Faculty Connection is an online set of real-world resources and shared peer knowledge, the goal of the Faculty Connection site is to put relevant and applicable tools and information at the fingertips of technology educators.
The UK Academic Team is responsible for offering IT students and faculty members free access to software, for enhancing knowledge and skills by providing curriculum materials and other learning opportunities, for helping students achieve their dreams by organizing an international competition, and finally for assisting last year students through career resources and job opportunities at our customers and partners.
With this blog we want to inform you on our latest initiatives.
Enjoy reading and stay tuned!
Then this free day of training is the quickest way to find out all you need to know.
The Windows Phone Camps will show you how to learn and build Windows Phone apps from scratch. You'll be guided through the development process with a series of hands-on workshops and short tutorials, with some seasoned experts to give you one on one help when you need it. There'll be topics like; Introduction to Windows Phone Development, Controls & Control Toolkit, Execution Model, Storing Data, Launchers & Choosers, Accessing Cloud Services, Marketplace & Submission. Also, there will be informal Mango tutorial sessions on offer covering topics such as Multi-tasking, Debugging & Profiling, Motion API, Advertising SDK and Sockets. There's even an introductory design session to help you make your app look its best. Just pick the workshops that are most useful for you and work at your own pace.
Once you've got the basics, you’ll be off and running and ready to develop your own apps. You can work on your own projects with assistance from our Windows Phone MVPs, and of course there's the all-important opportunity to meet up with likeminded devs.
The camp kicks off at 9am and finish at 6pm. By registering and attending, you will receive (fanfare please) an exclusive Windows Phone Design Guide Sketch Pad as well as your own customized Hit & Run Windows Phone Camp T-shirt.
Spaces are limited, so register your place in the Windows Phone Camp today!
Got a question? You might find the answer below...
How much do I need to know about Windows Phone to attend this camp?
You don't need any prior experience or knowledge about Windows Phone or app development to attend. The purpose of the camp is to provide you with the basic skills and knowledge to get started with learning about Windows Phone app development.
Who can attend these camps?
Academics, Students, developers, hobbyist, technology enthusiasts. Everyone is welcome! All we ask is that you are ready and keen to learn about developing apps for Windows Phone.
How much does it cost to attend this camp?
Your luck's in - it's FREE.
What do I need to prepare in advance to make the most of this camp?
There are a basic set of things you should prepare before attending the camp. This includes bringing your own suitable laptop with the Windows Phone Developer tools installed (these are free), preferably the latest version of the tools.
It would also be useful if you could read the following documentation:
If you have a Windows Phone please bring it with you.
Are you holding these camps elsewhere in the country?
Yes, this is a series of Windows Phone Camps kicking off around the country. Follow us on Twitter (@ukmsdn) to see where we’re visiting next.
What if I've registered already and can't make it on the day?
Please let us know as soon as you can if you can't make the camp as there will be plenty of people who are keen to take your spot. Please respect the trainers and your fellow delegates by turning up if you've registered and committed. Thanks!
Who are Hit & Run?
They're do cool live on-site event screen-printing. You'll get the chance to create your very own t-shirt with your unique design at the end of the camp.
What’s the Windows Phone Design Sketch Pad?
In the spirit of highlighting good design, we intend to provide each attendee with an exclusive Windows Phone design sketch pad with Windows Phone design guidelines as well as open spaces and templates to sketch your next big Windows Phone app idea. Great stuff!
Register at the event of your choice below. Go on. You know you want to.
London - Saturday 17 September
Manchester - Saturday 24 September
I’m pleased to announce that the 1st edition of “Building Windows Phone Apps: A Developer’s Guide” is available to download.
This e-book is a community effort to capture useful information and learning about building apps on the Windows Phone platform.
Download Building Windows Phone Apps: A Developer’s Guide
For more details on this publication and its authors see Mike Ormond's Blog, please feel free to use this book with students and your courses also if you have any comments suggestions or ideas for additional chapters or content please post your feedback on Mike’s Blog.
Happy reading!
So its now only a few days until the Build Windows conference, BUILD takes place between 13th – 16th of September 2011.
The event has been total sold out for many months. I have to say I am pretty excited! why? I am lucky enough to be attending the event. As your aware from my previous posts Build Windows is a new event that shows modern hardware and software developers how to take advantage of the future of Windows. So make sure you take note of the URLs and twitter addresses below to learn how the new Windows 8 UI is being designed to work seamlessly with a diversity of devices and form factors.
BUILD will be the first place to take a dive deep into the future of Windows. Microsoft is extending its newest developer event Build Windows globally in multiple ways including live streamed keynotes, having a major international presence in Anaheim. So it want to learn about the future of Windows make sure you take a look at the following..
