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!
EcoPi – Monitoring boiler energy consumption using Windows Phone and Raspberry Pi
Final year university student Lewis Greyson at the Lincoln School of Computer Science (LSoCS) recently showcased his dissertation project along with his fellow students at a show and tell event held within the school. The event was designed for final year students to present their development work to all staff within the school with lots of high-quality work present ranging from IR tracking to mobile tourism applications. Lewis decided he wanted to use Windows Phone (WP) technology and a Raspberry Pi to power his project’s sustainability concept called ‘EcoPi’. Lewis describes his project:
“This project discusses research on the issues surrounding domestic energy consumption and climate change. The purpose of the research is to aid the production of a ubiquitous system informed from energy consumption literature. A user study will be conducted to monitor a household for a week using the developed system. It is suggested from the literature that the results of this study will show that the participants are not necessarily aware of how their heating system behaves. It is hoped the results will encourage the participants to make changes to their heating system, thus proving behavioural change. The overarching goal is show that mobile devices have a positive impact on the participant and therefore the devices can be used for such research”
The development side of the project includes a WP application that monitors user locations using either GPS or 3G with location data saved at intervals. A Raspberry Pi with a temperature sensor is housed in the user’s home with the temperature sensor located on the boiler. The Pi polls the temp sensor and stores the data to a database, the user can view timeline graphs on the phone of the boiler temperature and whether or not they were at home when the boiler switched on. This creates greater awareness of wasteful energy consumption from the boiler, allowing the user to act upon it.
Lewis was inspired to build a Windows Phone app following his experience on the Social Applications Development module at Lincoln. The module teaches students the underpinning design theory and development skills on how to combine the WP and Azure platforms to create apps with a social computing theme.
“The basic version of Windows Store will be free, so Win8 desktop/tablet/WP8 are all covered. Also all users of Unity Pro will get the basic Windows Store product for free.” Andy Brammall, EMEA Biz Dev for Unity
Announced by Unity is their support for small indies and students (as measured by a annual turnover of less than $100k)
Unity announced that they are now providing free licensing to iOS, Android and Windows/Windows Phone platforms.
This is a significant announcement for the UK with indie game devs and a great opportunity for you to build and publish games to both Windows & Windows Phone. Unity is one of the largest middleware frameworks utilised by all flavours of games developers. It’s estimated to have around 60% utilisation of the total game dev audience (including students). With this announcement Unity have allowed developer to publish games to all app stores so if your a developers who is currently developing for iOS & Android you can now look to publish these titles to Windows 8 and Windows Phone for FREE.
This announcement about free licensing takes away a key blocker which has prevented UK Students from publishing portfolios of games developed in Unity.
For more details see http://blogs.unity3d.com/2013/05/21/putting-the-power-of-unity-in-the-hands-of-every-mobile-developer/ and http://www.develop-online.net/news/44232/Unity-mobile-game-development-goes-free
Join Microsoft for this one day event to lean how Windows Azure can be used in curricula, support research endeavours, and enable student projects. Institution administrators can explore how to use Windows Azure for infrastructural and application needs.
Educators
Microsoft provides Educator Grants for educators wanting to use Windows Azure in their curricula through Windows Azure academic passes. More info
Students
Need access to Windows Azure outside the classroom? Working on a project on cloud computing? Or maybe your master thesis? More info
Researchers
Tap into resources offered by Microsoft’s Windows Azure Research Engagement project to take your research to the cloud. More info
Institution Administrators
Help your students get the technology skills they need to be successful through Microsoft IT Academy. More info
Register today
http://azureineducation.eventbrite.co.uk/
As part of our on-going commitment to add value to the education community we serve, we are thrilled to be working with JaNET to provide additional support and services to their user base.
JaNET provides and develops a network infrastructure to support world-class research and education to over 18 million end users and helps academic institutions to better communicate, collaborate and co-operate, globally.
With the JaNET network now peered with the our datacentre, both Microsoft and JaNET can build on this strong and unique foundation to add additional services that reduce costs and help make the community more competitive.
