Everyone who came to the main .Net user group meeting on Jan 31st saw a sample of Microsoft's Photo Story 3 when Michael Earls put up a slide show of his San Francisco trip using Windows XP Media Center Edition.  That was the animated slideshow featuring the automated pan and scan of photos.  Well, if you want to do that for yourself but you don't have XP Media Center Edition, you have another option.  Microsoft has released Photo Story 3.  This nifty little tool will import a bunch of pictures, allow you to set the slideshow to music, and create a WMV video file which you can distribute.  Fantastically easy to use, I created a slideshow of nearly 300 photos complete with 8 different songs in the background in under 3 minutes.  I showed this off at work and everyone with kids is already downloading it.  Try it out - it's completely FREE!

-- Matt Ranlett