Microsoft NZ Student and Academic Blog : Student Partners

Still Looking For Student Reps For 2009

nzacad — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 03:05:00 GMT

Microsoft Student Partners

THE NEW ZEALAND IT COMMUNITY

The best way to connect with the IT Industry

The Microsoft Student Partner programme is to encourage students who are interested in building a closer relationship with Microsoft, and those who are simply hooked on technology, to develop their skills further.

The programme is designed to help students learn more about our different technologies and also help them connect closely with our Partners in the IT industry to help prepare themselves and their peers for the IT industry.

What do you do as a Student Partner?

To get the most out of being a Microsoft Student Partner, there are a lot of opportunities for you to contribute to the broad academic community. This ranges from blogging to setting up technical demonstrations.

We require Student Partners to undertake a range of voluntary activities throughout the year which are designed to give you not only real world experience but also to compliment your existing studies. Below are some of the specific goals for 2009:

§ Help drive events on campus where you liaise with industry partners who speak at events

§ Maintain and update NZ IT Student site

§ Support Imagine Cup 2009 activities on your campus

§ Support Microsoft activities on your campus including Orientation, Dreamspark, MSDNAA

What is in it for you?

We can promise you that being part of the Microsoft Student Partner programme will be a very rewarding and valuable experience. Being recognized as a Microsoft Student Partner is an amazing accolade to add to your CV/Resume to help you succeed and get ahead in your future career. In addition, you will:

· Develop your personal and technological skills further and allow you to gain some real-world, professional experience

· Have the opportunities to connect and network with Microsoft employees, Microsoft Partners and other industry experts and make valuable contacts for the future.

· Receive cool Microsoft software, access into some of our industry events, and plug into programs that not only let you show off what you know but also increase your chances of getting a great job when you graduate.

Who are we looking for?

An enthusiastic individual who is passionate about information technology and is interested in establishing a fantastic relationship with Microsoft, representing their students and department in New Zealand. He/She must be currently enrolled FULL TIME in an IT/IS/IM/CS/Software Eng degree.

What to do next?

We’d love to hear from you. So send your cover letter & CV to nzedu@microsoft.com and we will be in touch with you. This is a fantastic opportunity for all IT students. Show us your passion for technology and dedication towards becoming a great professional developer! We have opened applications till the end of February 2009.

NOTE: Terms & Conditions Apply.

DO YOU WANT TO BE CONNECTED WITH MICROSOFT

nzacad — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 05:30:00 GMT

Microsoft Student Partners

THE NEW ZEALAND IT COMMUNITY

The best way to connect with the IT Industry

What do you do as a Student Partner?

§ Help drive events on campus where you liaise with industry partners who speak at events

§ Drive IT related events on campus

§ Support Imagine Cup 2009 activities on your campus

§ Support Microsoft activities on your campus including Orientation, Dreamspark, MSDNAA

What is in it for you?

· Develop your personal and technological skills further and allow you to gain some real-world, professional experience

· Have the opportunities to connect and network with Microsoft employees, Microsoft Partners and other industry experts and make valuable contacts for the future.

Who are we looking for?

What to do next?

Last Presentation Overview

nzacad — Wed, 28 May 2008 00:22:00 GMT

AUT University

Aakash Polra and Balan Venkatachala

Last Presentation Overview

We had Microsoft Student-Partners presentation here at AUT in the new WE230 lecture theatre. Thank you to all the enthusiastic students and staff members who came along and made the presentation a success.

As interest of students in programming seems to be decreasing gradually, the aim of our presentation was to show how “cool” applications you can develop using Microsoft .NET platform with just a basic knowledge of programming. We showed two technologies with one example application for each of them in details.

1) Talk back application with dynamic question/answer loading

It is surprising to see how easy it is to recognize user’s speech using Windows Vista’s speech recognition engine in .NET using the speech library.
We developed an application which recognizes what user is asking and then preparing answer for that question and actually speaking out the answer using .NET speech synthesizer.
Check out our live space http://msp-aut.spaces.live.com to get the complete source code.

2) Remote Control Computer

We turned off AUT’s computer from our mobile phone in the presentation followed by describing the architecture of such systems.
Students were amazed to see how easy it is to use Windows’ Interoperatability API and control Windows functionality from custom applications.

Plans for next semester

We are starting up .NET Students’ user group at AUT. All AUT students who are passionate about technology can join this group. The membership is free and all members will get great benefits like access to free tutorial classes of .NET programming and invitations to sessions by Professionals.

