News from the South Africa Developer and Platform Group

Windows Ecosystem Workshop–Johannesburg

DaveMSDevSA — Tue, 14 May 2013 10:37:28 GMT

The following events are aimed at targeting specific types of application development across the Windows Ecosystem, Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, and Azure. The following are the sessions to be run:

Day1

Developing Applications for Windows Platform:
This session is aimed at individuals who have little to no experience of the Window Platform. This session will introduce developers to new concepts of the WinRT platform targeting Windows 8 and Windows Phone. By the end of the session developers will have a good understanding of how to create applications for Windows Devices.
Audience:
Developers, Developer Managers, Hobbyist developers
Duration 2 hrs
Developing Line of Business Applications for the Windows Platform:
There is a huge opportunity for companies to leverage the Windows Platform to develop easy to use business applications which tie into the backend systems. From store front management, CRM, to the cloud we aim to provide guidance on building applications for your company that will assist with productivity and minimise deployment issues across Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and Azure.
Audience:
Developers, Architects, Developer Managers
Duration 2 hrs – Level 300 –400

Register Here : Link

Date:	20 May 2013
Venue:	Microsoft Johannesburg Office
	3012 William Nicol Drive
	Bryanston
	Johannesburg

Time:	2:30 – 5:00

Day2

Developing Games for the Windows Platform:
Games provide the largest revenue across market places so why not get your piece of the pie. This session will get you started with developing games for the Windows 8, Windows Phone, and Xbox platforms leveraging various tools and technologies from DirectX & C++, to XNA, to SharpDX, to Monogame.
Audience:
Developers, Game Developers, Hobbyist developers
Duration 2 hrs
Designing UI for Windows Platform applications:
In this modern age of applications consumers and users alike are looking for engaging and rich experiences. This session is aimed at walking you through Windows Store application UI design principals. We will cover the core features of Windows Store Applications for Phone and Windows 8.
Audience:
Designers, Developers, UX Experts, Developer Managers
Duration 2 hrs

Register here: Link

Date:	21 May 2013
Venue:	Microsoft Johannesburg Office
	3012 William Nicol Drive
	Bryanston
	Johannesburg

Time:	2:30 – 5:00

Windows Ecosystem Workshops–Cape Town

DaveMSDevSA — Tue, 14 May 2013 10:33:23 GMT

Day1

Register Here : Link

Date:	23 May 2013
Venue:	Microsoft Cape Town Office
	Golf Park 3
	Engen House
	Raapenberg Road
	Mobway
Time:	2:30 – 5:00

Day2

Register here: Link

Date:	24 May 2013
Venue:	Microsoft Cape Town Office
	Golf Park 3
	Engen House
	Raapenberg Road
	Mobway
Time:	2:30 – 5:00

[Guest Post] - IntelliTrace Tips and Tricks: IntelliTrace Everywhere–Part 2- Colin Dembovsky

DaveMSDevSA — Mon, 13 May 2013 10:49:47 GMT

This two-part series of blog posts will show you how to get the most out of IntelliTrace – a historical debugger that allows you to record (and replay) program execution. A third post on some advanced IntelliTrace tips is already posted here.

In my previous post I showed you how to enable IntelliTrace for debugging – F5 IntelliTrace. That’s all well and good, but what about getting IntelliTrace logs from your test environments? Or from production?

Here’s where you can use IntelliTrace:

· .NET 2.0 and above managed code (note: the collector requires .NET 3.5, so you’ll need that on the target server even if you app is in .NET 2.0)

· Enable the IntelliTrace diagnostic adapter in Test Manager to collect logs during test runs

· IIS: Use PowerShell to attach to an application pool and collect logs

· Desktop Apps: Use IntelliTraceSC.exe to launch an app and collect logs

· Windows Services: This one is tough, but possible. Involves some registry tweaking. Read more here.

