Today’s online reading turned up what sounded like one of the coolest pieces of software in a very long time. Microsoft has come up with something called WorldWide Telescope, which basically hooks you in to a vast collection of astronomical databases and allows you to browse the night sky in much the same way as Google Earth allows you to browse our planet. The introductory videos on the site talk a lot about creating stories, and it is clear that, at least as far as the astronomy community is concerned, one of the major purposes of this is to get kids doing astronomy from their PCs and making their own multi-media presentations based on their explorations. That’s seriously cool.

As far as I know, no actual science fiction writers were harmed involved in the making of this project. However, I can quite see them getting interested. I immediately started thinking about how great it would be if Kim Stanley Robinson had a web site that gave you a grand tour of places he used as settings in his Mars trilogy, or if Robert Reed did a presentation showing Marrow’s grand tour of the galaxy. The possibilities are vast. I could see that I needed to get a copy of this, even if it was going to be a huge time sink.

I should perhaps have been slightly nervous because of the really slow speed of the web site. The videos that is has up are not playable from the site – you have to download them. But I persevered, watched the videos (which turned out to be mainly talking heads), and then downloaded the software.

And at this point it became clear that this was a piece of software written by Microsoft. When I ran the installer I got a message telling me that I needed .NET Framework version 2.0.50727. Yes, that’s right. Not v2.0, nor the latest in the v2 series, but v2.0.50727. Helpfully it gave me the option of downloading the software I needed. But did it actually do that? No, of course it didn’t. What it did was take me to a web page where I could download a beta version of .NET 3.5. There were links to other pages with downloads of other versions of the software, but it was by no means clear which one was the latest stable release, or which one I actually needed.

By this point I had got nervous enough to check out which version of .NET I actually had installed. It turns out I’m still on 1.1. But I know that some of the software I have installed, including stuff that I use for work, does use .NET. I have no idea how much of that would stop working if I upgraded. What I did know what that the web pages I had been directed to were sufficiently confusing that I decided not to take the chance. If I had been at home I would have done install on my desktop, safe in the knowledge that I would not damage my main working machine. But while I’m on the road I can’t afford to take chances.

As well, hopefully I’ll remember come August. In the meantime, congratulations Microsoft, you’ve put off yet another eager customer.