Please feel free to email us with your suggestions to make your “Student Partners Events” experience better at AUT – msp-aut@windowslive.com

Aakash & Balan
Aakash and Balan are the Microsoft Student Partners for AUT in Auckland.

Getting Started with Programming

nzacad — Tue, 27 May 2008 08:36:00 GMT

Getting started with choosing the right tools for Programming.

Ashwin Vasanth

One of the first steps people take, once they have chosen a programming language of choice, is choose an IDE or an Integrated Development Environment. People who delve in the .Net world have the advantage of being able to use the same IDE i.e. Microsoft Visual Studio irrespective of the programming language. You must have heard that Visual Studio supports the programming languages of C# (C sharp) and VB (Visual Basic). What most people do not know is that apart from the above mentioned two languages, Visual Studio supports a plethora of other programming languages like C#, VB.Net, Visual C++, HTML, XML and XAML. Visual Studio also supports, through extensions, PHP (VS.php), Ruby (IronRuby), Python (IronPython), J# and F# (Language Services). Support also exists for XSLT, xHTML, LINQ, CSS and JavaScript. For more information regarding such extensions Live Search them ;).

Visual Studio can be used to build both GUI and Console applications. The Windows Client and Server System, The Web, Windows Mobile, Microsoft Office System, the .Net Framework, the .Net Compact Framework and the new and exciting Silverlight platforms are all supported and can be targetted using Visual Studio. Whether you are planning on building a simple HTML page with your C.V. on it or if you were planning on world domination through the next best thing on the Interwebs or your version of TradeMe, then Visual Studio might just be the thing you need. You might not know this but TradeMe is an ASP.Net web application. XNA Game studio for building games whether be it for Windows or the XBOX 360 gaming platform is also supported.

Now that you have enough reason to pick up a copy of Visual Studio, lets make sure that you have the right version to get started. Unlike certain fruit named companies who think one size fits all, Visual Studio comes in a number of flavors each for a different audience of users.

First is the Express line which is free and is for people who just want to get their hands dirty with Visual Studio and .Net but cannot or do not want to pay for it. Then comes the Standard, the Professional and finally the Team System lines. The differences are quite a lot and require more than one blog post to cover it. If you want to know more about the different versions of Visual Studio and also a brief description about what version of the product would best suit the needs for your next project then check out the Visual Studio 2008 Product Comparison index on the following page:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/cc149003.aspx

You do know that the express line is free and can be downloaded from the Microsoft MSDN website. What you might not know about is that Visual Studio in its Standard and Professional flavors can be acquired for free if you are a tertiary student doing Computer Sciences and/or Information Sciences degree under a program called MSDN AA or MSDN Academic Alliance.Not only can you get Visual Studio for free but free legal licenses are also available for various other Microsoft products such as Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista Business, Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server and so on. None of that dodgy torrenting or high bandwidth solutions required.

What is that you say? You are a student at a University but currently are not enrolled in any IS or CS based degree. Fear not. Even you too can get Visual Studio and others for free. Keep an eye out for announcements regarding Project DreamSpark on your campus.

Microsoft Student Partners present on university campuses across the country will soon start talking about Project DreamSpark and will also be able to answer any questions you might have with regards to the existing MSDN AA program. For more information about the Student Partner(s) on your campus check out the list on the left for your campus.

And until next time look out for presentations on how to use Visual Studio for cool and amazing things coming to a campus near you.

About Ashwin
Ashwin is the Microsoft Student Partner for Massey University in Albany. Check out his blog http://binarymantra.com/blog/

Getting Started with Silveright 2 Beta 1 - Part 1

nzacad — Tue, 27 May 2008 00:53:00 GMT

Getting Started with Silverlight 2 beta 1 – Part 1

Chaks Chandran

Silverlight 2 beta 1 was made available along with the Visual Studio 2008 Tools for Silverlight and the Silverlight SDK at MIX’08. Silverlight 2 beta 1 ships with various user controls like Textbox, Button and also supports XAML and is tightly integrated with the .NET framework. This post will give the necessary information needed in order to start developing Silverlight applications.
Tools Required

In order to develop Silverlight 2.0 beta 1 applications, the following tools are required:

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
Silverlight 2.0 beta 1 Runtime
Silverlight 2.0 beta 1 SDK

Microsoft has released a unified installer which has the runtime and SDK and can be downloaded from here. Optionally the design engineers can also use the Expression Blend 2.5 Preview (please note that it is not Expression Blend 2, it’s the 2.5 Preview) to design Silverlight 2 applications.