Here’s where you can’t collect IntelliTrace:

· Silverlight applications

· Windows Phone applications

· .NET 1 applications

· Native code applications

The IntelliTrace Standalone Collector

You can get this from the Visual Studio installation folder, or you can download it here. I recommend downloading it, since this will be the latest and greatest collector available. The page has a link to instructions about how to extract the cab file. Once you’ve expanded the cab, you’ll have the PowerShell module as well as the IntelliTraceSC.exe for collecting application data.

Symbols

Before we look at how to collect logs, let’s talk about symbols. In order to open up code from the iTrace logs, you’re going to need to supply symbols. Ever seen a pdb file when you compile your apps? The pdbs map source code to compiled code. But of course no self-respecting developer ever deploys pdbs, right? So if you’re not deploying your pdbs (and you shouldn’t be) then where do you put them? You get the build to publish them to a shared folder, or Symbol Server. (If you don’t use Team Build, you can simply keep your pdbs somewhere – when you open an iTrace file, you can provide the location of your pdbs).

Here’s an image showing where in the DefaultTemplate you can set the symbols location:

One more thing – you’ll need to set this location in the Debugging options of VS in order for it to look there for the symbols. In VS, go to the Tools->Options dialog. Then expand the Debugging->Symbols section. There are some buttons in the top right of the dialog – click the “New Location” icon (between the yellow warning icon and the ‘x’ button) and type in the same directory that you used in the Build Process settings (above).

You’ll also need to open the “General” tab under Debugging and set the following checkboxes:

Now you’re ready to open the logs – let’s see how you can collect them.

Collect IntelliTrace from Web Applications

If you’re developing and deploying web applications, you get a lot of love from IntelliTrace. Here are the steps you’ll need to follow to start logging:

1. Download the IntelliTrace collector and expand it.

2. Find the name (and identity) of the application pool that your web app is running under.

3. Create a log folder. Make sure the app pool identity has write access to this folder.

4. Open a PowerShell prompt. Go to the IntelliTrace folder. Run “Import-Module Microsoft.VisualStudio.IntellITrace.PowerShell.dll”

5. To list the commands, type “Get-Command *IntelliTrace*”. This will list the 5 IntelliTrace cmdlets.

6. To start logging, type

Start-IntelliTraceCollection –ApplicationPool AppPoolName –CollectionPlan plan.xml –OutputPath logPath

where

· AppPoolName is the name of the app pool your application is running under

· plan.xml is the collection plan (more on this in the next paragraph)

· logPath is the path you want the log files dropped into

The plan.xml is the settings file for what IntelliTrace events you want to collect (and if you’re running in Events Only or Events and Call Information mode). You’ll see 2 xml files in the IntelliTrace folder that ship with IntelliTrace – the lightweight collection_plan.ASP.NET.default.xml and the diagnostic collection_plan.ASP.NET.trace.xml. I recommend starting with the default plan (Events Only) and if you get stuck then dial it up to the trace plan (Events and Call Information). In the next post, I’ll show you how to customize the collection to get fine-grained control over the events.

Be aware that when you run Start-IntelliTraceCollection, IntelliTrace will attach itself to the app pool, but part of that will require a recycle.

Don’t leave this on too long – especially if you’re using the trace plan. One the collector is running, you can use the following commands when you want to grab the log and open it:

· Stop-IntelliTraceCollection – which stops the collector entirely

· Checkpoint-IntelliTraceCollection – which unlocks the log file and starts logging to a new log file

Use checkpoint when you want to open the log and leave the collector running (when the collector is running the file is locked by the collection process, so you won’t be able to open it).

Collect IntelliTrace from Desktop Applications

Collecting IntelliTrace from Desktop apps gets some love – not as much as the IIS scenario. Instead of launching your application directly, go to the IntelliTrace collector folder and run the following command:

IntelliTraceSC.exe help launch

to see the help on how to launch. Here’s the basic launch command:

IntelliTraceSC.exe launch /cp:plan.xml /f:pathToLogFile application

where

· plan.xml is the collection plan – use the same ones as the web collection command – don’t worry that it’s called ASP.NET – it’ll work for most default scenarios

· pathToLogFile is the full path and filename of the log file

· application is the path to the application you want to collect the log from

As soon as you exit your application, the logging completes and you’ll have your log file.

