Microsoft Office 2007 Key Microsoft targets progra

In mid-November, Microsoft researchers dropped a number of hints about a new visualization language, codenamed Vedea, which was coming from Microsoft. On December 3, via a weblog post, Microsoft officials supplied much more specifics about it.Vedea is often a prototype experimental language designed by Microsoft Investigation UK that is aimed at helping users create interactive infographics, data visualizations and computational artwork. Vedea is patterned immediately after the Processing language ( based on the Softies. A downloadable check build of the Vedea might be on the market early in 2010, based on the December 3 blog post by Microsoft UK Researcher Martin Calsyn.Like Processing, Vedea;s target audience isn;t traditional programmers. Calsyn explained:“(Vedea) is created to become accessible to people who are either new to programming or whose primary domain of expertise is something other than programming. We wanted to give those people a tool that they can use to realize their own vision and visualizations without having to engage skilled programmers, but have it be an environment that skilled programmers would not find limiting.”Calsyn noted that Vedea is really a project of the Microsoft Computational Science Studio (MCSS). The MCSS unit also is the team behind the recently introduced Microsoft Computational Science Studio,Microsoft Office 2007 Key, a “a tool for enabling non-programmer scientists and researchers to harness vast amounts of storage and compute power for running the multi-scale models that are needed to truly understand and predict complex natural systems.”MCSS performs lots of modeling and computation work that requires a way to help consumers visualize the results. Calsyn elaborated:“Simple charts are ok in general for simple data sets, but not for facilitating deep interactive exploration of data with many dimensions or for facilitating the type of exploration that leads to speculative visual exploration or visually-inspired “aha” moments.”The kinds of infographics that Vedea is developed to create aren;t the usual pie charts or bar charts. Calsyn notes that the extra advanced infographics produced using Vedea will combine color, hierarchy, shape and line into new, more complex visuals. The graphics features in Vedea build on the native capabilities of XNA and GDI, he blogged. Vedea programs will be edited in Notepad or through an HTML text input and are compiled by the Vedea runtime, he said.Vedea also is built about the forthcoming .Net 4.0 Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR), Calsyn said, and is dynamically typed. Syntactically, Vedea looks a whole lot like C#, he said, with some distinctions. He blogged:“In its simplest form though, there are no class decorations – just a collection of functions. You can introduce classes if you want to do object-oriented programming, but they are not required and your topmost functions aren’t wrapped in any with the syntactic trappings of a class.”Because Vedea is a Microsoft Investigation project, there;s no guarantee as to if or when it will become a commercial product or incorporated into a commercial product. But given the fact that Processing is being taught in an increasing quantity of universities, I;d bet Microsoft will want to make sure it grabs a piece of the visulization mindshare among academics and students.