With the Cloud Services for Education agreement service already helping institutions, such as Goldsmiths, save in excess of £20,000 in legal due diligence, we are excited about the next stage in the evolution of our work with JaNET which is focused around Azure.
The press release from JaNET below covers these exciting developments in more detail, but in essence, with our joint dedication to the sector, Janet and Microsoft is able to offer improved access to infrastructure and application services such as websites, virtual learning environments and research projects.
A launch event for the strategic agreement, where a formal signing of the agreement will take place, is scheduled for the 21st May at Goldsmiths, University of London, and the full press release from JaNET is shown below.
Over 18 million students and staff to benefit from faster, more secure cloud-computing More than 18 million students, staff and researchers at institutions across the UK could start to benefit from a faster and more secure connection when using their institution’s cloud-based IT services, thanks to a new peering arrangement between Microsoft and JaNET, the UK’s research and education network. This new agreement enables improved access to infrastructure and application services such as websites, virtual learning environments and research projects. Janet has recently become part of the JISC group, the UK’s champion for digital technology in research and education. Connecting the networks privately eliminates the need to traverse data over the public internet. This enables a high bandwidth connection for students and staff to use Windows Azure. Bandwidth is managed, ensuring high-speed delivery with no delay or latency. The move to peer the Microsoft Windows Azure data centre to the Janet network comes as part of a new strategic alliance between the two organisations, being signed at Goldsmiths, University of London on Tuesday 21 May (press welcome to attend by prior arrangement). Professor Anne Trefethen, Chief Information Officer, University of Oxford: “In the UK, higher education institutions are fortunate to have high speed network services as provided by Janet. The capability afforded by Janet’s peering with Microsoft’s Azure Cloud with high-bandwidth secure connections creates new opportunities for researchers and the University community as a whole.” Professor of Computing Science at Newcastle University Paul Watson comments: “Cloud computing has the potential to revolutionise research by offering vast compute resources on-demand. At Newcastle University, we already have over £20M of research projects that are supported by the cloud. However, one of the major barriers holding back further cloud adoption is the time it takes to transfer large datasets from the lab to the cloud for analysis. This new link between Janet and the Azure Cloud removes this barrier, and will allow a far greater range of research projects to fully exploit the benefits of cloud computing.” The alliance agreement also means any UK education institution can benefit from standard terms and conditions on Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity software suite Office 365, negotiated by Janet. An early beneficiary of this arrangement is Goldsmiths, which is also one of a select group of institutions responsible for initiating work on the alliance. Basem El-Haddadeh, Director of IT Services at Goldsmiths said: “The work on Office 365 will save the sector considerable time and money in legal due diligence and speed up adoption of Office 365. We’re really pleased with the roll-out at Goldsmiths and our staff and students are already enjoying using the new system. I’m looking forward to the benefits the strategic alliance can bring.” “Through the peering and strategic alliance, we are demonstrating our commitment to UK research and education institutes’ increasing desire to access cloud technologies and we are complementing our world class fibre network with Microsoft’s leading technologies to support the sector,” said Dan Perry, Director of Product and Marketing at Janet. Steve Beswick, Director of Education, Microsoft Ltd said: “We are delighted to be working with Janet to provide additional value-added products and services to the research and education community. We have a long-standing relationship with this sector and are looking forward to more collaborative working with Janet to grow our offering.”
Over 18 million students and staff to benefit from faster, more secure cloud-computing
More than 18 million students, staff and researchers at institutions across the UK could start to benefit from a faster and more secure connection when using their institution’s cloud-based IT services, thanks to a new peering arrangement between Microsoft and JaNET, the UK’s research and education network.
This new agreement enables improved access to infrastructure and application services such as websites, virtual learning environments and research projects. Janet has recently become part of the JISC group, the UK’s champion for digital technology in research and education.
Connecting the networks privately eliminates the need to traverse data over the public internet. This enables a high bandwidth connection for students and staff to use Windows Azure. Bandwidth is managed, ensuring high-speed delivery with no delay or latency.
