Dot Net Solutions released a new version of its Wikipedia Explorer built on top of Windows Azure. Of course this is built in partnership with Microsoft developer and platform evangelism team, so I’m not sure if is just a prof of concept or an actual product that will evolve later. Nonetheless, the project is interesting and is one of the few applications out there using windows azure.

The project is about visualizing relationships between documents within Wikipedia - creating a new browsing experience in Windows Presentation Foundation.

In the original version all the data was downloaded from Wikipedia on the fly. This was very simple, but also very slow and meant different visualisations would be produced each time based on which links were downloaded first. Continue reading…