It goes basically like this: Sign up, create one or more tags (the image is generated on the server), make a sticker with tag image and once people scan the image with a mobile phone or some other mobile device they get the action you associate with the tag (i.e. open an URL). Simple and effective.

Even on my lame HTC TyTN II Windows Mobile device all it takes is a click to start the application and pointing phone’s camera to the printed tag. (to install the Tag application on the mobile phone you should browse the http://www.microsoft.com/tag using your phone’s browser)

Here is an example that will redirect you to this blog. Note that images aren’t fixed sized.

You can test Microsoft Tag for free.

There are some graphical problems, probably due to new Visual Studio’s WPF UI, when running shinny new Visual Studio 2010 beta under VMWare Workstation: things like menus disappearing, strange artifacts appearing, etc.

Luckily the solution to this is very simple:

1. make sure the virtual machine is turned off
2. open virtual machine settings, go to Hardware tab and select Display
3. Turn off Accelerate 3D graphics (DirectX 9.0c) option and that’s it.

Picture quality might be a bit lower but at least everything will work. Btw I’ve installed Visual Studio 2010 in both Windows XP x86 and Windows 7 x64 virtual machines and it works just fine when graphics acceleration is turned off.

Update 9.12.2009: Workstation 7 supports WPF/Aero with hardware acceleration.

Go grab your copy from MSDN downloads for subscribers. General public will get it in a couple of days. Via Soma.

Time remaining to complete the download for me: 20mins.