Resolve Evolve Solve - Imagine Cup UK Winners

This past week at the Imagine Cup UK finals, it was announced that Resolve Evolve Solve had won the UK leg of the competition. Which is a great achivement after all the hard work and problems that have occoured throughout this year.

Resolve Evolve Solve is made up of myself (Dominic Green) and Ben Nunney, we both met up through the Microsoft Student Partners program nearly a year ago and decided that we both felt pasionatly about the topic of the enviroment which is the main focus of the Imagine Cup this year along with the fealing that we could make a real difference.

Our entry EnviroMatch is a suite of interactive mini-games that helps to educate students about the enviroment and in doing so help future generations with making the eviroment much more sustainable.

These enviromental mini-games have been deployed used a range of cutting edge technologies from Silverlight 2 Beta1 (Beta2 conversion on way), WCF webservices and also the use of the FaceBook API to create a competative edge to the entry.

Using such technology as the FaceBook API it allows a social networking aspect to be brought to the entry with EnviroMatch scores being displayed on users social network profiles so that users can compete to better their peers, in turn learning mor about the enviroment.

Ben, whilst still doing a masters to become a teacher has been able to test out with the end users as well as the teachers who would be looking to use the entry as a real educational tool. All feedback from both students and teachers have really helped made the entry better and we hope to implement even more of these ideas in the final solution.

The initial proof of concept of the application includes a game whereby users take contol of a young child in a house that has to hurry to turn off all devices in the house to save the most electricity. This is updated in real time on one side of the application, however on problem that was identified was that 20Kw/h of electricity would mean nothing to children, therefore at the end of the game this energy saving is related back to the users in a more understandable way of the ammount of Xbox games a user could buy after saving this much electricity. Hopefully this will hit home with the children.

Now myself and Ben have around 3 weeks to update the application before we head out to Paris to compete in the World Finals of the Imagine Cup. Various updates and new features will be added to the entry before the finals come around.

Will keep updating with all events as much as I can.

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.

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.

MSP Live Meeting

Last night the world held it's breath as it basked in the glory of the first UK MSP Live Meeting!!

The Live Meeting was some what chaotic to start with multiple people signing in and the ocasional confused call of " ... hello? .... Can you hear me? ...." Which always seem to make me laugh as if nobody could hear you how would they respond?

The meeting was brilliant, it was good seeing Mo, Anna-Liza and Mark via video call and provided a good chance to catch up with all of the MSPs. As part of the Live Meeting various topics were discussed concerning what the MSPs will be doing in the coming months, some of which is still a bit hush hush so I can't be telling all. :-D

However the official Launch of Visual Studio 2008 will be high on the priority list for this term, and events will be based around this launch in March. Check out the heroes comunity for more info on the launch and events surrounding it.

Another aspect of the meeting was overcoming the phantom typist, who must be setting a new world record for the force at which any mortal can hammer on a keyboard! The Phatom continually typed over the meeting and I must admit got a little annoying. Apart from that the usual meeting banter happened, phonecalls, road noises, disconnections, reconnections and my fravourite moment when Ben Nunney and myself hijacked the meeting to broadcast our very own pirate propoganda messages. (all in the name of good old fashioned fun) :p

After the events of the meeting Mark found this video which totally sums up the Live Meeting experience.


Video: Conference Calls

I think someone should draw up some Live Meeting eticete, so that such situations are avoided.

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 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.

SLIDE 7

I recently had the opportunity to attend the SLIDE 7 event at Microsoft Campus Reading the mainly covered web development, using a verity of approaches.

The format of the event was basically split into two, one half of the attendees taking the more advanced topics such as Advanced ASP.NET and Connected Mobile Devices, whilst the other half (myself included) took the easier route covering an introduction to ASP.NET and AJAX. There were also common topics such as Silverlight.

I thought the topics on ASP.NET and AJAX were an excellent introduction to someone like myself who had not used either of the technologies before. Not surprisingly I found many similarities with ASP and JSP which I am much more accustomed to, after a year doing it at university. My JSP also helped me understand what was happening with AJAX.

These lessons have now inspired me to go out and try to learn more about each of the topics and I have started learning some basic ASP.NET and will hopefully move onto AJAX in due course.

Mark Johnsons presentation on Silverlight was excellent all be it with minor compilation errors. Also to my surprise a mac was used to give some of the presentation along with the friendly jokes along the way.

Swag, galore!! Everyone who attended also received a bag full of swag, containing a copy of Expression Web which at first look I am really impressed with.

Overall a great day and I will defiantly be attending next year!