BUILD Conference Site - http://www.buildwindows.com/
BUILD Conference Twitter - http://twitter.com/#!/bldwin make sure you follow @bldwin
BUILD Conference Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Build/156095381124816
Building Windows 8 Blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/
Building Windows 8 Twitter - http://twitter.com/#!/BuildWindows8 make sure you follow @BuildWindows8
The following is a quick guide on HTML5 Video and the Microsoft Media Platform, I have recently had a number of question and interest from a number of UK universities whom are looking at providing streamed media content both on and off campus.
Microsoft has developed the IE Test Drive Video Format support page to see some examples of how various codecs work across the different browsers.
Web developers are generally happy to leave their existing solution in place to play their pre-existing video/audio content using plugins. However many are now supplementing these plugins with the HTML5 Video and Audio tag if the browser is able to play their particular codec of choice natively. This is ideal as the most popular mobile platforms H.264, AAC and MP3 are generally well supported using the HTML5 video and audio tags.
The Microsoft Media Platform (MMP) frameworks are the glue that holds together individual pieces of the Microsoft end-to-end media solution.
Microsoft MMP is the the video platform that sits behind the Rugby World Cup 2011 event.
The Microsoft Media Platform: Player Framework (that is licensed for commercial use under the Microsoft Public License Ms-PL) has recently added a preview of support for HTML5 (API Documentation) that enables you as web developers to compliment the Silverlight player framework with a HTML5 video experience that enables you to reach additional mobile platforms.
There are a number of commercial solutions available that do all the work for you.
Example of these include
JW Player™ (licensed for commercial use)
SublimeVideo® (Player as a Service).
It is surprisingly easy to utilise your own video solution using the default browser controls and codecs that the browser supports. The markup below shows what you need to play a video in HTML5 with a “Fall Back” to an unlisted video on YouTube.
1. Video MIME types supported
Cross Browser HTML5 video running under IIS
Video Formats supported -
The order of your markup does matter please list them as above
Add in the MIME Types support to IIS.
Under IIS 7+ this is found under Website -> IIS -> MIME Types, and you’ll want to add:
File name extension / MIME type:
Turn off Compression under Website -> IIS -> Compression, and unchecking “Enable dynamic content compression”, and “Enable static content compression
Azure Storage Explorer also allows you to do this on individual files. of one of the following formats:
3. Byte Range Requests (seeking)
There are currently a few key areas not addressed by the current W3C Video Standard (full screen support, live streaming, real time communication, content protection, metadata and accessibility). Recently the W3C Web and TV Workshop discussed some of these areas and offered some early thinking on how they may be adopted as web standards in the future.
A real issues is the lack of a solution for live and adaptive streaming. Currently there are three proprietary solutions that support live and adaptive streaming.
Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) is currently in Draft International Standard. It looks likely that it will get W3C support if it is offered royalty free.
DASH supports:
HTML5Labs is where Microsoft prototypes early and unstable specifications from web standards bodies such as W3C. Sharing these prototypes helps Microsoft have informed discussions with developer communities to provide better feedback on draft specifications based on this implementation experience.
On the labs site Microsoft has released a Media Capture Audio Prototype that implements the audio portion of this W3C specification. The next prototype will support Speech recognition and will implement the Microsoft proposal available on the W3C website.
If you are hosting progressive download video and audio on the web you should be looking to support HTML5 video and audio today to extend the reach of your content.
The fundamentals. If you are looking to get started with the fundamentals, you may want to start online with JavaScript Tutorial. If books are more your speed, you should definitely start with Eloquent JavaScript by Marijn Haverbeke which is available in digital form as well for free.
Next steps to the next level. Once you have the fundamentals under your belt, you should begin checking out the following videos:
Did you know Internet Explorer has a JavaScript de-minifier? Ever been frustrated when you view source on a JavaScript file only to be frustrated that whitespacing and tabs have been removed? If you are in Internet Explorer and press F12, it will bring up the Developer Tools. On the Script tab, select the Script file you would like to view which will show you the file:
You can then click on the Configuration button and Select “Format JavaScript” and you will see the script in its un-minified state.
Today, there are more layout options available to us. For example, we can use CSS3 Media Queries to define styles based not on the actual browser being used, but the precise device capabilities being used to view our site. Media Queries is just one option, but we now are beginning to add other layout items to our arsenal with things such as CSS3 Flexible Box (“Flexbox”) Layout, CSS3 Grid Alignment, CSS3 Multi-column Layout, CSS3 Positioned Floats. If you are interested in learning more about layout options, check out:
· IE 10: The Future of Adaptive Web Design
· The future of CSS Layouts
If your not really a phone app developer or if you don't have curricula aimed at a specific mobile platform, you may want to look at the opportunity of the PhoneGap libraries.
