Daryll McDade - The High School Guy : For Educators

Visual Studio 2005 Express Announcement--it's staying FREE!

Daryll McDade — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 21:44:00 GMT

"We are incredibly excited to announce that effective April 19th, 2006, all Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions including Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual J#, Visual C++, and Visual Web Developer Express will be free permanently!"

This is very exciting for students and faculty--I'm just giddy! :) I'm especially excited about the Lego Mindstorms stuff and the Teacher Starter Kit. :)

Looking for post AP exam activities? Hunt for the Wombat is here!

Daryll McDade — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 00:54:00 GMT

What can teachers and students work on now that the AP exam is over? Hunt for the Wombat is a 4-6 week project designed to give AP Computer Science students the opportunity to apply their programming skills, gain broader awareness and understanding of the software development process and have fun along the way. By participating in a “real world” scenario where they build a computer game, students can gain experience with project teams, methodologies and core development phases: Discovery, Design, Development and Deployment.

KPL on Channel 9 again

Daryll McDade — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 03:36:00 GMT

In case you missed it check out 2/3 of the KPL team on Channel 9 (44 minutes). Lots of stuff on the next version--nice!

ASP.NET 2.0 "How Do I..." Video Series

Daryll McDade — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 02:08:00 GMT

Brian Goldfarb from the ASP.NET team just posted about a new series of "How Do I..." videos. I just watched the "Web parts and Personalization" and if it's any indication of the rest of the series, this is going to be EXCELLENT!

Enjoy!

Best Bill Gates interview yet

Daryll McDade — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 01:36:00 GMT

If you haven't checked out the "Seventeen minutes with Bill Gates" interview on Channel 9, I *highly* recommend doing so. Very open, honest, relaxed interview--really enjoyed it. Don Dodge has a nice Cliff's Notes summary here.

An hour of my time well spent...

Daryll McDade — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 01:29:00 GMT

It would be a good use of an hour of YOUR time as well to check out this Behind the Code interview with Anders Hejlsberg. JEEZ...that guy has done a LOT of interesting stuff.

Microsoft Academic Geek cruise

Daryll McDade — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 21:30:00 GMT

A very cool effort by my team--a "geek cruise" to connect with professors on the topic of Gaming in curriculum. It is ALSO cool that this was picked up by Forbes (I guess there was a bit of an inside track!). Pat Phillips has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 good posts about her experience—lots of great nuggets.

Project Hoshimi Programming Battle for High School students!

Daryll McDade — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 10:23:00 GMT

I've been promising this for a while but it's FINALLY here! Here’s the quick scoop;

Info for students:
You will compete, directly online, with students all over the US to see who has the best programming skills. brings together an imaginative background story, comic-style graphics and fun programming challenges. Student will devise strategies and write code for navigating a team of nanobots through life-saving missions and objectives through a map of the human body. We'll provide the tools, you'll provide the smarts and your coding skills could win you an Xbox 360 console. Students who want to self-start there are several tutorials You can register at the Project Hoshimi site and get started with the Quickstart Guide. Be sure to check out the competition guidelines for info on how its structured and key dates.

Info for teachers:
We’ve posted a Project Hoshimi Programming Battle Teacher’s Guide on MainFunction. This guide points to two sets of Teaching Objects we’ve created to support this—one is a set for teaching fundamentals and a set created specifically for the Project Hoshimi SDK. Each Teaching Object includes;

-An in depth how-to article to familiarize you with the topic.
-PowerPoint slides to deliver the lesson to your students.
-Project files with sample code for you and your students to get started.
-Exercises to practice the skills and master the concepts.

You can check out this video to get a sense of what it's all about.

Good luck and GET GOING! :)

Mint Source for Express

Daryll McDade — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 22:38:16 GMT

Huh?

Mint Source is a cool tool from the UK Developer team--built by an intern actually--that let's you play around with Express to build a system tray RSS aggregator.

Fresh... :)

Visual Studio Express Editions are here!

Daryll McDade — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 06:39:43 GMT

Gosh, it seems like this took FOREVER! Glad that the Visual Studio Express Editions are finally here and REALLY glad that they are available FREE! :)

From Dan Fernandez’s blog:

I am proud to announce that today, November 7th 2005, we officially released the downloadable versions of Visual Studio 2005 Express on MSDN and they are free to download for one year!

Download Visual Studio Express
You can download Visual Studio Express from the links below:

Visual Web Developer 2005 Express
Visual Basic 2005 Express
Visual C# 2005 Express
Visual C++ 2005 Express
Visual J# 2005 Express
SQL Server Express

Express is free for one year. Until November 7, 2006, we are promotionally discounting the downloadable versions of Express to free. This doesn’t mean that the product turns off after a year, but rather that as long as you download the product before November 7, 2006, you can get it for free and you can use it forever.

