Ed Dunhill's Blog : Teaching

Windows Azure Online Training for Students

edunhill — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:28:47 GMT

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.

Technorati Tags: Azure,.NET,Students

Try Microsoft’s Cloud Platform for Free!

edunhill — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:02:25 GMT

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!

Technorati Tags: Cloud Computing,Windows Azure,.NET,Student

Kodu is Here!

edunhill — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:56:44 GMT

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:

Technorati Tags: Kodu,Xbox Live,Community Games,Games,Microsoft

Getting Started with Azure #1

edunhill — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:06:27 GMT

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.

Technorati Tags: Windows Azure,Visual Studio,Cloud Computing,.NET

Free MCTS Certification Through DreamSpark

edunhill — Fri, 08 May 2009 17:08:28 GMT

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.

Technorati Tags: MCTS,MCP,Microsoft,Student,DreamSpark

Student Celebration Day Slides

edunhill — Fri, 01 May 2009 10:31:00 GMT

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.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft Research,Imagine Cup,MSP

IT Academy Student Pass - Free eLearning

edunhill — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 13:31:54 GMT

A little while back I posted about a great new programme we launched which gives students free access to official Microsoft eLearning courses.

To sign up you need a unique code which authenticates you as a student, the great news is these codes are now available (along with a bunch of free software) from DreamSpark. For more information about DreamSpark take a look at my posts here and here and to see exactly what's included in IT Academy Student Pass take a look at the official site.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft eLearning,DreamSpark,IT Academy,Certification,Student Pass

Free eLearning for Microsoft Certification

edunhill — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 18:13:00 GMT

Ever fancied getting some more letters after you name and improving your job prospects when you leave uni? Then Microsoft certification is for you!

We're making a whole bunch of official eLearning content available to students for free through the IT Academy Student Pass programme. These courses will give you everything you need to learn to take a MCP exams and get ready for industry!

~~To sign up you need a unique code to authenticate yourself as a student, if you want one~~ ~~click here to email me~~.

*** UPDATE - You can now get your code directly from DreamSpark (see this post) ***

Once you've got your code you can register here.

For all the details check out the official website.

Technorati Tags: MCP,Microsoft eLearning,IT Academy,Student Pass,Certification

New XNA Mini Game Available

edunhill — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 12:53:00 GMT

Video: XNA Creators Club Online: Movipa Mini Game

The XNA team just announced a new mini game called Movipa. Its basically a jigsaw game where you have to reorder the pieces to make the image complete the cool thing is it uses animations rather than static images.

The game is available for free and ready to compile but as with all creators club content you can use the source in your own creations!

You can find this game along with a whole bunch of code complete examples in the content catalog and other full games in the starter kit section of the site.

Technorati Tags: XNA,Movipa,Game Studio,Creators Club

Live Mesh Now Available to UK Users

edunhill — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:58:46 GMT

You've probably all heard something in the IT press about Live Mesh over the last couple of months well now you have a chance to go try the tech preview yourselves! Sign up is now open to UK users and if you already have a Live ID then all you need to do is go to mesh.com and log in.

To find out more about the tech preview take a look at the official site and the team blog.

Before you get too excited it is worth noting that currently the tech preview only includes access to the end user application, things will get really interesting when the SDK is released for developers. To find out more about the developer technologies and get on the waiting list for the SDK tech preview check out this page.

Technorati Tags: Live Mesh,Live ID,Tech Preview,Mesh SDK

Introduction to Web Development; Popfly Input Blocks

edunhill — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 14:59:15 GMT

In this the last in a series of five articles on Microsoft Web Development we look at creating an input block to allow your web service to be used in Popfly.

Building our block

For the purpose of this tutorial we will implement a block that will take XML data (in the form of an RSS feed), process and display that data. This will demonstrate the principles of building an input block in Popfly using JavaScript. In this tutorial we will build out put functionality into our block so we can display our data formatted with html, it is very easy to tweak the output so it can be transformed and displayed using further blocks.

Firstly, head over to http://www.popfly.com and login with your Windows Live ID. Then using the toolbar at the top, select Create Stuff > Block. Now we can start building our data input block...

When you first view the ‘create block’ screen, you’ll see a bunch of XML – this is the definition of the block so that you can provide customisation through Popfly’s user interface. Seeing as we’re creating an RSS-reader block, we’ll call ours “RSSFeed”.

1. Where it says class=“HelloWorldClass”, change it to read class=“RSSFeed”.

2. You’ll notice below there is a group tagged ‘operations’. This is where you can build different behaviours for your block to have. For this block, we’ll implement one operation: getItems. This will simply return all the titles from our RSS feed.

