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April 2006 - Posts

Friday, April 28, 2006 2:59 AM

Brandon Bray on Visual C++

Do you think that C++ has gone the way of FORTRAN and COBOL? (Remember them?) Well Brandon Bray is someone you will want to listen to in this Channel 9 interview . Brandon talks about how Visual C++ is fully involved in the .NET Framework if you want
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Thursday, April 27, 2006 2:48 AM

Eileen Brown - from super tanker pilot to IT professional

Channel 9 has a very interesting interview with Eileen Brown from Microsoft in the UK. eileen has had a non-traditional career to say the least. She used to navagate supertankers. From there she moved into information technology. Today she manages IT
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Wednesday, April 26, 2006 3:16 AM

Teaching Without Tests

Last week I read an interesting blog by Jane who is "an assistant professor in a computing field." Jane has decided not to use the typical small number of high stakes tests that are common in university level computing courses. She is using only projects
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Tuesday, April 25, 2006 3:03 AM

MSDN Training Events

Microsoft is starting up a national tour of training events at the MSDN Events site. While these events are designed for professional developers there is a lot of valuable content there for people who are looking to teach people who will become professionals
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Tuesday, April 25, 2006 12:59 AM

Computer Camp in the Mountains

Now this sounds like another wonderful experience. Western State College of Colorado is running a summer computer camp . John Peterson is the director and that suggests a great camp experience to me. I know John and he's a great guy who is a top CS professor
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Monday, April 24, 2006 1:43 AM

IT Employement Reaches Record High in U.S.

InformationWeek reports that there are now more people working in the IT field in the US than at any time in history. That includes the peek of the dot com bubble. The unemployement rate for IT workers is down to 2.5% which is a pretty low number. I've
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 3 Comments
Friday, April 21, 2006 2:03 PM

Join the Computer Science Education Day Committee

Brian Scarbeau is looking for people to join his committee to promote and run Computer Science Education Day . If you are interested contact Brian at bscarbeau@lhps.org Tell him Alfred sent you. :-)
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Friday, April 21, 2006 1:19 AM

Two Minutes on Why Iron Python is so Cool

Here is a short 2 minute video with Jim Hugenin that explains what "Python on .NET" is and why it such a cool implimentation of Python. There is some talk about Visual Studio integration to come. Now that may be something cool to use with high school
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Thursday, April 20, 2006 1:01 PM

Computer Science Education Day Website

Brian Scarbeau is now looking to get some corporate sponsorship for his idea of a Computer Science Education Day. He's also set up a web site for the project at his school. One of the initial things he has at this website is a guest book for people to
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Thursday, April 20, 2006 1:58 AM

Visual Studio Express Announcements

There is too much to copy from Dan Fernandez' blog but I'll give you the highlights so you'll go read the whole thing. First the big one! We are incredibly excited to announce that effective April 19 th , 2006, all Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, April 19, 2006 1:10 PM

Seidenberg School Summer Experience

The Seidenberg School Summer Experience is a special summer program at Pace University for top high school computer science students. This program is looking to accept up to 20 students for an expense and tuition paid summer program in New York City at
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, April 19, 2006 11:01 AM

Computer Science Education Day Gaining Traction

It looks like Brian Scarbeau’s idea for Computer Science Education Day timed with Grace Hopper’s birthday is gaining some traction. I talked about it yesterday and several other people brought it up in their blogs as well. Joyce Carpenter brought it up
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, April 19, 2006 2:56 AM

Why Choose Computer Science? Answers in Some Videos for Students

Thanks to a link from Diane Curtis in my group I found some interesting videos from the University of Washington. One called a Day in The Life has short interviews with some young women, recent Washington graduates, who now work at Microsoft, Google and
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments
Tuesday, April 18, 2006 11:43 AM