Rewards for Registering
The other big news announced at the Visual Studio launch is the availability of the Visual Studio Express DIY Kit, which is a set of benefits you get for registering Express and includes:

250 royalty-free stock photography images from Corbis
Free Windows Icons from IconBuffet

Free eBooks including: Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition: Build a Web Site Now, Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition: Build a Program Now!, and Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Edition: Build a Program Now!

3rd party components from VSIP partners

And we have more benefits coming soon

Want More Information?
Take a tour of the newly revamped Visual Studio Express Edition Web site, read the Frequently Asked Questions, and as always, please tell us what you think :)

Looks like the feedback from the community is positive as well. For those students and teachers that want to burn to image disc, instructions here.

Visual Studio 2005 for the Web Developer

Daryll McDade — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 22:50:24 GMT

If you’re into application development, of course you know that today is a big day. Especially exciting, IMO, if you’re into Web development. Lots of things are updated;

-the Visual Web Developer Express (VWDX) page (I dig the purple—I may have to order this just to have the box!)
-the VWDX tutorial page (my personal favorite project—Windows Media Player collection)
-the ASP.NET Developer Center
-the ASP.NET 2.0 community site

Sheesh! LOTS of updates and I’m sure I haven’t caught them all.

I … am ... overloading …

Must … go … play …. now …

Orange County Choppers - proud users of Microsoft technology

Daryll McDade — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 07:37:10 GMT

Maybe you’ve heard of Orange County Choppers, which is the featured bike builder on American Chopper which airs on Discovery Channel. OCC are proud users of Microsoft technologies. They are definitely at or near the top of the list of “cool” companies running their business on Microsoft technologies. All I have to say is, “Mikey for President!” :)

Why go to class? Just get the podcast!

Daryll McDade — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 20:24:00 GMT

Not sure how many other universities are doing this but University of Washington is offering lectures via podcast. Missed class? No worries—just download it to your iPod!

“Lectures in Kane have often been videotaped for student viewing, but that means the student must go to the library to check out the video and view it there. With podcasts the audio portion of the lecture can be downloaded to a personal listening device such as an iPod and listened to anywhere.”

I think that this is EXTREMELY cool. Now, I’m not advocating missing class but the fact is that some times it just can’t be avoided. It’s great that you can get a “replay” of the lecture. Actually, that could be useful even if you actually made it to class—might cut down on some note taking? I am guessing that more schools will pick this up soon.

Daryll

It's baaaaack!! Imagine Cup that is.

Daryll McDade — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 07:07:00 GMT

Pretty excited that Imagine Cup is coming soon. What is Imagine Cup? If you don't know...

“Microsoft’s Imagine Cup is the world’s premier student technology competition. It’s an opportunity for top young minds from around the globe to use technology to solve some of the planet’s toughest problems. Imagine Cup contestants have the chance to give their ideas exposure, make critical contacts, and experience a true sense of friendship with peers worldwide.”

Last year's theme was "Imagine a world where technology dissolves the boundaries between us". This year's theme?...

"Imagine a world where technology enables healthier lives.”

“Health means different things to different people. For some, a medical breakthrough springs to mind. For others, health may be represented simply by a clean glass of water. This year’s Imagine Cup theme invites contestants to define health for themselves and decide how to use technology to make a real difference in the lives of people everywhere."

Couple of trailers to get YOU excited:
30 second version (4.2 MB)
2 minute version (11.1 MB)

Tags: [Imagine Cup], [Students]

Is Microsoft cool to students?

Daryll McDade — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 01:54:55 GMT

Apparently not.

The Saturday after PDC some of my colleagues on the Academic team met with a group students to discuss “digital lifestyle”. Chris Avis was there and took some good notes. A couple of things strike me about this;

1) Windows is not cool. These kids clearly don’t remember the world before GUIs for personal computing. Shall I walk you through what it was like to boot up my Commodore 64? :) Vista will change a lot of minds about this.
2) Office is not cool. Hmmm…business and personal productivity just isn’t “cool” no matter what the product is. What IS cool is being able to use tools like Office to blast through work that you HAVE TO do so that you can go do fun things that you WANT to do. That said, they clearly don’t remember a world when the kinds of apps that are in Office were a) non GUI based (Lotus 1–2–3 on an MS-DOS machine…enough said) and b) stand-alone with no interactivity.
3) Microsoft is for “grandma.” Grandma’s company and grandma’s operating system. Though I disagree with this, I think I’m ok with this. Windows works for grandmothers AND students—which is what it’s supposed to do. I wonder how many students’ grandmothers can use Linux? I would guess that is a small number.

Like Chris, I think that these kinds of session are the best part of this job—there’s nothing better than listening to customers. But I would say that Microsoft doesn’t get credit for some things that are very cool. I predict that the next year will tell a different story however…