Visualization On ICE

Our little “ICE” open source project (“Information Connections Engine”) is growing in popularity! ICE is a visualization framework based on Silverlight, which allows any .net developer to visualize any sort of data and their connections in just a few hours of work. It’s free, it’s fun, it’s easy.

Check out this 3 min teaser to have an idea of what ICE is capable of:

There’s a complete step by step tutorial that should get you started real fast with your first “application on ICE”.

What’s most amazing about such a flexible and easy to use tool is to watch what developers are doing with it. The mathematical models and countless configuration options, along with the possibility to use XAML to visualize and animate nodes and links according to your own creativity, result in applications we had never anticipated. I’m pretty sure someone will create a little game using ICE soon…. anyone?

Getting Started…

So here we are, I’m finally giving in to my friends' and also my inner voice request to start my own blog. I know I won't have the time to write too often. I know that my interests in technology are so broad and so diverse that I might have difficulties capturing a specific audience (who else is equally interested by the impact on productivity of social networking in the enterprise and by how optimizing an AJAX call to a SOAP Web Service?). But it doesn't matter. This blog will at least satisfy my old frustration of having so much of my work or thoughts undocumented or even unchallenged.

So there you have it. Off the top of my head, I think you're most likely to read about SharePoint, web services, .Net, Silverlight, and Ajax technologies. And also high level views on social computing, enterprise mashup ecosystems, mobility, visualization technologies and cloud computing. And whatever else crosses my mind, after all it's MY blog!
Ah, one last point: don't fool yourself, you will never read this blog again unless you subscribe to the RSS feed, or unless you use the email subscription on the right column. There's simply no other way to stay connected to a blog.