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.

Xbox live gamertag

I have recently got an Xbox 360, and have decided to add my gamertag to my blog. This can be seen in the right side of the page and displays my gamer statistics and games played.

To display your own gamertag in your blog or web page just simply include the following code:

<iframe src="http://gamercard.xbox.com/REPLACE-THIS-WITH-YOUR-GAMERTAG.card" scrolling="no" frameBorder="0" height="140" width="204">Put your gamertag here too.</iframe>

Where your gamertag is put in at the obvious places.

Revolve Evolve Solve

Resolve Evolve Solve, is a distributed team of students consisting of Ben Nunney, Matt Duffin and myself who are working together on an Imagine Cup entry.
We have this past week completed and submitted our first round entry and are eagerly awaiting to see wheter our hard work has paid off.
So what better thing to do whilst we wait than develope a web site for our team and entry!!

Much of the site is still under construction at this time, however go check it out and get a feel of the creative genious that is Resolve Evolve Solve.

http://www.resolveevolvesolve.com/

Microsoft Buys Multimap

Microsoft have bought out Multimap, with the deal looking to land the founder of Multimap Sean Phelan £12m.

This will help Virtual Earth compete with Google Maps, especially as Multimap is one of the top 10 most visited site in the UK.

Imagine Cup: Software Design Round 1 Extended

The deadline for the first round of the Software Design invitation has been pushed back, from 14th December to 9th January.

This may come as good news for some groups who were scraping together their final bits for the entry. Luckily my team was ready to hand in our entry this Friday, the extra time will allow us to polish up on our entry and add some extra content.

Also meaning that people who have only just found out about the Imagine Cup, have a month now to get their idea typed up and submitted!

MIX@MMU Review

MIX @ MMU was a great event, with great presentations from our gueset speakers Phil Winstanley and Mike Taulty.

I started the event out with a present about the Imagine Cup, going through what is involved in the Imagine Cup and the various prizes that are up for grabs, from a trip to Redmond working with the Popfly team to the pile of Xbox 360s that Microsoft are giving away.

To register your interest in the Imagine Cup go to:

http://imaginecup.com/Registration/Default.aspx

Remember just registering your intrest will enter you into a prize draw to win an Xbox 360 Elite every month (Not bad for 2 minutes of your time).

The slides that I used in the presentation can be found on my Skydive account, feel free to download them:

http://cid-62e234c77f89fa18.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/Public

Phil Winistanley then went on to talk about developing websites using ASP.NET. Some of the topics that Phil covered were:

• A comparison of C# to Java
• Overview of the .NET framework and the languages supported
• Master pages and CSS to build up a consistent theme throughout the project
• Controls with back end functionality (Imagebutton that fired an event)
• Implementing AJAX into your ASP.NET pages
• Login and user creation components that are supplied with ASP.NET
• Rich video, using the forthcoming ASP.NET 3.5 Framework

During his talk Phil mentioned Visual Studio Express Edition which can be downloaded from the following link:

http://www.microsoft.com/express/

This comes with the .NET Developer Server, which is used instead of such things as the TomCat server which you may be more familar.

Phils talk ended with rich content in a website which was an ideal starting point for Mikes Silverlight demo. Mike covered a wide range of topics:

• Silverlight & XAML Introduction
• Silverlight V1.0 (current build)
• Silverlight V2.0 (future release)
• Rich Interactive Media, showing the Silverlight Airways and the Fox Film site
• cross platform capabilities
• developing Silverlight with JavaScript and the .NET Framework
• Expression Studio, for creating XAML

There are various ways of creating XAML but by far the best is by using Microsofts Expression Suite which is a family of programs (Design, Blend, Web and Media) which come togther to allow designers and developers to create rich web content. Trials of the Expression Suite can be found at:

http://www.microsoft.com/expression/

All in all the event was a great success, even with my it being my first public presentation. I would like to once again thank all those of you who turned up and a special thanks to Mike and Phil for giving some great presentations.

Check out this awesome song and video by The Richter Scales , found this video whilst reading through Scott Hanselman's blog. Very funny definatly worth watching!