The move to peer the Microsoft Windows Azure data centre to the Janet network comes as part of a new strategic alliance between the two organisations, being signed at Goldsmiths, University of London on Tuesday 21 May (press welcome to attend by prior arrangement).
Professor Anne Trefethen, Chief Information Officer, University of Oxford: “In the UK, higher education institutions are fortunate to have high speed network services as provided by Janet. The capability afforded by Janet’s peering with Microsoft’s Azure Cloud with high-bandwidth secure connections creates new opportunities for researchers and the University community as a whole.”
Professor of Computing Science at Newcastle University Paul Watson comments: “Cloud computing has the potential to revolutionise research by offering vast compute resources on-demand. At Newcastle University, we already have over £20M of research projects that are supported by the cloud. However, one of the major barriers holding back further cloud adoption is the time it takes to transfer large datasets from the lab to the cloud for analysis. This new link between Janet and the Azure Cloud removes this barrier, and will allow a far greater range of research projects to fully exploit the benefits of cloud computing.”
The alliance agreement also means any UK education institution can benefit from standard terms and conditions on Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity software suite Office 365, negotiated by Janet.
An early beneficiary of this arrangement is Goldsmiths, which is also one of a select group of institutions responsible for initiating work on the alliance. Basem El-Haddadeh, Director of IT Services at Goldsmiths said: “The work on Office 365 will save the sector considerable time and money in legal due diligence and speed up adoption of Office 365. We’re really pleased with the roll-out at Goldsmiths and our staff and students are already enjoying using the new system. I’m looking forward to the benefits the strategic alliance can bring.”
“Through the peering and strategic alliance, we are demonstrating our commitment to UK research and education institutes’ increasing desire to access cloud technologies and we are complementing our world class fibre network with Microsoft’s leading technologies to support the sector,” said Dan Perry, Director of Product and Marketing at Janet.
Steve Beswick, Director of Education, Microsoft Ltd said: “We are delighted to be working with Janet to provide additional value-added products and services to the research and education community. We have a long-standing relationship with this sector and are looking forward to more collaborative working with Janet to grow our offering.”
There are hundreds of thousands of topics in the Dev Center, http://dev.windows.com and http://dev.windowsphone.com. We know in any organisation discoverability and sharing of content is critical to success.
So why not get to grips with this detail in person at Microsoft //Build/2013.
Last month Steve Guggenheimer announced //Build/ 2013, the conference is taking place June 26-28, 2013 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. //build/ is a great opportunity to learn more about developing Windows Store apps.
The conference will include great presentations, demos, info sessions, etc. There will be no better place to get the latest and greatest info on Windows Store app development.
You can see all the details about the conference and register at www.buildwindows.com.
Here are some key resources for the each roles in your organisation.
When you go to the Windows Store apps home page, you’ll see:
The Design section. You can find useful downloads and reusable design assets more easily, and design inspiration and case studies give you the tools you need to make a unique experience on Windows.
The business opportunity of the Windows Store is significant, with a better economic model than competitive platforms and flexibility that enables you to build the business you want. The new Market section of the site provides great tips for marketing your apps, evaluating telemetry data, and passing app certification.
With //BUILD/2013 less than a month away, stay connected by following @windevs @ukmsdn on Twitter and subscribing to the Windows Store newsletter for the latest information on Windows 8.
This week I had a very interesting meeting with Kim Blake from UKIE. Kim is a Next Gen Skills Talent Development Coordinator, and part of her role is to simply understand and explain the skills educators and game developers need to ensure that the maximise their potentials.
So we got into the discussion of a mobile developer today... The simply fact is, if your a real mobile developer you develop apps for all platforms iOS, Windows Phone, Android and the web?.
We then got into the discussions of how app development skills are truly transferable skills. For example to be a successful app developer you need to competent in the following areas.
