We’ve recently set up a new facebook page which features a regular stream of student content including this blog! (in fact if you’re reading this on facebook then you probably don’t need to read on ;))

Please take a look at the site, become a fan and let us know what you think on our wall. We also have a monthly student newsletter called The StudentZine which is a digest of the best stuff from facebook.

This will probably be particularly interesting for those of you who read my previous post on free student access to Azure. ICS, our partner on this offer are running a series of online training sessions later this week specifically for students.

Each session will cover the following:

- Overview and demonstration of Windows Azure
- How you can benefit from your free trial
- Understanding Windows Azure and the Azure platform
- Azure pricing and Proof of Concept offerings
- Next steps in your Azure adoption
- Azure resources available to you
- Q&A session

You can find out more and register for free here.

On Monday we launched this years Imagine Cup competition in the UK.

The Imagine Cup is the worlds largest student technology competition with thousands of the best and brightest students from around the world competing for the opportunity to represent their country at the international finals (this year to be held in Warsaw) and ultimately win in their category.

The competition has four categories this year:

Software Design

This year we’ve worked with some of the UK’s leading charities to provide you with a selection of project briefs to form the basis of your entry. There’s a good range of briefs all addressing real world problems identified by our partner charities. I would really recommend using these briefs (although this is not compulsory) as they will get you off to a flying start.

You can find out more and download the project briefs here.

Game Design

As ever we anticipate Games Design being a very popular category this year. The competition is largely the same as last year but with one key difference – you can now use either XNA or Silverlight to build your game.

We are also planning on running a series of X48 type events where all entries would be submitted as Round 1 entries – once we have more details I’ll post them here.

Find out more about the Games Design competition here…

Digital Media

The Digital Media competition is designed for your team to create a video as interesting and as enticing as possible so that people want to pass it on, share it, and get the entire world to vote for it.  The videos that become the most viral - win! This is a chance for those who've always enjoyed creating videos and multimedia experiences, to develop one that can change the global community.

Visit the Digital Media competition page to learn more.

IT Challenge

IT Challenge highlights the art and science of developing, deploying, and maintaining IT systems that are efficient, functional, robust and secure. You, as a growing IT professional may think you have the base set of tools and techniques, but are you ready to consider a customer's unique needs and configurations that will make all of the pieces of a specific system fit together?

Visit the IT Challenge competition page to learn more.

Now is the time to jump in so check out the UK site, register and compete!

Windows Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform allowing you to build and deploy scalable .NET applications online.

Cloud Computing is a hot topic and likely to be a key part of of many organisations IT strategy moving forward. As a student now is the time to learn more!

We are making a limited number of developer accounts available to students for free - all you have to do is register here being sure to select ‘Student’ in the audience category drop down and using the promo code ‘blog’.

Once you sign up you will receive an email with your login details and links to help you get started.

This offer is strictly limited so if you want to get ahead in the field of cloud computing you should register now!

Some time ago I blogged about about an Imagine Cup Entry called Drizzle built by a bunch of guys at Huddersfield University. What I failed to mention is that they had previously built a game called Yo-Ho Kablammo which scored them second place in the Dream Build Play competition and a publishing contract for Xbox Live Arcade.

Huddersfield University is unique in that it has a game studio on campus, it’s called Canalside Studios and is staffed by students. Yo-Ho was built by the guys whilst on placement at Canalside.

Yo-Ho has now launched and is available on Xbox Live Marketplace. It’s well worth checking out to see what can be achieved with XNA (and a lot of hard work).

XNA is a great platform for building casual games and with the launch of Xbox Live Indie Games it’s easy to publish your creations and earn some cold hard cash.

We’re now all back from Cairo and fully recovered from the heat and sleep deprivation. The great news is that across the board the UK teams excelled with both the Short Film and Games Development making it on stage at the final.

Our Short Film team (Fulham Four) were from the London Film Academy and created an excellent short featuring a mummy particularly keen on interior design which went down very well with the judges and bagged the top spot. Once we have their film online I’ll post a link.

Sanguine Labs, our Games Development team haled from Bournemouth University and beat off stiff competition to secure third place with their game DEFILE of Eden.

