MIX08 Live Online

MIX 08 is being streamed live online here

Go check it out.

MSP Live Meeting 2: Andy Sterland

On Monday the second MSP Live Meeting took place, with guest speaker Andy Sterland speaking on Popfly.

Andy who was previously a MSP himself, competed in the Imagine Cup in 2006 and managed to get to the world finals in India (see link). Now Andy has jetted off to Redmond and works on the Popfly Team.

The meeting open up with a quick introduction from our glorious leaders Mark and Mo, before launching Andy straight into the action (even thought it was 8am in Redmond). Andy then started his presentation with a quick run through of Popfly and how it enables non-developers to quikly build a mashup of various web services into a single application which can then be deployed to a webpage, gadget or even Facebook.

After the standard Flickr / Virtual Earth demo Andy started a bit more of a deeper dive, showing how blocks can actually be built up using a some real code all be it JavaScript. One thing to note is that since coming out of Alpha Popfly now uses Silverlight to display blocks etc. and can also be deployed on websites as a Silverlight app. however Andy did point out that Facebook only currently support Silverlight in the application page and not on profiles. This should hopefully be fixed in the near future when Facebook arn't "too busy making money".

One of the things that I had never seen before which come form the presentation was the ability to intergrate Popfly with Visual Studio by downloading the Popfly Explorer.

MMU Visual Studio Launch

As part of HEROES Happen {here} there are going to be hundreds of events held around the globe to showcase the new products being launched. The products:

Visual Studio 2008

SQL Server

Windows Server 2008

To welcome the launch of these products I have organised a launch event at Manchester Met University for all of the students and lecturers, the event will be centred around Visual Studio 2008 and the great new features that are in the product such as multi-targeting, WISYWIG web design, and not forgetting LINQ.

This event will take place on the 12th of March, in room E221 of the John Doltan building between 1 and 2pm. Microsoft have been kind enough to donate a number of prizes for people who attend (not to mention DreamSpark).

I will also be helping out at the Manchester VBUG event on the 27th of March more information about this event can be found here, or on Phils blog here.

Inspiration Tour

Last year the Inspiration Tour kicked off and the first stop on tour was Manchester, however this initial outing was a little rocky due to some technical difficulties.


However the Inspiration Tour come back to Manchester Met with Ben Coley as the one man whilwind, presenting, gaming and coding after he has lost his wingman Ed Dunhil to sickness.





The Inspiration Tour covered Microsofts latest and greatest technologies ranging from the brower busting Silverlight, Windows Embedded, Popfly and the gamers fravourite XNA .



Starting out Ben showed why many are heralding Silverlight as "the Flash Killer", delivering HD video through the browser, quickly cooking up an app using Blend, and giving us an insight into your fravourite "Silverlight Airlines".

Silverlight is a great technology and with forthcoming release of Silverlight 2.0 (formerly 1.1) later in the year what better time than to start learning. Silverlight 2.0 will allow the development with .NET code within Silverlight along with the eagerly awaited control which will make creating a great app that much easier.



Windows Embedded went on to showcase that Windows is not just a PC OS but can be used on a number of different platforms and even in your parents washing machine. Using the Embedded development platform Ben showed us how easy it was to create an application for your Windows mobile phone. If I had on of these new fangled phones I would be pimping it out with a range of home made applications.



Popfly, a development enviroment for your mum, Ben showed off how simple it is to create a Flicker/Virtual Earth mashup creating a usable application in around 6 clicks of his Microsoft mouse.

Popfly is such a user friendly IDE that no programming knowledge is required, just use the provided blocks to wow other with your sophisticated apps. This block structure makes learning a sites API a thing of the past, now what would of taken you days to create can simply be done in a matter of seconds (bar the having to register with Flickr).



The grand finalae of the event was XNA, with a bevvy of brilliant but somewhat disturbing games demenstrating the power some of the great games that have bee developed using XNA. Not to mention the 1-on-1 shoot out between two spaceships,



Overall MMU's Inspiration Tour was an excellent event, some excellent content leaving me wising I had more time on my hands to learn all this great stuff.

MIX@MMU Wednesday 5th December

MIX @ MMU is fast approaching, with only a couple of short days to wait we have another speaker confirmed!

Mike Taulty a Microsoft Development Evangelist and Silverlight guru will be attending, giving an insight into development using Silverlight, Microsofts latest web technology which gives developers the ability to create rich interactive user experiences.

MIX promises to be a great event, especially with Phil and Mike offering a wealth of knowledge and experience.