1. Finance - How to monetize your app? Freemium, IAP, Paid, Subs Based..
2. Marketing - How to promote and market your app? Branding, Apps store advert and description
3. Social - How to influence your customers and channels? Twitter, Facebook, linkedin and blogs
4. Development - How to build an app effectively? Code portability, code reuse and cloud services.
So where do you get started building apps for Windows 8
With Windows 8 you can take your existing app development skills and start applying them to developing great apps.
Why should you build apps for Windows 8
Here are just a few of the benefits:
The info throughout this section is intended for developers who are creating apps for platforms like iOS, Windows Phone, Android, or the web, and who want to create similar Windows Store apps for Windows 8. To learn more, click one of the links in the preceding section.
Resources for iOS developers
Apply your existing iOS app development skills toward developing great apps for Windows 8.
Resources for Windows Phone developers
Apply your existing Windows Phone app development skills toward developing great apps for Windows 8.
Resources for Android developers
Apply your existing Android app development skills toward developing great apps for Windows 8.
Resources for web developers
Apply your existing web development skills toward developing great apps for Windows 8.
To successfully start creating Windows Store apps, you'll need the following at a minimum:
For Students Follow the Student resources guide
Cinder is a cross platform framework for C++ design engineering. In order to run and Apple, Android and Windows devices prior to Windows 8, the rendering libraries leveraged OpenGL as the open source, cross platform solution.
Even though DirectX has been Microsoft's preferred rendering solution for advanced graphics programming. Windows traditionally provided both DirectX and OpenGL support from the desktop. However, Windows 8 Store applications are now exclusively DirectX based, to maximize reusability across the entire domain of Microsoft experiences including Windows Phone, Windows RT, Windows 8, and gaming. This means that Cinder apps that leverage OpenGL for their rendering will not work as Windows Store apps.
To get a Cinder project running as a Windows Store app, the Cinder project needs to leverage a DirectX render instead of the default OpenGL renderer…”
Microsoft Evangelism team have been doing lots activity with the open source community in helping bring Windows Store support to Cinder. We are pleased to confirm there is now on a public branch on GitHub.
This is an initial implementation and there is still a bit of work to do ( such as adding XAML support, etc. ) but the broader creative coding community is already embracing it.
The following screenshots are from the DirectX, Windows Store samples that ship with the branch.
The getting started guide here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Getting-started-with-Cinder-for-Windows-Store-Apps
As well as discussion on the official Cinder forums here:
http://forum.libcinder.org/#Topic/23286000001540037
And the DirectX / Windows Store branch of this library can be Cloned from here:
https://github.com/cinder/Cinder/tree/dx_rt
Some of the feedback so far:
“A big "Thank You" to Microsoft for investing in Cinder. I think it's a wise move: you'll get the love of hundreds of creative coders around the world, and word-of-mouth goes a long way! Looking forward to learn more about DirectX and the Windows 8 system. I hope video playback will be implemented as well, the current QuickTime-based solution is a big performance hog on Windows at the moment.” – Paul Hoax
“It's very exciting to see such a contribution to Cinder: definitely a win-win for both Microsoft and the Cinder community. For me, it will be the perfect opportunity to learn DirectX 11 and get my hands dirty on the more advanced features its graphics pipeline. Lots of potential there I believe! Cheers,” - Éric
Let me know how you are using Cinder and any feedback and thoughts on these resources?
So What is NEW at Design.windows.com?
A new UX Checkilist
Checklist is a welcome addition to design.windows.com. It can empower designers when self-evaluating their app so they can better understand what is required and prioritize when they make need to make tough choices. Guidance links are available for each checklist item.
How does this checklist relate to building beautiful apps?
In an effort to help all designers and developers understand UX requirements and considerations, the content team did a great job at ensuring alignment of topics and requirements across the published UX guidelines and to help developers ensure you apps meet the quality bar.
See the UX checklist.
Ensuring you app meets the needs of a Global Market
People using Windows 8 are located all over the world. We want your app to succeed and be ready for world usage so we have provided app design guidelines to ensure this.
Top Tips
See the updated document details.
