This Week on Channel 9, Dan and Brian go through the week's news and celebrate the 4th of July (American Independence Day): - Shooting Roman Candles at a video camera with a fireproof screen - Microsoft acquires Powerset, a natural language search company - Microsoft announces Equipt, a $70/year subscription to Microsoft Office that includes three Office licenses and OneCare (via ReadWriteWeb.com) - Imagine Cup 2008 Finals are taking place in France and Long Zheng from istartedsomething.com is competing (via Liveside.net) - Video by Jason Sobel from Facebook's infrastructure team on how Facebook supports billions of photos(via James Hamilton) - Video clip of Brian interviewing the researchers building "Pex" a new tool for automated exploratory testing - Video clip of Amanda Silver on making tough feature cuts for Visual Basic 2008 - New, cool 3D XNA Starter Kit: Robot Game, available for download for Creator's Club subscribers - Bart de Smet's blog post: A Lap around "Velocity" - Sandcastle source code published to Codeplex (via Todd Mancini) - New PDC Sessions updated on MicrosoftPDC.com - Andy Konkel's Coding4Fun article: BlueBoss, Bluetooth Proximity Detection - How Stuff Works: How Fireworks work - Dan's Pick of the week: Erik Klimczak: Coding4Fun: WPF Custom Screensaver Art - Brian's Pick of the week: Nick Berardi's analysis on male/female ratio's for developer bloggers (Phil Haack wins!) - After the credits, Roman candle test failure