Well I got a little bored this evening and started to play around with the Microsoft Surface SDK. Nothing too exciting in this first iteration, but I wired it up to my Twitter account and started pulling down new tweets every couple of minutes. With a little styling I was able to get each of the messages to look like a handwritten Post It note. The messages are created using the ScatterView control which is a Microsoft Surface specific WPF control that allows each item to be picked up, dragged, resized, and even thrown around the screen. Microsoft uses this control a lot during demos of the Surface, wiring it up to pictures to provide a table full of photos type environment. Why is this a $12,500 Twitter client? Well because that is how much it is going to cost you to get a MS Surface, or $15,000 for the developer version. Though, if you buy one in the next 15 minutes, I'll throw in this nifty Twitter client for free.

Well after a bit of work and some help from this blog post, I was able to get the Microsoft Surface SDK working on my 64bit Vista machine. The documentation for the SDK says that it needs to run on 32bit Vista but Steven Robbins seems to have figured out the steps to get around that. Now that I have it up and running I hope to put up a few blog posts on doing Surface development and hopefully I won't run into any issues using 64bit. If anyone would like to donate me the money to buy an actual Surface unit I would be grateful, but until then the Surface simulator appears to be a decent environment that allows you to hook up multiple mice to act as different finger touches. The below sample application comes with the sdk and allows you to select a picture to create a puzzle out of and then put the puzzle together. I can't wait to get my hands dirty and create a Surface application of my own.