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!
I have had a number of questions recently from institutions..
Simply asking.
How can we move from Windows XP to Windows 8 to allow my students to use the latest developer tools and build apps and portfolios for Windows Phone and Windows 8?
A key issues many institutions even point out to me is that many of their students were born after XP was released, yes Windows XP was released in 2001 so well before things like Xbox, Skype, LinkedIn Video Chat and many more things we simply take for granted.
So if your interested in moving away from 11 year old Y reg car. to Windows 8, you need to plan carefully the migration, and this October holiday will be one of the first opportunities for many of the classrooms around the country to be updated.
Welcome to the Springboard Series
This series of resources is focused on the five key stages of rolling out Windows 8, and provides information that answers key questions:
The Resource Guide has links to over 70 detailed documents which will help you to understand what Windows 8 does, how to plan the deployment, and what tools are available to make it easier.
For an education institutions, there are a number of documents which would be especially useful, including information on:
Download the Spring Resource Guide for Windows 8
These resources have been designed to help you learn how to build applications that use Windows Azure services.
This technical content covers several of the new Windows Azure features including:
The October update includes updated hands-on labs to use the latest version of Visual Studio 2012 and Windows 8, new demos and presentations.
The training kit (available for download here) is the most authoritative learning resource on Windows Azure.
I highly recommend that you download the training kit, review the presentations and go through the Hands On Labs and include these resources into your teaching materials.
Test drive Windows Azure solutions in a virtual lab and see how you can quickly and easily develop applications running in the cloud by using your existing skills with the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment and the Microsoft .NET Framework. Virtual labs are simple, with no complex setup or installation required.
Get Free Cloud Access Windows Azure MSDN Benefits | 90 Day Trial
You get a downloadable manual and a 90-minute block of time for each module. You can sign up for additional 90-minute blocks at any time.
These versatile tools range from games to help you get started in a new programming language to analysis engines that enhance the power and usability of Visual Studio. These are tools made by researchers for researchers, designed specifically to meet the needs by people who share their needs.
Microsoft Research has a range of Microsoft Visual Studio tools that aid in programming safe and secure code. These tools bring programs alive for every skill level, from games to help young developers get started in a new language, to analysis engines operating at the highest level that enhance the power and usability of Microsoft's premier development environment.
Tools
The Fakes framework runs in Visual Studio Ultimate and helps developers create, maintain, and inject dummy implementations in their unit tests. Fakes makes development more robust and scalable when individual components are tested in isolation.
Code Contracts provide a language-agnostic way to express coding assumptions in Microsoft .NET programs in all versions of Visual Studio. The Code Contracts tools include a runtime checker, a static checker based on abstract interpretation, and a documentation generator.
Social for Team Foundation Server (Social for TFS) is a community add-on for Visual Studio to aggregate teammates’ content from various social sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, into the developer’s workspace. Social for TFS is developed in C# and available under MPL license.
Microsoft Automatic Graph Layout (MSAGL) is a tool in Visual Studio Ultimate for graph layout and viewing. MSAGL can be used to represent complex directed graphs, such as those found in business management, manufacturing, network analysis, and bioinformatics research.
Debugger Canvas is used for debugging programs in Visual Studio Ultimate. It visually brings together the code being explored into a single pan-and-zoom code bubbles display. Debugger Canvas helps to see variables through the code bubbles, make notes and see the bigger picture in one place.
Pex4fun brings programming in C#, Microsoft Visual Basic, and F# to any web browser. Pex4Fun is an interactive coding game environment where the player discovers a secret program. Pex4fun is based on Code Contracts and the unit testing tool Pex, which runs in Visual Studio and also as a dedicated app on Windows Phone.
Try F# is a web browser–based interactive cross-platform learning environment. It features tutorials and resources for learning F#, which is a functional language ideal for data-rich, concurrent, and algorithmic development. The full power of F# is available in Visual Studio.
Learn more or read the blog.
Science@Microsoft, an e-book that commemorates our many years of Microsoft Research activities with the academic research community.
This celebration of collaboration, demonstrates the breadth of our collaborative research and the potential of computer science to address some of the world’s problems. These stories demonstrate the amazing power of technology to impact areas far afield from traditional computer science.
Science@Microsoft is available as a PDF at microsoft.com/scienceatmicrosoft. It is also available for the Kindle at Amazon.
Learn more:
· Download the PDF
· Get the Kindle version
· Read the blog
· Read more
The Microsoft Research Faculty Summit was held July 16 to 17 on the Redmond campus, with 431 attendees from 235 institutions in 30 countries. In addition, this year we streamed the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit live.
This year’s focus on advancing the state of the art covered two key themes: big insights from big data and blending virtual and physical reality. Eric Horvitz provided an enlightening keynote about how machine learning intelligence is making it easier to gain insight from large amounts of data and Rick Rashid inspired attendees with his presentation on how hardware and software advances are contributing to a simpler, more natural integration of the physical and virtual worlds.
· Watch the virtual 2012 Faculty Summit sessions on demand
· Read our blog about the virtual event
· Read our blog about the David Breashears keynote
1. Build a single, flexible app vs. many replicated apps. - For example, a book publisher should not publish 100s of apps, one for each book. Rather, the publisher should deliver a single app that allows the user to browse their full book catalogue.
2. Check privacy requirement (Certification Requirement 4.1). This is by far the most common reason for failure – well over half of submissions fail on this requirement. The good news is that in the vast majority of cases, this is simply a documentation issue that does not require code changes, i.e., providing a link to the apps privacy policy on the Description page.
3. Another very common reason for failure that is simple to fix is inappropriate Age Rating.
4. Ensure all app builders run the WACK before app submission.
5. Take advantage of App Fast Track (AFT) review where appropriate.
6. Familiarize yourself and app builders you engage with App Certification Tips on the Dev Center: Common Certification Failures and Guidance for Resolving Certification Failures.
7. Review apps locally before app submission with Store certification requirements in mind.
Further Resources
Windows 8 App Store Requirements – http://aka.ms/storereq
Resolving certification errors – http://aka.ms/storefix
I am happy to confirm that DreamSpark has been modified and we have reinstated the ability to download batches of Windows 8 Professional and Windows Server 2012 unique retail keys.
These student keys, are available from the MSDN Subscriber Portal for Program Administrator to distribute to their students. This is to allow, students to successfully register Windows 8 and Windows Server products downloaded from DreamSpark.
Hearing directly from our experts is the best way to get a really good understanding of Visual Studio, especially now we’ve launched Visual Studio 2012. We have scheduled free in-person events on Application Lifecycle Management capabilities of Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server for you to come and learn more about the new version.
In the meantime we will continue to add ad hoc events and helpful videos which will cover all aspects of the latest Developer tools from Microsoft.
If you would like to attend one of these events please register here http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-gb/visual-studio-events
Want to try Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server in your teaching and learning see http://www.dreamspark.com
The Windows 8 Camp is open to everyone and offers an experience catered to your background and technology preference. Find out how to make sure your app is in the Windows Store by the time Windows 8 hits the market.
We don’t expect you to have finished your application in one day (although that’s not impossible). You will at least understand the Windows 8 operating system, what makes a great Windows 8 style application and the development paths that are available to you. If you choose to take advantage of one of our 1:1 UX labs, then you will also leave with a set of wireframes that you can use to start your base your Windows 8 style application on.
You can then return to one of our future camps to carry on with your application build and take further advantage of our Windows 8 experts who will be present all day to personally answer your questions.
For more details and resources see http://www.microsoft.com/uk/msdn/windows8/
For students and educators get all the necessary software and windows store accounts from www.dreamspark.com