3. Rename the default operation from “hello” to “getItems”.

4. Inside the description tags, change the description, to something such as “Gets the titles from the RSS feed.”

5. Above the <outputs> group of tags, create another group called inputs.

6. Create an input tag with the name=“url”, required=“true” and type=“feedURL”.

7. Give this new input tag a new description, such as “The URL of the RSS feed.”

8. If you like, you can give this a <defaultValue> property, I’ve set mine to my blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/edunhill/rss.xml.

9. Under the <outputs> group, change the isArray property to “true”, change the type to “custom” and add object=“RSSItem” – this will show we’re outputting a list of RSSItems.

10. After the <operations> group, add a new group called <objects>, so we can quickly define what an RSSItem is.

11. Create a new <object> tag, with name=“RSSItem”, then give it another tag called <field> with the properties name=“title”, type=“title” and isArray=“false”.

12. That’s it! The block is now defined so Popfly can understand it. Hopefully you should have something that looks like the below:

Now, we have to head on over to the “Block Code” tab, to write the code that will actually make the block do it’s thing.

1. Change the HelloWorldClass text to read RSSFeed.

2. Rename the first “hello” function to “getItems”, and add url in the brackets after the word “function”.

3. Then inside the function, type the following:

var returnResponse = environment.getXml(url);

return this.__formatResponseDataRSSItem(returnResponse);

These lines download the RSS feed into a readable format for use with our block.

4. Create another RSSFeed.prototype. called “__formatResponseDataRSSItem” – this will return the article titles as an array of strings (lines of text) for use with our block.

5. Inside the new function, add the following code:

     var resultArray  = new Array();

    var itemNodeList = resultXML.getElementsByTagName('item');

    var resultNodeCount = itemNodeList.length;            

    var resultArray  = new Array(resultNodeCount);

    for(var i = 0; i < resultNodeCount; i++)

    {   

        var itemNode = itemNodeList[i];

        if(itemNode)

        {                

            var title =         itemNode.getElementsByTagName("title").length >= 1 ?        itemNode.getElementsByTagName("title")[0].text : "";

                resultArray[i] = new RSSItem(title);

        }

    }

    return resultArray;

This code iterates through each of the titles in the RSS XML document and adds them to our resultArray, which is in turn, returned to the block for output.

6. The two final things to do are define (in code) an RSSItem, and then define how our block will pass it’s data to another block (or optionally, how it will output the data).

7. Define another function called “RSSItem” with “title” as a parameter, then insert the code: this.title = title;

This code defines RSSItem as ‘having a title’.

8. Finally, we need to output some sort of data. Create another RSSItem.prototype. called “toString” and insert the following code:

    var html = ""; 

    html += "<strong>" + this.title + "</strong><br />"; 

    return html;

This code simply outputs all the titles in bold as html to be read either by the user, or another block.

And that’s it! Now our block is totally built and configured, hopefully you’ll be looking at something like this:

Now we can quickly test the block, by clicking the “Save and Run” option to the top-right of your screen. Give the block a name, like RSSFeed, and Popfly will create a new Mashup with your block. If you want to see what it looks like, you can hit preview and should be able to see a list of article titles.

You can change the code in step 8 above to output variables instead of html so you can hook this block up with a display or transform block.

I hope you've enjoyed the series, if you have any questions about any aspect of Microsoft Web Dev don't hesitate to drop me a line.

Technorati Tags: Popfly,JavaScript,Silverlight,Studentzine

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Now Available

edunhill — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 10:23:27 GMT

The Beta 2 of Silverlight v2 is now available adding a bunch of new features to .NET based SL development.

Scott Guthrie has put together an awesome post detailing all the new stuff.

Everything you need is available on the official Silverlight website so there's no time like the present to go and have a play :)

Technorati Tags: Silverlight 2,.NET,Visual Studio,Expression Blend

Introduction to Web Development; Silverlight and SQL

edunhill — Thu, 15 May 2008 09:06:00 GMT

In the fourth in a series of five articles exploring Microsoft Web technologies we'll look at implementing a Silverlight front end for our SQL database/WCF Web Service.

Prerequisites

For this tutorial you will need Visual Studio 2008 Standard or above and the Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Tools for Visual Studio 2008. Both items are available for free for students (see links).

Getting started

Last month we looked at building a simple ASP.NET Web App that connected to a SQL database to add and retrieve data. This month we will build on that example and create a Silverlight frontend for the database. Because Silverlight is a client side technology and we want to retrieve data from the server side we need to implement a Web Service that will retrieve the data on the server side and then provide that data to our Silverlight application.

