In mid-November,
Office Professional Plus 2010, Microsoft researchers dropped some hints about a brand new visualization language, codenamed Vedea,
Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise, which was coming from Microsoft. On December 3, through a blog post, Microsoft officials supplied far more specifics about it.Vedea can be a prototype experimental language designed by Microsoft Study UK that is aimed at helping people make interactive infographics, data visualizations and computational artwork. Vedea is patterned right after the Processing language ( according to the Softies. A downloadable test create with the Vedea will be on the market early in 2010, based on the December 3 blog post by Microsoft UK Researcher Martin Calsyn.Like Processing, Vedea;s audience isn;t conventional programmers. Calsyn explained:“(Vedea) is designed to get available 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 often a project of the Microsoft Computational Science Studio (MCSS). The MCSS unit also is the team behind the recently introduced Microsoft Computational Science Studio,
Windows 7 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 a whole lot of modeling and computation work that requires a way to help customers visualize the results. Calsyn elaborated:“Simple charts are ok in general for simple data sets, but not for facilitating deep interactive exploration of information 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 created to develop aren;t the usual pie charts or bar charts. Calsyn notes that the much more advanced infographics created using Vedea will combine color, hierarchy,
Discount Office 2007, shape and line into new, additional complex visuals. The graphics features in Vedea construct on the native capabilities of XNA and GDI,
Office Home And Student 2010, he blogged. Vedea programs might be edited in Notepad or by way of an HTML text input and are compiled by the Vedea runtime, he said.Vedea also is built on the forthcoming .Net 4.0 Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR), Calsyn said, and is dynamically typed. Syntactically, Vedea looks quite a bit 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 actually a Microsoft Research 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 with the visulization mindshare among academics and students.