day was the keynote piece about SketchFlow in Expression Blend 3. I really can’t wait to get back to the office and start working with it.

Here are some random photos from the day, and a gratuitous shot of the suite. More later.