MIX@MMU

MIX @ MMU is going to be my first major event as an MSP and hope as many people from the universiy can make it down. It promises to be a great event with talks from myself and Phil Winstanley. Not to mention the free beer and pizza (if we dont get kicked out by the Dean lol).

Register for the Imagine Cup and win an Xbox 360

Want the chance to win an Xbox 360? Well every month Microsoft will be giving one away, all you have to do is register your interest in the Imagine Cup. Go to:

www.imaginecup.co.uk

Then click on register, easy as that!

The Imagine Cup is the world’s largest technology competition with students all over the world taking part. It gives you brilliant opportunities to build up connections with people in a wide range of computing companies, last year one of the UK’s entrants was offered a job based upon his entry into the imagine cup.

This year the Imagine Cup is being held in Paris, France and with a little effort you will be able to get an all expenses paid trip there to compete all you have to do is enter. Also for the first time ever the UK will be giving out country specific prizes, to some of the groups that reach the third round of the competition. Some of these prizes include 2week work placement with the Microsoft Popfly team in Seattle, 2 week work placement with a Microsoft Games Studio, HD Video Camera and loads of Xbox 360 Elites.

For more information on the Imagine Cup check out the website: www.imaginecup.co.uk

Building Dynamic Web Applications with Microsoft Silverlight

Want to learn about the latest internet technologies? Well now’s your chance, Mike Ormond a Microsoft Development Evangelist is coming to Manchester on the 15th November to give a presentation on developing web apps using Microsoft’s latest web technology Silverlight.

Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering rich media experiences and applications for the Web. Silverlight provides a highly productive platform for designers and developers to collaborate in building a new generation of web experiences enabling you to build visually stunning interactive content and applications that run on multiple browsers and operating systems.

Mike will also be taking a look at XMAL a mark-up based language based on XML, which is currently being used to develop rich media experiences such as those you will see when developing with Silverlight or WPF.

For more information on the free event go to:
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032355901&Culture=en-GB

or check out Mike Ormond’s blog at:
http://blogs.msdn.com/mikeormond/default.aspx

Hope to see you all there!

IT Carrers Fair

I know its a bit short notice but today there is a Carrers fair at the G-Mex Centre, Manchester.

All the large IT corperations will be there for a chance for you to speak with the employees and to get more of an idea of what it is like to work for an IT company.

So if your looking for a year placement or a graduate oppertunity head down to the G-Mex and see if any of the jobs take your fancy.

Re-Inspiration Tour

The Inspiration Tour will be heading back to MMU in the new year to re-do the event which suffered from technical difficulties last time round.

The new date for the event is

Thursday 24th Jan, 11-2 in C0.14.

This will be in the John Dolton building so easy enough for all computing students to get to.

An advertising campaign will be lauched a few weeks before the event so everyone is aware of event.

Imagine Cup Website

With the 2007 Imagine Cup competition finished it is now time for everyone to get signed up and involoved with next years competition.
The UK website for the IC has just been launched and can be found at:

http://www.imaginecup.co.uk/

Make sure you head over and take a look, there is also some cool competitions with the chance to win an Xbox 360.

If you have not yet registered for the IC then register on the main site which is:

http://imaginecup.com/

There will be more excitement and news to come in the next couple of months, so go sign up and start thinking about what sections you will be entering.

Inspiration Tour??

The Inspiration Tour kicked off today and where better to start it than right here in Manchester! However after some major technical difficulties the event started to look gloomy. Ed and Ben encoundted technical problem with the projector and were only able to use the project for about 15 minutes, which left the rest of the event being presented without any demos or slides.

However all is not bad news, we have been asured that the Inspiration Tour will return to Manchester and give a fully fledged event. Possibly starting and ending the tour Manchester.

Inspiration Tour UK

The Inspiration Tour will soon start making its way around the country and where better to start than right here in Manchester!

With topics like the .NET Framework, Silverlight and XNA it covers all bases for those students who want to go on intoth tech industry.

Scott Guthrie MIX Interview

Scott Guthrie was kind enough to give Kevin Pfister and myself an interview during his busy schedule at MIX:UK. This is just a preview of the finished video which will be uploaded onto Channel 8 as soon as the audio is cleaned up.

If you like this take a look at my MIX mashup as well.

