I got to play with Surface when I was at Microsoft last year. It looked really cool and was fun to play with, but when I would talk to people about it, it was hard to explain why it was so compelling.

The following demo gives you an idea in 3 different scenarios how this can become a very useful technology.

Since I am now spending more time in the Real Estate space, it sets my mind to thinking about the great possibilities for a real estate office and mini conference rooms.

Take a look and let me know what kind of ideas it generates for you.

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I spent some time a few months back building an application that converts PowerPoint slide shows into Silverlight applications. I was very excited about it at the time and I think it has great future potential.

Working with Silverlight 2.0 I could see how far it had come since 1.0. The difference between the two was night and day. Silverlight 1.0 was really focused on animation and a pretty GUI versus real applications. Silverlight 2.0 is much more robust and provides a substantial subset of the .Net CLR functionality. It enables real business applications.

With Mix09 coming up, I am also seeing a lot of new stuff about Silverlight 3.0 already. There are a couple of great videos that demonstrate Microsoft’s intent to make this a real player in the business application space. Check outhttp://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/03/10/silverlight-line-of-business-made-easier-with-ideablade.aspx and http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2009/03/09/the-knowledge-chamber-silverlight-3-0-for-great-business-apps.aspx .

So when I needed to take a piece of business logic that I had written in C# and move it to a Rich Internet Application, my first thought was to drop it into a Silverlight 2.0 app. I created the app and it was pretty straight forward adding the video portion, the branching and the business logic. It worked great.

Then I dropped it into the web page where I intended to run it. It looked great. Next I went to a business associate to show it to them. And of course what I saw was the beautiful Install Silverlight button. And when I went to install it, it wouldn’t install. Eventually I got the player to install on their system, but it took some time and a little bit of frustration.

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