Let's Celebrate Computer Science Education at our Schools

Brian Scarbeau came up with what I think is a completely wonderful idea (read his proposal here ). The short version is that while most subject departments at most schools have annual "days" or "weeks" that they celebrate there is no one special day or
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Tuesday, April 18, 2006 2:29 AM

Best Jobs in America

MONEY Magazine and Salary.com rated careers based on salary and job prospects and CNN reports the results . 1. Software Engineer 7. Computer IT Analyst So apparently someone thinks there are good jobs in computing out there. The number two job was college
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Monday, April 17, 2006 3:04 AM

Interview with Sara Ford

Pat Phillips has an interesting interview with Sara Ford at MainFunction this month. ( Audio version here ) Sara is responsible for the developement of PowerToys which are free tools that Microsoft makes available to developers. Sara has a blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Sunday, April 16, 2006 1:32 PM

Survival - is it really coming down to that?

kcbibo over at the iTeacher blog is writing about his fight to keep his computer program alive. He's got six-year old computers and no money to upgrade. The only courses that can get any funding are those which are seen as contributing to raising test
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Saturday, April 15, 2006 5:38 AM

Educational Computing Organization of Ontario

I read that my friend Daniel Shapiro from Microsoft Canada is speaking at ECOO on May 4th. Microsoft is a sponsor again this year. Daniel says its a great conference and I believe him. Truth be told there are a lot of great educational conferences during
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Friday, April 14, 2006 10:14 AM

Students can win an XBOX 360 desiging a web page

The Sandbox at theSpoke is a learning site for students who want to create interesting and useful web sites. There they will find a download link to Visual Web Developer 2005 Express, a series of webcasts and screen casts and 4 months of FREE hosting
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Friday, April 14, 2006 3:18 AM

Code Camp 5 - Waltham MA

If you are in the Waltham MA area or reasonable drive and you are looking for free training in Microsoft software development technologies you will want to look into Code Camp 5 . The current list of sessions is here . One of them on VS2005 for VB6 developers
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Thursday, April 13, 2006 2:35 AM

Making Sense of Alphabet Soup

What is the difference between a degree program in Computer Science and Computer Engineering? How about Information Technology and Information Systems? And where does Software Engineering fit in the mix? Those are questions facing thousands of students
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, April 12, 2006 12:37 PM

Academic Search in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Physics

Microsoft announced a new search tool today called Academic Search at http://academic.live.com/ It is in beta and so far is only deep in the areas of computer science, electrical engineering and physics and related areas. The results include both freely
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, April 12, 2006 12:16 PM

Testing

No really. This is just a test. Please ignore it. Sorry to be a problem.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 2 Comments

Attachment(s): test.wav
Wednesday, April 12, 2006 5:10 AM

Technical People Need to Know How to Write (Prose as well as code)

I saw a great post in the Technical Careers at Microsoft Jobs blog recently. It is about ways to get noticed by researching recruiters. There are more or less two parts to the advice. One is to become an expert. The other is to get out there and write
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Monday, April 10, 2006 10:08 PM

What is an Operating System?

Larry Osterman is a well known and very respected developer at Microsoft. Recently he has been writing about what an operating system is and what it is for. Larry talks about how a lot of what we talk about being an operating system is actually something
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Monday, April 10, 2006 3:00 AM

Hunt the Wombat - A project in J# for AP CS (and perhaps other) students

The write up and the project are not my work but come from a partner team here at Microsoft. I think it well worth passing along. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What do we work on now that the AP exam
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 3 Comments
Saturday, April 08, 2006 6:09 PM

How do you explain inheritance?

John Montgomery is really asking the good questions these days. One of the things that teachers struggle with is of course how to explain difficult concepts to younger and younger children. John asks about explaining inheritance to an eight-year-old as
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 9 Comments
Saturday, April 08, 2006 7:06 AM

Getting all excited about software

I’ve been chatting with a friend in the XNA Framework group about what is coming in his team. XNA allows programmers using managed code to write games that play on both a Windows PC and an XBOX 360. I’ve pretty much decided that I need to get an XBOX
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Friday, April 07, 2006 6:05 AM

A hint of things to come

A couple friends of mine are working on something called XNA that will let people write programs (like games) once for multiple devices including PCs, mobile devices and the XBOX 360. One of them sent me this link to some images of what this is going
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Thursday, April 06, 2006 6:42 PM

The Non-Professional Team (The what team???)