The Web Service

We will start by building a WCF web service that will retrieve data from our database (using the principles demonstrated last month) and allow us to access this data in our Silverlight application.

Open Visual Studio and select 'File'>'New'>'Project...'>'Web'>'WCF Service Application'
Firstly we need to reset the default binding in the Web.config file to Basic HttpBinging:
- Open the Web.config file
- Find <System.serviceModel> <service> <endpoint>
- Set the 'binding' property to 'basicHttpBinding'

Now lets implement our database and dataset - follow the instructions in last months article.

If you get stuck take a look at the below code which implements retrieval of data using our dataset and returns an int specifying the number of rows in our table:

public int CountUsers()        {            DataSet1TableAdapters.addressesTableAdapter addressAdapter = new CustomerService.DataSet1TableAdapters.addressesTableAdapter();            DataSet1.addressesDataTable addresses = addressAdapter.GetData();            ArrayList addressList = new ArrayList();            foreach (DataSet1.addressesRow addressRow in addresses)            {                addressList.Add(addressRow.Name + " - " + addressRow.Phone);            }            int rows = addressList.Count;            return rows;        }

That's our service implemented!

The Silverlight Frontend

Once you have your WCF Web Service up and running you can move onto implementing your Silverlight frontend. I will now show you how to consume data from your service using Silverlight.

First we need to add a Silverlight Project to our solution:
- Right click the solution in the Solution Explorer and select 'Add'>'New Project...'>'Silverlight'>'Silverlight Application'
- In the following dialog box leave the default settings intact and click OK.
Now you should see your page.xaml file in design/code view
Add '<TextBox Height="50" Width="200" x:Name="userCountResult"/>' within the '<Grid>' tags to create a TextBox we can manipulate in code.
Now we need to create a reference to the service we created in the previous section:
- In the Solution Explorer right click the references folder under the Silverlight project and select 'Add service reference...'>'Discover'
- You should now see the Web service you created so just click OK to create the reference.

Next we're going to write the code to connect to the Web service, download the data and when the data is fully downloaded fire an event that will update out TextBox:

You need to insert the below code into your Page() class (NB: you may have to change some of the reference names depending on the naming conventions you have used)

public Page()        {            InitializeComponent();            Binding binding = new BasicHttpBinding();            EndpointAddress address = new EndpointAddress("http://localhost:54580/service1.svc");            ServiceReference.Service1Client proxy = new ServiceReference.Service1Client(binding, address);              proxy.CountUsersCompleted += new EventHandler<CustomerClient.ServiceReference.CountUsersCompletedEventArgs>(proxy_CountUsersCompleted);            proxy.CountUsersAsync();        }

This code will connect with the service running on the same domain, set up a proxy, initiate data retrieval and create an event that will be fired when data retrieval is complete.
So now we need to handle the event:

void proxy_CountUsersCompleted(object sender, CustomerClient.ServiceReference.CountUsersCompletedEventArgs e)        {            userCountResult.Text = "Number of users: " + e.Result;        }

Hit F5 and it should all work. If you find it throws an unhandled exception related to http error codes the chances are that the dev server provided by VS2008 is not using port 54580 as in the above example. The port used is dynamic and you just need to check in your IE address bar and update the code accordingly. If you come up against any other problems take a look at the zip file below - it contains my working sln file which you can download and play with.

Also why not check out these excellent tutorials on MSDN:

Next Month

Next month will be the final article in this series and will investigate implementing our Web Service as a Block in Popfly to allow us to rapidly build Web Apps and share our data in new ways.

Technorati Tags: Silverlight,SQL,Visual Studio 2008,Popfly,Web Service,Web Application,ASP.NET

Robochamps Robotics League - Win Real Robots!

edunhill — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 00:35:34 GMT

Today saw the launch of a new website which allows users to compete in a series of challenges to program virtual robots using Microsoft Robotics Studio (a plugin for Visual Studio - C# Express and above).

Historically robotics has had many barriers to entry for the casual users wanting to get started such as the cost of hardware. The cool thing about Robochamps is it uses 3D simulation technology built into Robotics Studio to allow users to program virtual robots at no cost. Even cooler you can actually win real robots by competing!

It's really easy to get started; just set up the IDE (you can get a Visual Studio 2008 from DreamSpark if you're a student), pick a challenge and start coding, if you get stuck there's even a learning zone on the site.

