Yesterday our first development surface unit has arrived. We encountered some minor issues when installing it (mostly because of a lack of knowledge). This post describes some of these issues and the solutions we have found. Hopefully this information can help other people when installing a surface for the first time.

We ordered the development unit about a week ago and had it delivered yesterday, so we thought that was quite fast.

After having unpacked the unit we noticed that the bluetooth mouse and keyboard were not included. Finding a spare mouse and keyboard was not really an issue, but still, one expects to find all parts in the box.Besides that the manual includes all information needed to get the unit up and running quite fast. After half an hour we could start up the SurfaceDesk and start 'touching' the surface. We executed the short callibration because the manual states that the complete callibration has been done for each surface before shipping.

Unfortunately nothing happened when touching the surface. For some reason it did not recognize any fingers, tags not blobs. Only a complete black button seemed to trigger some kind of reaction.

In order to try to solve this, We then tried the full callibration. The procedure went quite well and reported that the callibration was succesfull. However, nothing changed in the behaviour of the surface. After having tried several things (rebooting, re-callibrating - both simple and complete) we found out that the callibration chart is covered (on both sides) with some kind of protective foil, of which it is not immediately clear that it needs to be removed. I don't know (yet) how the surface functions exactly, but my guess is that the foil makes the black squares look grey and therefor the unit doesn't callibrate correctly.

After having removed the foil (on both sides) and having executed the complete callibration with the correct callibration chart the unit is now working properly.

We now can start to play with the SDK, sample applications and write some code !

PS. We have contacted Microsoft and apparantly the mouse and keyboard are no longer shipped to Europe and Asia. The documentation does not yet reflect this change and still lists them as being in the box.