Making Sense of Microsoft - PhotoSuru.com

There's a fable about three blind men encountering an elephant- and each feels a different part so there are three different descriptions by them of what an elephant is. (Trunk, Body, and Tail). I sometimes feel that way when I discover a new manifestation of Microsoft. In this case it's the photosuru.com website and the syndicated content bits of Windowsclient.net. Perhaps it's just that Microsoft is so big there's no place to stand back and see all the different bits. I wonder what else there is to discover!

Photosuru.com is an offshoot of windowsclient.net which is a community for Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation, IE WPF. You have to register and surprisingly there is no msn/hotmail account integration but it is free. After that you gain free access to software like the Syndicated Client Experiences Starter Kit (Beta). These use the push capability of RSS to help build experiences not unlike social networking.

Photosuru (pictured) is a photo viewer that also lets you share and it's very snazzy and fast. Best of all you can download the full source code which includes nearly 200 C# source code files as well as xaml, some 13MB of sources and resources. The syndicated Client stuff looks interesting; Microsoft’s Sync Framework-based Subscription Center takes care of syncing local storage, subscription management and the safe caching of authentication credentials. With the source code, it's enough to get a place in the C'# code library.

• Link to C# Code Library