Wednesday 30 July 2008

Microsoft Midori - OS in the Cloud?

Recent reports suggest that Microsoft will be moving to a more web centric user experience with there next generation of oprating system.

Codename Midori looks to be being released after Windows 7 and most probably 8. Making the most of the recent movement of software plus services that we have seen from MS. If you've not seen some of the great services released by MS go check out:

Live Mesh

Outlook Live Connector

Live Office

Popfly Work Experience


One of the prizes for winning the UK leg of the Imagine Cup with our entry EnviroMatch is a week work experience with the Popfly. During this week Ben Nunney and myself will travel out to Microsoft headquarters in Seattle and meet up with some of the greatest minds in Microsoft.

The week will start out meeting with Andy Sterland, the Popfly Team's token Brit who was also a previous competitor in the Imagine Cup, representing the UK in India. Andy will show us round the offices and start us on our main project for the week. As well as doing general babysitting just in case Ben gets arrested (anything could happen) or i get lost on campus.

Creating a number of 60 minute presentations on the Popfly platform, creation of mashups and also a deep dive into programming (javascript pfft) custom blocks. Will update when i get more indepth information on these presentations.

During the week we also get the honour of meeting up with Anders Hejlsberg (wiki) , who is the lead architecte on the C# programming language. Hopefully we will be able to get some interesting sneak peaks on what Anders envisages for C# 4.0.

We will be out in Redmond from the 3rd till the 12th of August, anyone who is free to meet and talk tech drop me an email or a tweet (domgreen).

Monday 28 July 2008

Best Ever Popfly Video

Just been browsing around on the Popfly site and managed to stumble upon this really funny "Live Action Demo" of how to create mash-ups in Popfly.

http://www.popfly.com/Videos/?video=liLiveAction


Who said you need a PC to use Popfly?

Wednesday 23 July 2008

Microsoft Scalable Fabric

Microsoft Scalable Fabric is a new way to manage tasks brought to you by the geniuses at Microsoft Research (MSR).


Rather than minimising or tabbing between each of the applications that are running Scalable Fabric allows you to pull applications to the side of the screen where they are scaled down.

Allowing you to still see all applications that are running on your machine right from your desktop.


A central "focus" area is defined where by dragging an app closer will scale it up and if the app is dragged away it is then scaled down.


One of the really cool things about fabric is that you can then group similar applications that you may be running together, in my screen shot (ace background im sure you'll agree) you can see that ive made an IM app group, consisting of my Skype and digsby chats. By clicking on the group label all o the applications can be brought into the focus area.


Although the app is very cool it does still seem a little buggy, will use it for a couple of days to see how i like it :D


Microsoft Scalable Fabric can be downloaded here.

Thursday 17 July 2008

Presentations from Paris

Ben Nunnery has uploaded a video of Resolve Evolve Sovles final presentation at the 2008 Imagine Cup, and can be found below:

Unfortunatly, we didnt make it to the second round of the finals but being in Paris was such a great opportunity. Hopefully I will be reappearing at future IC events as either a mentor or judge (fingers crossed).




Video: EnviroMatch Presentation


I would also like to thank all the Microsofties that gave us alot of support whilst we were out in Paris.

Saturday 5 July 2008

Imagine Cup 2008 - Paris

"Imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable enviroment"
Microsoft and the Imagine Cup has brought the best student competetors from all around the world to take part in the Imagine Cup in Paris, France. With over 1000 student from 60 countries this years Imagine Cup has to be one of the biggest mult-cultural student gathering to ever happen.
Over the past two days the competetors have been competing and presenting projects that have been worked on for the past few months. All the competetors out in Paris are already winner having competed in regional finals within their own contries to get the honour to represent at a world level.


My own team Resolve Evolve Solve, have given our first two presentations for the Software Design invitational, each presentation should last around 20 minutes and display the entry to the judges showing what enviromental problem we solved and how it has been done. I feel that the presentations have gone really well and we will find out later today if we have made it to the semi-finals.


Making it through to the semi-finals would be a truley excellent experience, especially with the high class entries from other contires around the world.

From feed-back after outr first two presentations will deffinatly be put into practice if we make it through to the next round. One point of feedback was to make it much clearer how the EnviroMatch application will generate revenue, using the skinning services offered to our customers. To find out more about our teams Imagine Cup entry visit our website.

So, untill we find out the results of this round fingers will be securly crossed.