Happy logging!

[Guest Post] IntelliTrace Tips and Tricks: The Basics–Part 1–Colin Dembovsky

DaveMSDevSA — Mon, 13 May 2013 10:47:33 GMT

Using IntelliTrace

You can use IntelliTrace in the following scenarios:

1. During debugging in VS using F5

2. In Test Manager (enabled as a Data Diagnostic Adapter)

3. Anywhere (using the standalone collector)

Understanding IntelliTrace “Modes”

Out of the box, IntelliTrace has 2 broad modes – “Events Only” and “Events and Call Information”. Events Only is much more lightweight, and allows you to record “events” that occur when your program is running. These “events” are “interesting occurrences” – like ASP.NET calls or ADO.NET calls – or exceptions. The product team tried to record events which would help you understand how your code works so that you can understand long “cause and effect” chains.

Events and Call Information turns the dial up a lot – it collects not only all of the events from the Events Only mode, but also method calls (including in and out arguments). There are some limits placed on what data is collected – otherwise the logs would become even more enormous than they are using the default settings.

F5 IntelliTrace

Use this when you’re coding. It means you can debug and move back and forwards in your debug session without having to stop your application and add breakpoints. To turn it on, go to Tools->Options and go to IntelliTrace settings. Here you’ll see the 2 modes:

Once you’ve turned it on (in this case I’ve got the Events and Call Information mode on) you can start debugging. Click around your app, and then click the “Break All” link in VS in the IntelliTrace window:

(Here I am debugging my Calculator application – click “Break All” to go to the IntelliTrace log).

When you look at the log, you’ll initially see all the events that occurred. In this case, button clicks are “Gesture” events, so that’s what I see:

Let’s say that I remember something weird happened when I clicked “=” when multiplying 2 numbers – well, I don’t have to restart the application, I can simply click on the “=” gesture after the “*” button click (in the above log, I’ve clicked 3 x 6 =). So I can click on that event and “rewind” to that point.

What I can now do is click “Calls View” to start walking through the log from that point.

Double-click on the call to btnEqual_Click to “zoom” to that point of the execution. You’ll see the IntelliTrace glyphs in the gutter of the source window:

If you mouse-over the icons, you’ll get a tooltip. The functions (in the order they appear) are:

· return to calling method

· step back

· step into

· step over

· return to Live Debugging

(Just a handy tip: If you press the bottom button “return to Live Debugging” remember that this now puts you at the current debugger point – you’ll need to press F5 again if you want to start running the application again.)

If you advance using F11, the current pointer will advance. Pressing twice from the previous image gets me to the point where the program enters the switch statement:

Notice that I don’t need to guess which case statement was selected – the log records exactly what the program did. I’ve also pinned the mouse-overs for val1 and val2 – you can see their values. Not all values are collected, but since these are primitives and are being passed into (or out of) a method, IntelliTrace dutifully collects their values.

I’ll press F11 again to step into the Multiply() method, and then F11 again to advance one more event:

That puts me onto the closing curly brace of the Multiply method. If I look in the Autos window, I’ll see that the method in parameters (val1 and val2) were 3 and 6 respectively, and that the return value was 9.

Voila – with 3 or 4 clicks we found the bug in our program. And we didn’t even have to set a breakpoint!

Filtering Events

As you use IntelliTrace, you’ll start seeing large amount of events – to make the logs easier to navigate, you can use the category, thread and search box at the top of the events window to filter the events.

For example, expanding the dropdown with “All Categories” in it I can filter just exceptions:

Search For This Line…

Another useful tip is the “Search For this line” or “Search For This Method”. You suspect that a method was hit sometime during your debug session – but the log is quite long. No problem – right click a line (or method) and select “Search For This Line / Method in IntelliTrace”.

Once you do, you’ll see the search results in a bar at the top of the current code window – press the arrows to go to the previous or next instance of that line or method in the log file:

Here I’ll click on the arrow icon directly after the work “Multiply” to go to the first call to this method in the log, and I can start “debugging” from there.