PhoneGap is an open source mobile framework that enables developers to build applications targeting multiple platforms, by using standard web technologies (HTML5, CSS and JavaScript). On Windows Phone Mango PhoneGap leverages the new HTML5 support provided by IE9.
PhoneGap is currently in beta, but does includes most of the basic features, and includes JavaScript APIs to use Windows Phone Mango features like:
Here’s a screen shot of the PhoneGap Unit Test application running on the Windows Phone emulator:
This is a new option to build applications targeting Windows Phone and gives your students more choices . PhoneGap is unique as its aimed at Web developers and simply allows them to leverage their HTML5 skills to target Windows Phone IE9 browser.
The beta version of the PhoneGap libraries can be downloaded from: https://github.com/phonegap/phonegap-wp7
For more details and information please read Nitobi’s blog post to get more details on how the whole process works. With the availability of Windows Phone developer tools, made available freely via DreamSpark to all students and academics and the fact that Windows Phone Mango Released to Manufacturing and developer tools hitting “Release Candidate”, it’s the perfect time to start trying this out.
So please get developing give feedback and join the PhoneGap open source project.
This week I have been Microsoft’s BUILD developers conference in Anaheim, California.
BUILD is an event that shows modern hardware and software developers how to take advantage of the future of Windows and provides an avenue for them to discuss other products and tools that Microsoft is working on. The buzz from around the conference has been amazing with delegates super excited about the variety of new features within Windows 8 such as touch-first user interface, powerful applications and a seamless experience that syncs across all of your devices. The increased accessibility of applications across devices also brings about some exciting opportunities to drive innovation and creativity within the developer community. But, this week isn’t only about Windows, but advancements in Microsoft technologies, including Visual Studio 11, code-named “Windows Server 8,” and new capabilities for Windows Azure.
So if you are interested in knowing more about BUILD or what’s new from Microsoft, check out
The Microsoft News Center feature
The Microsoft Blog
Watch the keynotes from the BUILD website
and watch all the presentations at the Channel9 BUILD site.
The Microsoft robotics group have announced the release of the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4 Beta.
You can download RDS 4 beta at Microsoft.com/robotics. What is exciting about this release is that it has extensive support for the Kinect sensor hardware through the Kinect for Windows SDK.
This simply allows developers to create Kinect-enabled robots in the Visual Simulation Environment and in real life. Along with this release comes a standardized reference spec for building a Kinect-based robot. .
Today a comprehensive package to leverage Nokia developer skills while learning to build applications for Windows Phone. Microsoft and Nokia have worked together to build a great package.
The package contains the following tools and documentation to help you along the path to learning Windows Phone development:
These complement the similar iOS/Android guidance & mapping work we released a couple months ago.
The “Windows Phone Guide for Symbian Qt Application Developers” white paper is about 100 pages organized in 8 chapters.
The white paper is available in different formats (HTML, DOCX & PDF).
Chapter 6 introduces porting tutorials, in which you will find practical examples and tips on how to port your applications, like the RSS Reader applications or the “Diner” example, a catalog-type restaurant information application. From design consideration to data binding, the porting story addresses many aspects of the process that will be useful to you; the developer.
The full list of samples and source code is available to you.
The addition of Symbian Qt to the Windows Phone API mapping tool is another perk we wanted to deliver in order to speed up the learning curve to Windows Phone. For this first iteration of the mapping, includes core libraries for Qt 4.7 for Symbian (QtCore, QtGui, QtLocation, QtNetwork, QtSensors, QtSql, QtXml, QtWebKit, QML Elements, QML Components ).
Finally, keep an eye on the “Nokia Windows Phone Training” roadshow. During this one day training event, you’ll learn how to take your ideas and get them running on the Windows Phone platform. Upcoming dates and locations for the roadshow are as follows:
We realize this is only a few dates and locations, so for all the developers who want to learn Windows Phone, we recommend that you follow at your own pace the EXCELLENT “Window Phone Mango Jump Start” online video training.
So, go get your copy of the “Windows Phone Guide for Symbian Qt Application Developers”
About two months ago the Windows Phone team issued a challenge to student developers over the summer holiday:
The challenge, to create an awesome Microsoft Expression Sketchflow prototype of a Windows Phone application.
The reward was to win one of 50 HTC Mazaa developer devices. The competition resulted in over 281 prototypes created and over 203 participants submitting prototypes.
So if your developing Windows Phone make sure your using Microsoft Expression Sketchflow which can be downloaded for FREE via Microsoft DreamSpark or MSDNAA and here are some useful tips and guidance on your designs.