File Explorer, previously known as Windows Explorer, is a file manager application and default desktop environment that is included with releases of the Microsoft Windows operating system from Windows 95 onwards. It provides a graphical user interface for accessing the file systems, as well as user interface elements such as the taskbar and desktop.
Extensible Application Markup Language is a declarative XML-based language developed by Microsoft for initializing structured values and objects. It is available under Microsoft's Open Specification Promise.
Channel Definition Format (CDF) was an XML file format formerly used in conjunction with Microsoft's Active Channel, Active Desktop and Smart Offline Favorites technologies. The format was designed to "offer frequently updated collections of information, or channels, from any web server for automatic delivery to compatible receiver programs." Active Channel allowed users to subscribe to channels and have scheduled updates delivered to their desktop. Smart Offline Favorites, like channels, enabled users to view webpages from the cache.
In NeXTSTEP, OPENSTEP, and their lineal descendants macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and watchOS, and in GNUstep, a bundle is a file directory with a defined structure and file extension, allowing related files to be grouped together as a conceptually single item.
Bing Maps is a web mapping service provided as a part of Microsoft's Bing suite of search engines and powered by the Bing Maps Platform framework which also support Bing Maps for Enterprise APIs and Azure Maps APIs. Since 2020, the map data is provided by TomTom, OpenStreetMap and others.
This article describes the technical specifications of the OpenDocument office document standard, as developed by the OASIS industry consortium. A variety of organizations developed the standard publicly and make it publicly accessible, meaning it can be implemented by anyone without restriction. The OpenDocument format aims to provide an open alternative to proprietary document formats.
Compared with previous versions of Microsoft Windows, features new to Windows Vista are very numerous, covering most aspects of the operating system, including additional management features, new aspects of security and safety, new I/O technologies, new networking features, and new technical features. Windows Vista also removed some others.
Photosynth is a discontinued app and service from Microsoft Live Labs and the University of Washington that analyzes digital photographs and generates a three-dimensional model of the photos and a point cloud of a photographed object. Pattern recognition components compare portions of images to create points, which are then compared to convert the image into a model. Users are able to view and generate their own models using a software tool available for download at the Photosynth website.
Prior to IIS 7, Microsoft's Internet Information Services stores its information in an internal database called the MetaBase. The metabase is an inheritable, hierarchical database that allows for configuration of HTTP/HTTPS, FTP, SMTP, and NNTP at the server, the site, or the folder or file level. Different versions of IIS use different formats; prior to IIS version 6 this was always a proprietary format, whereas with 6.0 and later the data is stored in XML files. The metabase consists of two files, MetaBase.xml and MBSchema.xml, stored in the %SystemRoot%\system32\inetsrv\ directory. The metabase periodically gets backed up to the MetaBack subdirectory.
Windows Vista contains a range of new technologies and features that are intended to help network administrators and power users better manage their systems. Notable changes include a complete replacement of both the Windows Setup and the Windows startup processes, completely rewritten deployment mechanisms, new diagnostic and health monitoring tools such as random access memory diagnostic program, support for per-application Remote Desktop sessions, a completely new Task Scheduler, and a range of new Group Policy settings covering many of the features new to Windows Vista. Subsystem for UNIX Applications, which provides a POSIX-compatible environment is also introduced.
The Open Packaging Conventions (OPC) is a container-file technology initially created by Microsoft to store a combination of XML and non-XML files that together form a single entity such as an Open XML Paper Specification (OpenXPS) document. OPC-based file formats combine the advantages of leaving the independent file entities embedded in the document intact and resulting in much smaller files compared to normal use of XML.
Task Scheduler is a job scheduler in Microsoft Windows that launches computer programs or scripts at pre-defined times or after specified time intervals. Microsoft introduced this component in the Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95 as System Agent. Its core component is an eponymous Windows service. The Windows Task Scheduler infrastructure is the basis for the Windows PowerShell scheduled jobs feature introduced with PowerShell v3.
Image Composite Editor is an advanced panoramic image stitcher made by the Microsoft Research division of Microsoft Corporation.
Pivot is a software application from Microsoft Live Labs that allows users to interact with and search large amounts of data. It is based on Microsoft's Seadragon. It has been described as allowing users to view the web as a web rather than as isolated pages.
Seadragon Software was a team within the Microsoft Live Labs. Its product, Seadragon, is a web optimized visualization technology that allows graphics and photos to be smoothly browsed, regardless of their size. Seadragon is the technology powering Microsoft's Silverlight, Pivot, Photosynth and the standalone cross-platform Seadragon application for iPhone and iPad.
Blaise Agüera y Arcas is an American AI researcher, software engineer, software architect, author, and Vice President and Fellow at Google Research.
Microsoft Silverlight is an application framework for writing and running rich web applications that was actively developed and marketed by Microsoft from 2007 to 2012. This is a technical overview of the platform's history.
A tiled web map,slippy map or tile map is a map displayed in a web browser by seamlessly joining dozens of individually requested image or vector data files. It is the most popular way to display and navigate maps, replacing other methods such as Web Map Service (WMS) which typically display a single large image, with arrow buttons to navigate to nearby areas. Google Maps was one of the first major mapping sites to use this technique. The first tiled web maps used raster tiles, before the emergence of vector tiles.
The International Image Interoperability Framework defines several application programming interfaces that provide a standardised method of describing and delivering images over the web, as well as "presentation based metadata" about structured sequences of images. If institutions holding artworks, books, newspapers, manuscripts, maps, scrolls, single sheet collections, and archival materials provide IIIF endpoints for their content, any IIIF-compliant viewer or application can consume and display both the images and their structural and presentation metadata.