In the next post, I’ll show you how to run IntelliTrace anywhere and everywhere.

Happy debugging!

Team SentiMeter from the University of Johannesburg Wins the Imagine Cup SA 2013 Local Finals

DaveMSDevSA — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 12:31:46 GMT

An innovative tool that allows businesses to see what people are saying about them on social media platforms has won three University of Johannesburg computer science students and their supervisor a place in the final of a global technology competition in Russia later this year.

Dr Ian Ellefsen, Jan van Niekerk, Lorenzo Boccetti and Merrick Bengis beat off the challenge of South Africa’s top computer programming students to win the local leg of the Imagine Cup, a Microsoft-sponsored technology competition which pits the world’s best student programmers against each other. As part of their prize, they will be jetting off to St Petersburg in July to compete in the global finals.

Now in its 11th year, the Imagine Cup challenges the world’s best student programmers to create applications to solve real-world problems. More than 1.65 million students across the globe have participated in Imagine Cup during the past decade. Locally, this year’s local Imagine Cup drew 78 entries from universities across the country. Sponsors included the Department of Science and Technology/ CSIR Meraka Institute, BBD and Nokia.

The winning solution, SentiMeter, uses the power of affordable cloud computing to let businesses of any size track what is being said about them on social media platforms at very low cost, and analyse their brand sentiment.

SentiMeter was born a few years ago at the start of the social media boom, and the team realised that brands needed a way to take charge of what is being said about them – or face brand decimation.

“We believe our platform will save companies not only in rands, but also in reputation management,” said Van Niekerk. “The award means so much to us. As the tool is currently in Beta phase, we can now continue to grow our start-up even further.”

The tool combines sentiment analysis derived from an identified location anywhere in the world and various social platforms to provide companies with detailed reports, trends and insights, said van Niekerk.

The head of Microsoft South Africa’s developer and platform team, Clifford de Wit, said Imagine Cup was a cornerstone of Microsoft’s commitment to providing opportunities for young people, by providing a platform to inspire and showcase innovation and to encourage entrepreneurship.

The event saw entries across three categories - Gaming, Innovation and World Citizenship. Microsoft also included an additional App Challenge, where students were challenged to build Apps for the Windows 8, Windows Phone and Windows Azure platforms.

“These students all have one thing in common – a passion for technology and a desire to change the world for the better, starting with their innovations. Students’ work reflects immensely valuable solutions to real problems out there while giving them the opportunity to compete for generous cash prizes and the chance to build their own small business,” says De Wit.

De Wit says the competition each year is so competitive and is proud to be associated with the leaders of tomorrow. He says there is a continued need for smart technology in public and business sectors. For a competition such at the Imagine Cup to have touched more than 1.65 million students ages 16-24 from 190 countries over the past eleven years is incredibly impactful.

Michael Ofori-Appiah, Imagine Cup judge and Senior Technologist at CSIR’s Meraka Institute believes this year’s challenge was very competitive. “The submissions and presentations were of excellent standard, which reassured us that South Africa is on the right path of developing skills in software development to compete with the rest of the world. Team building among peers of diverse skills was prominent and recipe for developing IT entrepreneurs who will soon be creating jobs for the youth.”

Another judge from BBD, Peter Scheffel, agreed. “In our industry it sometimes happens that we take significantly longer to adopt and build similar solutions. However, the students often produce entire end-to-end solutions on new technology with all the add-on features like mobile access, using technology that they have only just learnt. And it is often available on the internet for anyone to access. This is just incredible.”

The complete list of winners is as follows:

App Challenges

Best Windows Phone App

App Name: SignPro

Developer: Linda Nyoka

University: Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University

Best Windows 8 App

App Name: Noted

Developer: Brian Campbell

University: University of Free State

Best Windows Azure App (Best Use of Windows Azure in Solution)

Team: SentiMeter

University: University of Johannesburg

Competitions

Best World Citizenship Solution

Team Superstiens

Solution: eTute Mathematics Tutoring System

University: Nelson Mandel Metropolitan University

Best Innovation Project

Team SentiMeter

Soulution: SentiMeter

University: University of Johannesburg

Best Games Project

Team Sumo Development

Game: Pillar: Revenge of the Mad Scientist

University: Nelson Mandel Metropolitan University

Overall Imagine Cup Winner to represent SA at the WW Finals in Russia July 2013

Team SentiMeter

Solution: SentiMeter

University: University of Johannesburg

TechIdols–Teched Africa

DaveMSDevSA — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 06:32:44 GMT

Do you have what it takes?

