Welcome to the Microsoft Christmas CoolWall. What is it and what can you do with it? Well, first of all, it is a project designed to permit Microsoft to flex its Silverlight and Live Search muscles in a brand new combination. But, the mixture of the two technologies from the Redmond company makes up quite an interesting application that users can turn to for the upcoming holiday shopping frenzy. Essentially, the Christmas CoolWall is designed to permit users to make a wish list of gifts for this Christmas and share it, in order to make sure that "Santa" will not pick the wrong presents.

"The CoolWall allows you to find images of different items and sort them into categories of 'Seriously Uncool', 'Uncool', 'Cool' and 'Sub-Zero'. You can also annotate the images with comments. Having built a cool wall, you can save it, copy it as an image, or send it via email to a friend", revealed Tim Sneath, resident group manager for client platforms.

The CoolWall features a search field where users will be able to obtain images with their preferred gifts. Then, the visual wish list can be organized in accordance to the "coolness" factor of the various items, providing strong indications of what the user wants or does not want to get for Christmas. The images can be placed on the wall via a quick drag and drop action, and the result can be saved using a Windows Live ID. After saving the CoolWall as an image, users will even be able to send it through email.

"All this is, of course, built in Silverlight 1.0. The application demonstrates a range of capabilities: integration with Live Search and Live ID, HTML / Silverlight integration, reuse of simple controls written in JavaScript, ASP.NET server integration. It's not the most complex application ever written, but it's a bit of fun in this holiday season", Sneath added.