John Montgomery blogs about his "non-professional team." His team is the one that works very hard, and I must say very professionally, to look after non-professional developers. There are a lot of programmers who either program for the fun of it or they
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Thursday, April 06, 2006 11:59 AM

The Hard Drive Ate My Homework

According to a survey of students in Canada released by Daniel Shapiro , Academic Program Manager - Microsoft Canada, "The Hard Drive Ate My Homework" is the second most common computer related excuse used by female students for not handing in their homework.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Thursday, April 06, 2006 5:03 AM

Samsung’s Hope for Education

Samsung’s Hope for Education is a joint effort with Microsoft and the Tony Danza Show to better educate U.S. elementary, middle and high schools by adding new digital technologies and software. So far this program has donated over $3 million in technology
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, April 05, 2006 10:06 PM

Announcing the FutureReady award winners!

Last week at FETC in Orlando, Microsoft, Dell and Intel were honored to award all the prizes associated with the three FutureReady contests. See the winners here. Mobile Computer Lab winners here . Dell Intelligent Classroom winners here . Visionary winners
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, April 05, 2006 10:41 AM

The Washington Post says the Teacher's Lounge is moving online

Teachers are starting to blog. Slowly and sometimes anonymously and for a number of different reasons. But starting they are. MSNBC has an interesting article from the Washington Post on the subject. (Quoted in small part below.) I can think of a number
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, April 05, 2006 5:59 AM

Microsoft education grants, scholarships, and academic discount pricing

Microsoft gives out a large number of education grants, scholarships, and academic discount pricing oppertunities. Are you eligible for any of these ? If your school recieves donated computers you will want to check out Fresh Start for example. More computers
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, April 05, 2006 1:24 AM

Academic .NET Radio

I just ran into an audio interview with Dan Fernandez talking about Visual Studio Express at a site called Academic .NET Radio . Academic .NET Radio is a series of podcasts by Matt Cassell, a 15 year old software developer from Cambridge, Ontario, Canada.
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Tuesday, April 04, 2006 1:00 PM

Hints and Tips for Visual Studio & Express Installations

These are some links to Aaron Stebner , setup guru thanks to a link from Dan Fernandez that your system manager or IT support person may find valuable. How to silently install Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions How to do a network install How to create
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 1 Comments
Tuesday, April 04, 2006 5:12 AM

Visual Basic Webcasts

Go here to read about a series of webcasts on Visual Basic 2005. 4/05/2006 9:00 AM Pacific - New Language Features in Visual Basic 2005 4/12/2006 9:00 AM Pacific - Data Access with Visual Basic 2005 4/19/2006 9:00 AM Pacific - RAD for the Visual Basic
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Tuesday, April 04, 2006 4:16 AM

Hi-tech Jobs in Rural America

Interesting article in The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog this week. There is a company that is setting up office parks near small American colleges to compete for jobs that might otherwise go to India and other places. These companies can also work with
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
Monday, April 03, 2006 5:37 PM

Free Visual Basic 2005 eBook

Brad McCabe announced today on his blog that Introducting Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 for Developers has been updated for the released version of the software and is now available here . You can download all the chapters in a single step or you can read
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 7 Comments
Monday, April 03, 2006 11:14 AM

Technology literate or left behind?

There is an interesting article at eSchool News that explains that the various states are "all over the map" when it comes to technology literacy. Quote Lawmakers who drafted NCLB wanted to make sure that all students were exposed to computers and the
Posted by Alfred Thompson | 0 Comments
 
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