Tech Idol is coming to Tech·Ed Africa, do you have what it takes to be our winner?

We’re looking for the rock star (presenter) of the future! If you’re passionate about technology - show us!

Enter our Tech Idol competition at Tech·Ed Africa, strut your stuff on stage and wow our judges and the community with your talent.

Our panel of judges will select the winning Tech Idol who will receive:

The opportunity to present a technical breakout session at the next big Microsoft technical event hosted by Microsoft South Africa
An cool gadgety prize

Two runners-up will each receive:

Something cool

How is this going to work?

You will have the opportunity to submit presentations to us, we will list them on our blog and ask the developer and IT Pro communities to vote for their favorites. The top 5 presentations, as voted for by the communities out there, will be selected to compete in Tech Idol. You will then deliver your sessions for our judges to score you. The winners will be announced once the judges have tallied their results.

When? 17 April 2010 from 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM
Where? Look out for the announcements at Tech·Ed Africa 2013
How do I enter? Contact us with your proposed presentation. Please include:
- Your name
- Your email address
- The title of your presentation
- A description for your presentation
Can anyone enter? Almost anyone You must be attending Tech·Ed but you must not be presenting at Tech·Ed – we’re looking for new hotshot speakers!
When is the deadline for presentation submissions? You can submit your presentations until 12:00 PM, 14 April 2013.
What topics can I cover? You can speak about anything related to Microsoft technologies, something new, something old, something cool – anything!
How long must my presentation be? Each presentation must be a maximum of 10 minutes long.
When will voting start? Voting will start on 14 April 2013 once all submissions have been received. Vote using our online poll (only one vote per person).
When will voting end? Voting will end at 12:00 PM on 17 April 2013 (yup, that’s during Tech·Ed).
When will I know if my presentation has been selected? We will announce the top 5 presentations at 1:00 PM on 17 April 2013(yes, that’s during Tech·Ed and you’ll need to be prepared up front!)
How will presentations be judged? We will have a panel of 4 judges who will rate your presentation on: mastery of your subject, the quality of your demonstrations, slides and your ability to get your point across. The audience will also vote on their favorite presenter.
What you should bring: Yourself(!) and your PowerPoint presentation and demo on a USB drive / your laptop.
What will be provided: A demo presenter machine with Powerpoint 2013. You will have access to the Internet, but it’s recommended to plan your presentation without this. If your presentation requires the installation of other software, please bring your own laptop (if your bring your own, set your screen resolution to 1280 x 720).

Developing for the Windows Ecosystem Workshops–Durban

DaveMSDevSA — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 07:56:28 GMT

Day1

Register Here : Link

Date:	29 April 2013
Venue:	Microsoft Durban Office
	Suite 308 / 309, 3rd Floor
	Granada Square
	16 Chartwell Drive
	Umhlanga Rocks
Time:	2:30 – 5:00

Day2

Register here: Link

Date:	30 April 2013
Venue:	Microsoft Durban Office
	Suite 308 / 309, 3rd Floor
	Granada Square
	16 Chartwell Drive
	Umhlanga Rocks
Time:	2:30 – 5:00

#CodeOff 2013 – Jarrod – The Catch-up Post

Jarrod Hermer — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 15:51:40 GMT

Things got a little crazy around here. Promoting Windows 8, preparing for a little event called TechEd (shameless plug: I will be doing a game dev talk so register! Early Bird Registration still open) and never ending emails causing me to slip behind schedule on my game dev. So this is my “Catch-up post” just to show that I have not forgotten about this competition.