Both our Software and Embedded teams placed in the top 12 internationally and our IT Challenge competitor in the top 10. Overall excellent results considering at the beginning of the competition there were more than 300,000 students in the mix! For all the results see the official Imagine Cup website.

Everyone had a great time and the highlight was definitely the closing ceremony held in front of the pyramids (see above photo). Next year the Imagine Cup final will be held in Warsaw so start thinking about your entries now and you might be joining us next year! Visit imaginecup.com to find out more.

Just as we’re heading off to Cairo for the Imagine Cup worldwide finals I want to give you a flashback to the UK final event…

Previously I published the slides from all of the Microsoft Research talks delivered on the day and now, finally I have the videos online!

Getting from A to B: Fast Route Finding Using Slow Computers from Ed Dunhill on Vimeo.

Curing Cancer, Halting Global Disease Outbreaks, Preventing Dangerous Climate Change from Ed Dunhill on Vimeo.

Proving that Software Eventually Does Something Good from Ed Dunhill on Vimeo.

Regular readers will know all about the Imagine Cup but for the uninitiated it is the worlds largest student technology competition which Microsoft runs annually. 2009 has been a bumper year for the UK with 14 students travelling to Egypt this Friday to represent the UK in the Software Design, Embedded Development, Games Development, Short Film and IT competitions.

We will be sure to let you know how the teams get on in Cairo but we’re certainly hoping at least one of them will be bringing home some silverware!

If you want to support the UK Software Design Team (TKCL from Kings College) then your in luck because this year for the first time part of the judging is based on a public vote. All you need to do is visit peopleschoice.imaginecup.com find TKCL (toward the bottom of the page and click vote!

You can follow all the teams on the UK Imagine Cup Blog, YouTube Channel and of course on Twitter.

Have you ever wanted to create your own game but don’t want to get your hands dirty with code? We now have the answer… Kodu!

Kodu allows you to build games using traditional programming paradigms such as conditional statements and loops but without having to fire up Visual Studio. Basically you start with a blank world which you can customise, add characters and set up interactions. Multiplayer is supported as is sharing created games online using Xbox Live Community Games.

Its great if you’re just looking for a bit of fun and its also a neat way to introduce children to programming.

Kodu is available for purchase (or demo) on Xbox Live Community Games. You can find out more here or watch a demo from GDC below:

Just a quick signpost to the Ultimate Steal, a programme that allows UK students purchase Office for a seriously reduced price.

I’m sure I’ve blogged about it before but thought it was worth resurfacing as its a cracking deal and for those of you in your final year your last chance to grab a bargain.

Windows Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform allowing deployment of .NET applications with flexible scaling. My colleague Paolo recently wrote a great introductory article for our Faculty Connection newsletter which outlines the fundamentals.

Over the coming months I will be writing a series of posts focussed on getting you started developing with Azure. In this first post I will walk you through setting up the development environment.

The development environment for Azure consists of Visual Studio and the Azure SDK. You can user either the free Visual Studio 2008 Web Developer Express Edition or a full version of Visual Studio 2008 (such as those available through MSDNAA and DreamSpark). For this article I will be using Windows 7 as my operating system but you can also use Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008.

Once you have installed Visual Studio please update it to download SP1 which includes .NET 3.5 SP1 both of which are requirements for the Azure SDK. Finally, before installing the SDK you need to enable ASP.NET and WCF HTTP Activation. To do this on Windows Vista or 7 follow these steps:

1. From the Start menu, choose Control Panel | Programs | Programs and Features.

2. Click Turn Windows Features On or Off.

3. Under Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5.1, select Windows Communication Foundation HTTP Activation.

4. Under Internet Information Services, expand World Wide Web Services.

5. Under Application Development Features, select ASP.NET.

6. Under Common HTTP Features, choose Static Content.

7. Click OK to install the selected features.

You can now download and install the Azure SDK and the Azure Tools for Visual Studio. The Azure SDK provides a simulation of the cloud on your desktop so you can test applications locally and the Tools for Visual Studio include the Windows Azure project types.

We’re now set to develop our Azure web application, for this example we will build a simple ‘Hello World’ application but using the twist is that rather than running it as a single instance as you traditionally would we will fire it up with 5 instances.

