UPDATED: Here is the link to the presentation.

I’m heading up to Cleveland tonight for the .NET SIG meeting.  They are deviating from their standard meeting type (speaker, pizza) to more of a holiday party style.  I’ll be bringing 3 XBoxes, projectors, and a decent selection of games to play, including Halo 3, Guitar Hero III, and Project Gotham Racing 4.  But that’s not really what I’m most excited about for tonight.

I’ll be giving a short presentation on some of the cool things that Microsoft is working on.  I’ve given this a few times in the past, but it always generates more discussion and "WOWs" from the crowd than any Silverlight or WCF presentation I’m going to give.  The reason is because people haven’t seen this stuff before.  And it’s amazing.

For those of you not coming to Cleveland for the meeting tonight, here’s a rundown of what you’re going to be missing:

Microsoft Popfly – A mashup engine.  Imagine having the power to create a map with all of your Facebook friends on it.  Oh yeah, and you didn’t write a single line of code.

Tafiti – I call it a research engine.  It’s a new search engine interface, based on Windows Live Search, which is built entirely in Silverlight.

Microsoft Surface – a completely new model for computing.  Take one coffee table, add 400% innovation, and you’ve got an amazing new way to interact with files, the internet, and more.

Photosynth – Let’s say you wanted to take a virtual tour of Seattle.  You could certainly look for pictures on the web, of if you really wanted to see a bunch, maybe you search on Flickr for Seattle.  Photosyth allows you (eventually) to take a set of photos from the web, and visually "stitch" them together to create a 3-D model of the space.  If you check nothing else out from this post, make this the one.

Seadragon – the technology that Photosynth is based on, Seadragon is primarily focused on showing immense amounts of image data at one time.  Their philosophy is that the only thing [in this technology era] that should restrict your ability to view large [we’re talking TB] sets of images should the be number of pixels on your screen.