Earlier this week, Microsoft announced new features in Silverlight 2, our cross platform rich internet application runtime.  One of the most exciting new features is Deep Zoom.  This capability allows users to explore collections of super high resolution imagery, from a 2 or 3 megapixel shot from a digital camera to gigapixel scans of museum pieces, all without waiting for huge file downloads.  The simple zooming interface allows users to explore entire collections down to specific details in extreme close-up, all with fantastic performance and smooth transitions.

Don’t just take our word for it:.  Hard Rock Café is using the Deep Zoom technology to power the site showcasing their huge collection of memorabilia.

Deep Zoom is based on the same Seadragon technology that you have seen in our demos and in the Photosynth preview.  For the first time, we are enabling individual developers to harness the 2D capabilities of Seadragon to support smooth zooming interfaces on super high resolution images and collections.  You’ve been asking for the ability to use Seadragon yourself, now here’s your chance.

We have added a host of new features and improved designs to Listas today.  A fresh home page design and updated community page make finding relevant information even easier.  New community lists like popular tags, recently created lists, and top users are all now available both in Listas and through RSS.  For fellow GTD fans, there are now task lists.  Improvements to printing support, history and version management, and many other additions and refinements round out the update.  You can check out the newly updated Listas technology preview as always at http://listas.labs.live.com.

Today, we are announcing the Volta technology preview, a developer toolset for building multi-tier web applications using existing and familiar tools, techniques and patterns. Volta’s declarative tier-splitting enables developers to postpone architectural decisions about distribution until the last possible responsible moment. Also, thanks to a shared programming model across multiple-tiers, Volta enables new end-to-end profiling and testing for higher levels of application performance, robustness, and reliability. Using the declarative tier-splitting, developers can refine architectural decisions based on this profiling data. This saves time and costs associated with manual refactoring. In effect, Volta extends the .NET platform to further enable the development of software+services applications, using existing and familiar tools and techniques.

You architect and build your application as a .NET client application, assigning the portions of the application that run on the server tier and client tier late in the development process. You can target either web browsers or the CLR as clients and Volta handles the complexities of tier-splitting. The compiler creates cross-browser JavaScript for the client tier, web services for the server tier, and all communication, serialization, synchronization, security, and other boilerplate code to tie the tiers together. In effect, Volta offers a best-effort experience in multiple environments without requiring tailoring of the application.

Learn more about Volta and download it to try building applications yourself >

As part of our ongoing collaborations with product groups around Microsoft, Live Labs continues to help other teams improve features and add new capabilities to Microsoft's online services.  Recently, with the fall release of Live Search, our work with the Maps team paid off for users.  We worked closely with the team in developing two key improvements:

Single Box Search

Using Live Labs' entity extraction technology, a machine learning algorithm for classifying data, the Local Search team was able to combine the two boxes used for separately entering a business name and a location into a single search box. 

A much anticipated feature, it enables maps.live.com users to enter single queries without having to negotiate multiple input boxes such as:

• Philadelphia, to just jump to a map of the city;
• Chowder in Boston, MA, to search for some comfort food by the bay; or
• Chinese Food to search the current map area (or our estimate for your location if it is a new session) for some lo mein.

Bird's Eye in 3D

Both the 3D and Bird's Eye views in maps.live.com provide unique and valuable ways to look at the world, providing far more detail and more useful information than straight down aerial views alone can.  Until now, you had to switch back and forth between the 3D client and the Ajax version to see Bird's Eye Imagery.  Now, with a user experience reminiscent of Photosynth, the Virtual Earth 3D experience let's you see bird's eye images right in context, including a preview of the perspective of surrounding images with that familiar white outline:

Check out the newest version of Live Search Maps for these and many more great enhancements.  This type of ongoing collaboration with groups around Microsoft is what Live Labs is all about; stay tuned for many more improvements like this. 

At Live Labs, we are always experimenting with new ideas that we think will be useful.  Today we are releasing our latest technology preview:

Listas (http://listas.labs.live.com)

Listas is a tool for the creation, management and sharing of lists, notes, favorites, and more. It allows you to quickly and easily edit lists, share them with others for reading or wiki-style editing, and discover the public lists of other users.  We encourage you to try using it for meeting notes, bookmarks, shopping lists, to plan a night out, or whatever other creative ways you can think of.

In the Listas Community Section, you will find a number of highlights of the most popular and random items from around the community of public lists such as the most used tags, the hottest lists, and prolific contributors.   You can even add others’ lists (or any RSS feed) to your own Listas so you are always up to date.

You can even create lists from all the things you find on the web, like search results, wish lists, videos, or all or part of virtually any page with the Listas Toolbar for Internet Explorer:

So, give Listas a try.  And, as always, let us know what you think.