Reading Microsoft tags

Question

Hi,

You guys are probably aware of Microsoft Tags.

We have a barcode gun in our office and I would like to read these tags using C#.

Any idea how I can go about doing this?

Thanks

Answer 1

The question is why?

There have been companies spruiking this for years and it just doesn't make sense.

I'd rather have an application that read a URL from a photo, OCR'd it and then punched it into a browser for me. That way you get the ability to click and view, but you don't need a phone in your hand to write down the URL. They're all striving for a vendor lock in.

Call me a luddite or blind to the way of the future but I just don't see this as a "killer app".

Answer 2

The Microsoft Tag initiative is based around image recognition, a barcode gun won't have any idea of what to do with a 'Tag', but you can use your phone camera. There's a sample app in the Apple App Store if you have an iPhone, not sure if they've written a version for Windows Mobile yet.

The principle is that you can resolve the tag to a short alpha-numeric code (think GUID but smaller) and then look that up using Microsoft's register of tags, using Web Services.