Learning what is possible

I don’t know much about the Windows Phone platform and a little less around what version 8 has to offer. This article is a great starting point for all the new features in Windows Phone 8 for developers. But nothing beats actually trying to get some code to work. Here is what I wanted to achieve in my first Phone-Dev-Spike:

Can I manipulate the DOM
Is the <canvas> element supported in the HTML project type
Can I execute arbitrary JavaScript using buttons in the AppBar

Short and simple…for now.

Creating the project

In Visual Studio 2012 do a File->New->Project (or just type CTRL+SHIFT+N). Select Windows Phone and the ‘Windows Phone HTML5 App’ template.

This creates a C#/XAML based solution with a WebBrowser wired up on the MainPage. So we are not getting a “native” HTML5/JavaScript app but rather a typical C#/XAML based Phone app with a browser control neatly wrapped for us. We still need some understanding of C# and XAML to integrate with Phone features. The bulk of our game logic will be built using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

If you ever add a WebBrowser control to your Phone project make sure the ID_CAP_WEBBROWSERCOMPONENT capability is selected, most templates have it selected by default.

Manipulating the interface

I wrote something really simple just to see that I could use standard JavaScript to update the DOM. Here is the code:

Then it was time to put down a canvas element and draw a square. Also simple stuff. Don't forget to change fillStyle / colours used as the default is black and if you did not notice Phone 8 default to the dark theme with a black background.

Here is how it looks using the included emulator, which is seamlessly integrated into Visual Studio.

Now we know we can write plain old HTML & JavaScript and it just works, nice to have IE10 built into the phone. You can also get IE10 for Windows 7. But everyone reading this is running Windows 8…right!?!?!

Our game is going to run in landscape so we want the app to start-up in that mode. It is real easy to change that. In the MainPage.xaml we just need to set the following attributes for the main tag:

SupportedOrientations="Landscape" Orientation="Landscape"

Outside the browser

Now its time to add a button to the application bar and see if we can run some JavaScript to get the square to bounce. For now I am writing all my JavaScript inline – not something I would recommend. As we flesh out our game a better structure will be needed.

Putting the XAML below between the ApplicationBar element in MainPage.xaml sets-up the new button. wiring up BounceApplicationBar_Click as the method to run when the button is clicked.

<shell:ApplicationBarIconButton IconUri="/Assets/AppBar/appbar.bounce.png" IsEnabled="True" Text="bounce" Click="BounceApplicationBar_Click"/>

And the click method has one line in it: Browser.InvokeScript("bounceRect");

We are expecting the JavaScript function bounceRect, which is defined in index.html to be executed when the button is clicked. And it is.

For now our animation code is really naïve. It will have to be improved. This is just to make sure we can do what we want.

Getting down to work

Now that we know we can write our game using HTML, CSS and JavaScript its time to buckle down and start coding. Next post will be about displaying sprites and getting useful animation going.

Complete project

The complete code for this project is in HTML5App1.zip on my SkyDrive - http://sdrv.ms/Y0cKTD

Assign those MSDN subscriptions–and fully leverage your benefits

southafrica — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 10:12:13 GMT

I work with many customers around their development and application lifecycle management requirements. That is a core part of my job. One of the other aspects is educating customers around leveraging the benefits when they purchase Visual Studio on MSDN. One of the areas that many, many South Africa customers are quite poor at, is managing their MSDN subscriptions. A customer will have many people involved in the process of creating solutions (not just devs, but also architects, testers, product owners, analysts etc), and will also have a bunch of licences. Often though, customers and partners are not properly managing who is assigned what. This has 2 major impacts

1) Potential mislicensing. If you don’t know who is assigned what, how do you know if you have too much, too little or enough? Imagine you had a fleet of cars, and you had no idea who was driving that car?

2) Benefits usage – The amount of benefits on MSDN are increasing, and if you don’t assign the benefit you cannot leverage it.