Accessibility and Design are key for success
We want you to design your apps for use by the widest possible audience and create an accessible app. The doc previously known as “accessibility cheat sheet” is nowavailable with improved content on design.windows.com.
See accessibility details.
We want to inspire you
So to really help we have developed a new design inspiration (AKA “Idea books”) For your application ideas so be sure to check out these idea books which include apps for education, financial, medical and retail app ideas.
Further References and Resources
The UX guidelines
Browse through the UX guidelines index to read them all:
Do you have a device running the latest Windows Phone 8 operating system?
Are you a fan of the TouchDevelop app that enables you to create apps directly ON your mobile device?
Do you love to try out the latest apps, and give feedback about what you like or wish to see improved?
Then our beta testing program for the upcoming update of the TouchDevelop app is for you!
This update will leverage some of the phone sensors and features only available on Windows Phone 8, and it will include all of the new language features which you already might have seen in the TouchDevelop Web App.
This update packs our new editing and execution engine that is powered by TypeScript under the hood. You will enjoy a unified experience between the Windows Phone app and the Web App that runs on most other devices and even your PC.
Thanks to the JavaScript Just-In-Time compiler built into the Windows Phone, your scripts will also run faster. There are still some rough edges, but our goal is to make sure that most of your existing scripts run great in the new environment, and that you enjoy coding on the go more than ever. That’s why we want your feedback now.
If you want to participate in the beta testing program, send an email to touchdevelop@microsoft.com with the following information:
The Touchdevelop team will collect this information over the next couple of days, and then invite the first 800 respondents to try out the beta. They also might contact you later on again to ask for your feedback.
The existing TouchDevelop app for Windows Phone will keep working as before on all Windows Phone 7 devices.
Like TouchDevelop on Facebook to stay up to date.
Rapid2D v1.3 introduces Rapid2D Pro which allows you to deploy to Windows Phone!
Now you can release your game onto desktop, tablets and mobiles with a single click!
You now have greater control over your game’s objects; adjust the finer details of how they behave, right in the editor. Custom colliders will compliment this higher level of control perfectly. Squares and circles just not doing it for you? Draw your own colliders around your game objects, to make your objects! as precise as you like.Collision filters also make an appearance, allowing objects to only react physically to certain object types. Scene switching is now yours to use; create games with multiple levels, create menu screens! , or for simply anything you can apply it to.ParticlesWith up to 10,000 simultaneous particles, that’s just the start of our new particle system. Customisable warp effects allow you to push and pull particles in different directions with different intensities. Create a gentle breeze, a directional explosion, perhaps even a full blown vortex! They can stretch, according to their force, and their colour is under your control with additive and normal blending. Particles can be set to be uniformly emitted to give predictable, balanced distribution, or non-uniformly emitted to create a more sporadic distribution. The emitters themselves can be used with global or local directions, which might really come in handy, since they can also be attached to your game objects, too! Multi-threadingMulti-threaded rendering greatly improves efficiency in this release, by performing simultaneous rendering on multiple CPU cores, taking advantage of faster processors in modern phones. The automatic .DDS converter helps to limit the amount of resources your images will claim. These are just two of the additions we've made to improve the quality of the games you create.An installer, to make your experience with Rapid2D even more, well, rapid! You’ll also notice that the engine will prompt you when a new version is available, to make sure you’re kept up to date with the latest changes.Finally, this update opens the doors to two new licences! Pro and Studio.To find out which one best suits your needs and a list of some of our features, you can get more information hereFor a limited time only, get 50% off Pro and Studio licenses! Offer expires on the 27th of May
Interested in programming with C++ here are some great resources
Developing games
Prepare your Windows Store DirectX game programming environment
Add Windows Store features for DirectX 11.1 games
Prepare your Windows game for publishing]
Port from DirectX 9 to Windows Store
Port from OpenGL ES 2.0 to Direct3D 11.1
DirectX game development and sample walkthroughs
Developing Marble Maze, a Windows Store game in C++ and DirectX
Develop Reversi, a Windows Store game in C# and XAML
Additional game programming resources