Technorati Tags: Robotics,Visual Studio,Robochamps,Robots

Introduction to Web Development; Building an ASP.NET/SQL Web Application

edunhill — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 12:32:18 GMT

In the third of a series of five articles exploring Microsoft Web technologies I'll walk you through building a simple Web application which retrieves and stores data in a SQL database.

Getting Started

First off you need to set up your development environment, to find out how see my previous article.

I'm going to show you how to build a simple address book application which will allow you to search for a contact by name and add new contacts. The data will be stored in a SQL database and the frontend will be built using ASP.NET.

To kick off you need to open Visual Studio and create a new Web Site:

Click the File menu > New > Web Site...

In the resulting dialogue box select 'ASP.NET Web Site' and give your project a name in the Location dialogue.
A new Web Site project will then be shown in Visual Studio. Locate the Solution Explorer:

(If the Solution Explorer is not displayed press Ctrl + S + W)

The Database...

Now we will create a new SQL database to store out data. Right click the App_Data folder ( ) folder and select 'Add New Item...'
Select 'SQL Database' and give your database a name.
Locate the 'Server Explorer' pane, select your database and right click Tables and select 'Add New Table'

(If the Server Explorer is not displayed press Ctrl + S + L)

In the centre pane create two columns called Name and Phone, set their Data Types to 'varchar(50)' and uncheck the 'Allow Nulls' box in the Name column.
Hit Ctrl + S and give the table a name.

We now have our database ready to use so its time to link it to our web app and build a simple frontend.

Go back to the Solution Explorer and right click your project and select 'Add New Item...'

Now select Dataset and give it a name. (If you get a warning simply click OK and the appropriate folder structure will be created)

You will now get a wizard pop up which will walk you through the creation of your Dataset.

In the first window select your database and click next, give the 'Connection String' a name and select Use SQL statements
At the next step select the 'Query Builder...' button, select your table and click close.
Click *(All Columns) and OK.

In the wizard click Finish
Click on the query section and click Add > Query...
In the wizard select Use SQL statements, Next, Insert, Finish.

The frontend...

In the Solution Explorer double click Default.aspx and when it loads click on the 'Design' tab
At the bottom of the Server Explorer click 'Toolbox and then drag and drop three textboxes and two buttons onto the page:

Change the name of each control in the Properties pane.
Now double click the top button to create the click event and access the code.
Copy and paste the below code into your click even for the search button (please note this code may need tweaking depending on the naming conventions you've used)

   1: DataSet1TableAdapters.addressBookTableAdapter addressAdapter = new DataSet1TableAdapters.addressBookTableAdapter();

   2:         DataSet1.addressBookDataTable addresses = addressAdapter.GetData();

3:

   4:         foreach (DataSet1.addressBookRow addressRow in addresses)

   5:         {

   6:             Response.Write(addressRow.Name + "/" + addressRow.Phone);

   7:         }

Once you've got your code working and everything compiles we have a way to retrieve all the data from the database and display it. The code can be modified slightly to display only results matching what was entered in the search box with the addition of an if statement:

   1: DataSet1TableAdapters.addressBookTableAdapter addressAdapter = new DataSet1TableAdapters.addressBookTableAdapter();

   2:         DataSet1.addressBookDataTable addresses = addressAdapter.GetData();

3:

   4:         foreach (DataSet1.addressBookRow addressRow in addresses)

   5:         {

   6:             if (searchBox.Text == addressRow.Name)

   7:             Response.Write(addressRow.Name + "/" + addressRow.Phone);

   8:         }

This is the quickest way to implement search functionality for this example but it would be much more elegant to construct a SQL query based on the search term to avoid iterating over all data in the table.

Now we have our database and means of getting data out implemented it just leaves the small task of implementing the ability to put some data in!

First go back to the Solution Explorer and open the Dataset then right click the Table Adapter and select Add > Query...
Select 'Use SQL statements' > Next > Insert > Next> Finish
Go back to Default.aspx and double click the second button.
Copy in the below code - again it may need tweaking.

   1: DataSet1TableAdapters.addressBookTableAdapter addressAdapter = new DataSet1TableAdapters.addressBookTableAdapter();

   2: addressAdapter.InsertQuery(nameBox.Text,phoneBox.Text);

   3: Response.Write(nameBox.Text + " and " + phoneBox.Text + " written to database!");

If you hit F5 it will compile and run and you should be able insert data and then search it.

If you get stuck check out the below video of me building the application from start to finish.

Next Month...

We will be looking at building a Silverlight front end for our address book database.

Technorati Tags: ASP.NET,SQL,Visual Studio,Studentzine