MIX:UK Day 2

Day two of MIX, was kicked off in true developer fashion with Scott Guthrie jumping straight into programming in .NET 3.5 and the new Visual Studio 2008 (formerly Codename Orcas). The two hours spent going over the new features of VS2008 not only showcased some of the new features of the development environment but in true fashion was entertaining. With the session only being a two hour slot, we were only able to scratch the surface on the new features. The new LINQ querying language was particularly impressive with demos of LINQ in action querying object, databases and more. Also demonstrated was the new WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) controls for VS2008 taking much of the functionality from Expression Web to allow the user to create stunning applications, as well as easily managing CSS.
During the break between the first set of presentations I managed to get my much anticipated interview with Scott, which if the audio turns out find will be posted up on Channel 8 with the rest of the footage that was captured at the event. Scott was a genuinely nice guy to meet and have a chat with, we managed to talk with him about a number of things from how he got started in Microsoft, where he sees the web going in a couple of years time and my personal favourite was when we asked him about the best “freebee” that he had got since he started working at Microsoft. It turns out that the best thing he received was a basket ball signed by Bill Gates asking him to come and work for the company which he still has in his office today.
After this talk we then went on to a presentation on where to get started with WPF and Silverlight applications, this talk was much more cantered towards a group of developers / designers however was still very interesting. The talk was mainly about trying to achieve the balance between design and development, as well as how the use of the internet and sites on the net has changed over the past 10 or so years. One interesting point made was the emergence of a new role, during the creation of a web app or desktop application which is a middle man between the designer and developer. This is a role well suited to people who can both develop and also have an interest in design, they are then able to easily identify if a design is far too flashy to be made into a viable application, and these member of the team would ideally be XAML gurus.
I had never heard of tech based gameshows before today but they are extremely entertaining with myself and Kevin Pfister volunteering ourselves to play. The game was called “Swaggily Fortunes” and the questions were based on the answers given in a handout at another event. I managed to win my fair share of sway and have a great time whilst doing it. Also I must say that I nearly have enough “Microsocks” to last me a week and my prized runner up trophy.
The final session of the day was dedicated to giving us a Sneak Peak into what is currently being developed with Microsoft Technologies, by themselves and third parties. We had a sneak peak at some new Halo 3 footage, a look at multicore programming and also what can be done with the Microsoft Robotics package.
The whole MIX experience has been great and I would defiantly recommend other people to attend such events as you not only get a more in depth look at the latest technologies but there are so many people there to meet and get talking to.
Hopefully I will be able to attend more events in the future, but until then keep an eye out for any footage of MIX on channel 8.

MIX:UK Day 1

Yesterday was the first day of MIX:UK 2007 and it couldn't of been better.
The day started of with a brilliant keynote, presented by a large numbe of people it gave a brilliant overview of what MIX is all about. Starting off by wowing the audiance with brilliant footage of silverlight in action. The keynote was made up of a number of demos from Microsoft employees and companys who use Microsoft technologies to develop great solutions.
There was a demo on how to build a silverlight media player application, using expression blend which took under five minutes to get a stunning end peice with rich animated graphics.

After the footnote and a short break, Scott Guthrie went on to explain silverlight development in much more detail, starting with the basics of how to use XAML to create a brilliant GUI by using different shapes and effects. The main thing that struck me in the design and creation of the GUI was how similar it was to creating SVG with XML. Once Scott had got the basics done with the GUI he went on to show us some more advanced techniques such as using transform matricies to transform and rotate buttons and shapes. Also connecting Silverlight to the users local machine to use folders from there pc was really interesting. This presentation has really given me the silverlight bug, and once I download VS 2008 beta (as Express dosn't support SL) I will get progamming and designing some small applications.

The next presentation was all about harnessing the power of Windows Live apps in your own web sites so using such things as Virtual Earth to create websites such as Track Me and another sports tracking system which allows uses to track there excercise by using a GPS device which is then synced with a map to show the route that the user has run on a map. There was also talk about a Silverlight hosting system where you can get up to 4Gb of FREE storage for your silverlight videos and applications. When you upload your apps you are then given a section of JavaScript that you can copy and paste into your own web site for free video hosting. For more information on using Windows Live apps on your web sites have a look at http://dev.live.com/.

Throught the day we managed to get a number of interviews and am really looking forwards to an interview with Scott Guthrie on the second day of MIX.

The day ended with a final show down between the people attending the event fighting for the crown of Guitar Hero. I think this was a billiant competition with all competetors putting on a great show. The winners ended up bagging themselves a great graphics tablet and also means I will now start training my Guitar Hero skills for the next MS event that I go to.

Overall the first day was a great experience and I can't wait for what they have in store for us in the second day of MIX. There is a number of talks on Orcas and the .NET 3.5 framework that I am particularly looking forwards to not to mention whatever tricks they have up their sleeves.

