I have been very busy over the last few weeks with the ArcReady tour, presentations, and customer commitments and have not had a chance to starting playing working with any of the new technologies that Microsoft seems to be releasing at break neck speeds. I really need to carve out at least 4 hours per week where I can start working with the new technologies. So here are some of the technologies that I am thinking about tackling and I would like your input on projects that I can work on (feel free to leave a comment):

Silverlight - Silverlight 1.1 (Alpha) has the ability to call Web Service endpoints. I was thinking about putting together something that used the public web services exposed by either Flickr.com or Amazon.com. I think you could do some real interesting data visualizations with Silverlight and public web services.

Facebook - Microsoft announced a Facebook Developer Toolkit just last week. Jon Rauschenberger and Clarity Consulting put this toolkit together. What I like about this toolkit is that it is a great example of taking an Open API and wrapping it in managed components so that it is easy for developers to work with. This might even get me to create a Facebook account.

Popfly - Popfly (Alpha) is a mashup creator that allows “drag and drop” style programming to create interesting applications using blocks. Mashups are a becoming increasingly popular (more on that later). If you sign up for a Popfly account, add me as a friend (User name: Bottom9th Home Page: http://www.Popfly.ms/users/Bottom9th.

These along with the other projects (AJAX Web Site and Vista Sidebar Gadget) that I have on the back burner will keep me busy while I wait to be able to create applications for the Surface. 🙂