First open Visual Studio, select ‘File>New>Project...’ From the ‘Project types’ box select Cloud Service and from the ‘Templates’ box select ‘Web Cloud Service’, enter a name for the project and click OK.

When the template loads you will notice in the ‘Solution Explorer’ we have a solution with two projects. The first project contains the cloud service which features two XML files containing the service configuration (.cscfg) and the service definition (.csdef). The second project is the web application itself where you will find a blank default.aspx file which is familiar in traditional ASP.NET development. For the purposes of this tutorial we will make a small change to the default.aspx file so double click it and in the left hand pane add the text ‘Hello World’ between the ‘<div>’ tags. You can now press F5 to setup the development fabric and deploy your application for local test.

Your application should then launch in your web browser and display ‘Hello World’. If you look in your system tray you should notice an icon displaying two gears, this represents the Azure Development Fabric. Right click the icon and select ‘Show Development Fabric UI’. In the interface you can expand the application we have just built and you will see that there is one instance running. A single instance is the default configuration for a cloud application but if we want to scale our application and run multiple instances it is a simple matter of changing the XML configuration file I mentioned earlier. To do this go back to Visual Studio, stop debugging and open the .cscfg file. In the left hand pane you should be able to see a tag containing ‘Instances count="1"’, change the 1 to 5 and press F5 to rebuild your application. If you reopen the Development Fabric UI you will now see that there are 5 instances of our application running.

As you can see it is very easy to run up multiple instances of our application and this works exactly the same when you deploy your application to the cloud which I will cover in my next post on Azure.

Microsoft are currently running a competition where you can build an IE8 Accelerator, Web Slice or Visual Search to win and Xbox 360 Elite as well as promotion for your project in a range of Future Publishing titles.

Mike Ormond has all the details - this is a great opportunity to grab yourself a cool prize and get something neat on your CV and best of all its really easy to get started.

For a limited time Microsoft is offering free vouchers to sit an MCTS exam through the DreamSpark programme. The MCTS (Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist) stream is aimed at developers and IT professionals and is available in multiple flavours relevant to a raft of developer and infrastructure technologies. Full list of MCTS certs.

DreamSpark is available to all HE students through direct verification as well as schools through an onsite admin. If you are a school pupil and would like access please direct a member of staff at your school to the sign up page so they can register the school for free.

As well as free exams DreamSpark provides a range of Microsoft products for free:

Find out more about the free MCTS offer.

To follow on from yesterday’s post I wanted to share the slides from the MSR talks:

• MSR Overview - Andrew Herbert
• Getting from A to B: fast route-finding using slow computers - Simon Peyton-Jones
• Curing Cancer, Halting global Disease Outbreaks and averting Dangerous Climate Change - Drew Purves
• Proving that programs eventually do something good - Byron Cook

Videos will follow next week.

Yesterday we held a big event at MSR (Microsoft Research) Cambridge  to celebrate the success of UK MSPs and Imagine Cup Contestants.

The day included a series of fascinating talks from MSR and Microsoft (slides and video to follow shortly) and culminated in an award ceremony for MSPs and Imagine Cup winners.

Team TKCL (Kings College) with their route finding application Pioneer won the Software Development competition and will be representing the UK in Cairo later this year. Runners up were Vision Creative from Reading/Aston with their CityCycle application and TravelPrint from Aberystwyth University.

We also highlighted the success we have had in Games, I'm positive that the 22 teams competing in round 2 of the competition will produce some awesome games and we’ll end up taking some of them to Cairo.

MSP awards were as follows:

• Imagine Cup Registration Award – Andrew Smylie
• Ultimate Steal Award – Andrew Smylie
• DreamSpark Award – Gareth Young
• Most Innovative Event – Honourable mention – Gareth Young, Winner – Warren Rieutort-Louis
• MSP Star Award – Runner up – Sergei Golubev, Winner – Chris Alexander

We encouraged the use of twitter throughout so you can check out the reaction on the hash tag #imaginecup.

Congratulations to all those who won a prize and thank you to all the other students that travelled to Cambridge for the event.

As mentioned above I’ll shortly make the slides from the event available and we’re hoping to have the videos on Channel8 next week.