MIX:UK Fast Approaching

MIX:UK 2007 just around the corner, with a couple of days to go until the event. MIX is a annual event held by Microsoft, displaying the newest technologies both for designers and developers. This years agenda seems to be focusing on web design/development with alot of focus on Silverlight, RIA and how to create and get the most out of these cutting edge goodies.

Lucky for me being a MSP I have been able to grab myself a ticket to attend the event. Whilst at the event I will be hunting down unsusspecting attendes and speakers to try and get video interviews which will be posted on Channel 8 at a later date.

Recently I have been trying to get in touch with as many people who will be attending to try and secure interviews with some of the speakers but as you can imagine with the amount of people at the event as well as the local media it isn't plain sailing.

However I have been told there is a possibility of getting an interview with Scott Guthrie, which is awesome as apparently he will not be giving interviews to the press. This does put a little more pressure on us to get a good interview. Scott is a general manager of a number of teams at Microsoft over in the states, he is in charge of teams which develop such things as ASP.NET, WPF and Silverlight to name just a few. Scotts blog can be found here.

MIX isn't all about learning about the latest tech but also getting to know other people in the community and with the MIX Munchies after the first day of the event this is the place to mingle. There will be a DJ and drinks being put on before we head out for a bite to eat, I have to say this is one of those opportunities to make the most of as there will be so many interesting people about.

I have also just found out that the tube strike has been canceled which means that the hassle of trying to get accross London for 8:30 in the morning is reduced.

I'm really excited about the event and can't wait till it all starts. I will hopefully keep you updated as the event develops (if I can find a WiFi access point).

MIX:UK 2007

Woohoo! I got some great news today, I have been given a ticket to attend MIX-UK 2007 this is a technology event held each year by Microsoft, displaying its latest technologies and gadgets.

I got the ticket as part of the MSP program and will be doing a video review, which hopefully will be put on channel8 and blogging about the experience. This is a brilliant opportunity for me to learn about the newest things that are about to be released.

The schedule for the event can be found on the MIX-UK web site and the current event which have been penciled in seem to focus heavily on Silverlight and Orcas. Which are tipped to be the hottest things for is year.

Schedule Includes:

• Building Silverlight Applications
• Design for Silverlight
  
• Windows Live Services
• Visual Studio 2008
• ASP.NET 3.5
• 3D solutions on the web

These are just a few of the topics being covered over the event, one session that I am really interested to find out what it's about is "Who's afraid of the blue monster?" I suspect that this will be a session about Vista and why people shouldn't be scared of the move.

Overall the event looks great and I'm really stoked to be attending, I will be attending along with my fellow MSP Kevin Pfiser who's blog can be found here.

I will keep you updated about what happens and the event and where the reviews can be found.

MSP 'Boot Camp'

Ok so it's been confirmed, its official the first MSP 'Boot Camp' is nearly upon us. The first 'Boot Camp' of the academic year is being held at Microsoft London on the 17th and 18th of September and looks to be a great event.
It will be the first time that this years UK MSP's will meet and I'm really looking forwards to meeting the rest of the crew, talking to each other in online forums is great but meeting and getting to know someone in person is much better. Hopefully this will make us a much tighter group and result in more topics and ideas being shared online.
At the current time I do not have a run down of what will be happening at the even, there will be some presentation techniques invloved which will help all the MSP's give better demonstrations and presentations to there respective universitys about the new Microsoft technologies. I am also hoping that there will be a number of workshops focusing on such things as WPF, WF, WCF, XAML and AJAX.
I will be traveling down to London the day before the event so that I don't have to rely on British transport to get me from Manchester to London for 10am. So if anyone else is in London at this time it would be great to hear from you and meet up.

Visual Studio 2006 'Orcas' Event

There is an upcoming event from Microsoft to demonstrate the new features of Visual Studio 2008, formerly codename 'Orcas'.

The event will be split into 2 sessions the first covering LINQ (Language Integrated Query) which I am personally looking forward to as LINQ looks extremly promising and looks as though it will be easy to pick up due to the syntax being much like that of SQL. I can see LINQ being a major part of new development, especially if all documents etc. have an XML back end.

The second session of the day covers the remaining features of Visual Studio 2008.

The event will take place both in Reading and London with the same content on each day, links to the event are below:

Reading - 04 September 2007

London - 05 September 2007

If I can find a cheap ticket I will be attending, hope to see you all there!