The Midweek Download: Nov. 2nd Edition–A Chat with the Bing Social Search Team, a Cool Microsoft Research Project, plus Windows 8, Windows Phone and Internet Explorer

In this edition of The Midweek Download, we’ve got stories on the Bing Social Search team, a cool Microsoft Research project, Windows Phone developer news from Nokia World and a new post from Building Windows 8. Check it out.

Bing Social Search team makes search ‘less lonely’. In this feature story, three members of Bing’s social search team chat with Microsoft News Center about working in the exciting technological frontier of search – and what they do when they’re not hard at work.

Using Task Manager with 64+ logical processors. In this Oct. 27th post on Building Windows 8, readers will find the updated Task Manager tools for managing systems with a large number of logical processors. In an intro to the post, Windows and Windows Live President Steven Sinofsky writes, “This is scalability well beyond desktop PCs, and is designed for the server and data center. A big part of Windows development is that the OS scales across a wide range of form factors and CPU architectures.”

Microsoft Research shows Augmented Projectors. Want to see another video from our Microsoft Research team in Cambridge of some cool Kinect-related work? A project titled Augmented Projectors shows the potential to augment environments with digital graphics – this becomes particularly interesting when the projector has an awareness of the environment in which they’re being used. Yes, projectors that understand the room they’re in. Want to know more? Check out this Tuesday post on the Next at Microsoft Blog, which features a six-minute video showing off the project.

Tap, flick, slide or swipe. Natural User Interfaces (NUI), such as touch, have been in development for years, but only recently have become a mainstream reality. Touch user interfaces have made computing more interactive, easier to use and more pervasive than ever, whether on a laptop, all-in-one PC or mobile phone. To see what Samsung, a Microsoft partner, has done to create rich experiences through innovative hardware, check out this feature story and slide show of slick devices on the Microsoft News Center.

Intelligent systems and the next information age. At a fundamental level, it sounds like a relatively simple recipe: Take one tiny, very powerful microprocessor, connect it wirelessly to the cloud, and add a generous portion of very smart software. According to many experts, these are the primary ingredients of an intelligent system, a place where everyday objects provide information to a centralized computing infrastructure where this data is aggregated, sliced, diced and analyzed. For more on this story, read this feature story on the Microsoft News Center.

Exciting news for developers at Nokia World. At Nokia World last week, Nokia unveiled two new amazing Windows Phones – the Nokia Lumia 800 and the Nokia Lumia 710. Also at Nokia World, we detailed the fresh new opportunity that Nokia and Microsoft have created by establishing a third ecosystem. For more on this story, read this Oct. 27th post on the Windows Phone Developer Blog.

And in Internet Explorer news this week… Building fast and functional sites is a challenge with which most Web developers are familiar. Loading a new page every time the user clicks a link is slow. Fetching all content dynamically effectively disables the back button. Working with hashes is better, but still not ideal. Internet Explorer 10 in the Windows Developer Preview eliminates the compromise by adding support for HTML5 History. For more detail on this topic, read this Monday post on the IEBlog.

That’s it for this edition of The Midweek Download. Thanks for reading!

Posted by Jeff Meisner
Editor, The Official Microsoft Blog

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