Avanade put out a press release today announcing a Microsoft Surface demo that aims to "enhance the retail experience". This happens to be the application I've been working on for the past few months at Avanade headquarters in Seattle and I'm really excited to see it hit the light of day.

There should be a video available soon, but basically this application helps you shop for products by making it easy to compare them to each other, and see how they will work in your home. For instance, you can draw your living room blueprint-style, placing all your existing furniture and equipment, and then try out a new TV to see how well it will fit. Then you can resize the TV on the fly to pick the best one for your room. It's a bit hard to explain how well that works, but when the video is available you'll see it's pretty cool. :) There are also additional aspects to the application involving making product suggestions and helping with connecting up your equipment. It's all really good stuff that I would personally love to see adopted by retailers in the near future.

From a development perspective, this was a really fun app to work on. This is essentially a big WPF app that is touch-enabled using the Surface SDK. Our team didn't start with much WPF experience, so we had that learning curve to deal with on top of learning the nuances of the Surface device itself. To Microsoft's credit, it really wasn't too tough. Even in this early stage the devices are stable and easy to work with, and the SDK is well designed. The whole approach to designing applications for Surface is still evolving inside Microsoft, and probably our biggest challenge was trying to figure out which design principles we could work into this application and to what extent we could define our own. There were quite a few iterations of the design, and I must say I'm pretty impressed with what we were able to produce in just a couple months (we started in December).

So take a look at the pics (that's me in the first one on the left!), and be on the lookout for a video. I know this isn't exactly a blog people are reading for development posts (or reading at all actually) but feel free to ask questions in the comments or send me email to seraph.ben+surface@gmail.com. I still have a ton to learn about WPF and Surface, but I'm happy to share the knowledge I've gained so far!

Update: The video is now available.

technorati tags:surface, microsoft, microsoftsurface, avanade