What are some of these benefits

1) Subscriber Downloads – last week I got an email from someone who wanted VB6, and this week someone else wanted VS2008. These are available for easy access on the MSDN subscription download site. You also get access to server software for dev and test usage. You get SQL and Windows when you buy the Pro editions with MSDN. You get all servers when you get Premium and Ultimate. These are licensed on a per user basis so anyone interacting with these environments needs MSDN too (final end users doing acceptance testing don’t need. Testers/Analysts generally do)

2) Windows Store accounts – we recently added Windows Phone and Window 8 store accounts as a benefit for MSDN subscribers

3) Technical Support – 2-4 incidents depending on the agreement

4) E-Learning Courses – Last year we also had a limited offer to get access to the Plural Sight courses

5) MSDN Magazine – for South Africa, you pay shipping but the magazine if free. You would pay around R150-R180 a year to get the MSDN Mag sent to you

6) TFS Service Account – for Test Pro, Premium and Ultimate users, you get a TFS Service Account

7) Office 365 Developer Account - NEW – Last week we added a 12 month subscription to Office 365 Dev Subscription.

8) Other offers from partners

How do I assign MSDN subscriptions for Volume Licensing Purchases – Check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/administration/aa948862.aspx which has the appropriate resources and tips for managing MSDN subscriptions

I am a partner? How does MSDN work for me?

Microsoft partners receive Visual Studio with MSDN as a software benefit. This is a benefit, not a license (i.e the partner does not “own the software”). As such there are a couple of important points regarding this benefit

1) it is purely for internal use. You cannot use Microsoft Partner Network benefits for direct revenue generation. Snippets from the licensing whitepaper

“”Partner MSDN subscribers may use the software in accordance with the MSDN subscriptions not for resale (NFR) retail license terms. MSDN subscriptions offered as benefits of the Microsoft Partner Network, including those provided through Microsoft Action Pack Development and Design, cannot be used for direct revenue-generating activities, such as providing consulting services, customizing a packaged application for a specific customer, or building a custom application for a customer, for a fee.

Partners can also purchase MSDN subscriptions separately for use in direct revenue-generating activities.

2) The subscriptions must be activated. For normal purchases, we recommend that you assign and activate the subscriptions. With Partner benefits, it is required that you do this. Only those employees who have activated their MSDN subscriptions are eligible to use the software

I hope this helps.

Ahmed Salijee

Bronwen Zande and John O’Brian are coming to South Africa

DaveMSDevSA — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 12:58:34 GMT

In the month of March we have a surprise set of speakers popping out to talk about Windows 8 and Kinect.

John is an experienced developer, speaker and leader in the Australian .Net community. The director of Soul Solutions, John combines innovative technologies with exception people to provide clients with great custom solutions. Soul Solutions is currently pioneering spatial rule engines for the Australian mining Industry, building world class Windows Phone applications and providing data visualisation services for clients throughout the world.

John’s passion for technology includes Kinect, Silverlight, HTML5, Touch, Photosynth, Bing Maps and SQL Server Spatial. Regularly presenting at local user groups, national events and international conferences John brings code to life by combining the latest technologies with visual demonstrations. John is a 5 year Microsoft MVP for Windows Live.

Bronwen Zande is a Director of Soul Solutions, based in Brisbane, Australia. With over 10 years of software development experience, Bronwen’s primary focus is Microsoft Live and .Net development.

15 March 2013 - Windows 8 Kick Start Session

Re-imagine your favourite application using Windows8! In this session Bronwen will introduce you to the world of Windows 8 apps and how they are different to the desktop applications you have been familiar with. She will take you through the main controls and navigation patterns to create your next application and show you how to integrate the charms like the search and share. The session will be interactive to help you plan out how you'll build your great ideas into a killer Windows 8 application.

5 April 2013 – Kinecting the Dots – Developing with the Kinect SDK

The Microsoft Kinect holds the Guiness World Record as the fastest-selling consumer electronics device ever, selling 8 million units in the first 2 months. With the release of the official SDK, you are the controller, with the ability to change the face of future applications. Learn how to take advantage of depth sensing, skeletal tracking and sound source localisation in a sub $200 device in your next project using your current .Net skills.

We look forward to seeing you all there.