Using Visual Studio 2008 to develop Silverlight Applications

The SDK provides the necessary tools needed to develop Silverlight applications using Visual Studio 2008. Once the SDK is installed, the Silverlight Visual Studio project templates are also installed accordingly. The Visual Studio New Project option now has Silverlight options:

The two available options are:

Silverlight Application

Used to develop normal Silverlight web applications;

Silverlight Class Library

Used to build a Silverlight library component which can be used in other websites or other Silverlight projects;

Choosing Silverlight Application will further give more options, such as:

We can either a build a web site where our Silverlight controls will be hosted or we could just generate a HTML Page to host the control. This post focuses on building Silverlight applications by generating a HTML test page and hosting the Silverlight control. Choosing the second option of generating an HTML page, Visual Studio would generate the necessary code and the files.

The Toolbox section now has a lot of new Silverlight controls.

And we also have the XAML Design and Code window.

Now, we are ready to design a small Silverlight Hello World program.
Here is the code that we have added:

Nothing fancy here. We have added a Stack Panel, an Image, a Button with a Click event, and a TextBlock. And the corresponding design looks like:

If you look at the design code, it looks very similar in building WPF applications, as both WPF and Silverlight now use XAML.
We can now insert the necessary code behind for the Button’s Click event to raise an Alert window. Note that we are building a browser window and thus we do not have the normal MessageBox, instead we have to use the Alert box.

Our Hello World Silverlight application is now ready to launch. Building and executing the application will open the application in a browser window:

The Silverlight 2 beta 1 Assemblies and Namespaces

Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in which is running on top of .Net framework. So what assemblies and namespaces does Silverlight use? The references tab in the Solution Explorer does show some of the familiar names:

Are they same assemblies that are used in normal WPF applications? – The answer is NO. This is a stripped down version of the BIG .Net framework. We can also call it as a mini .Net framework built especially for Silverlight.

Where do these assemblies reside? – These assemblies reside in the Silverlight installation folder. Traverse to the following location to view the full list of assemblies

%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Silverlight\2.0.30226.2\

These assemblies are provided by the Silverlight SDK.

How are Silverlight Applications executed?
Our whole project including the XAML and other sources are compiled into assemblies (.dlls). That’s the reason we see that every Silverlight project will always be an UserControl:

This assembly is then combined with the assemblies that our project uses and packaged into a .XAP (pronounced as ZAP) file. This XAP is then read by the Silverlight runtime in the browser and rendered accordingly. If we look into the Output while building our Silverlight project, we can see that it is indeed packaged into XAP file:

Traversing to the ClientBin folder in our project location, we can see the XAP file generated:

Let us do something interesting. As told earlier, the XAP file is nothing but an archive, in other words, a ZIP file. Copy the HelloWorld.xap to your favorite location and rename the extension .xap to .zip Now you can extract the contents from the archive and see what is inside.

What we see in the archive is the control assembly and the other assemblies that the control uses. Exploring the AppManifest file, we could see that it has a Deployment class which holds our control and other assemblies.

More about Deployment class and its’ members can be found here.
This is the end of Part 1 of building Silverlight applications with Visual Studio 2008. The next part would introduce some of the default Silverlight controls available with the SDK.
The sample application can be downloaded here:

HelloWorld-Sample

About Chakkaradeep

Chakkaradeep is the Microsoft Student Partner for University Of Otago. He writes two blogs: Chaks’ Corner and Chaks’ Geekzone Corner

Student Partner Massey Palmy

nzacad — Mon, 26 May 2008 12:37:00 GMT

Late Nights, Bloodshot Eyes and a Can of Red Bull...

Ashleigh Thompson

It’s something all of us can relate to – late nights, bloodshot eyes and a can of Red Bull. Over the past two weeks it’s becoming a familiar sight. The labs have seen an influx of numbers of the past few days as everyone makes the most of what little time is left before those impending deadlines finally sneak up on you. It’s not something that is unique to those of us studying CS/IT/IS. BUT, it seems that all too often people are left with the impression that those involved with CS/IT/IS degrees, and these professions spend long hours, stretching to late nights working on various aspects of the SDLC.

It’s been misconceptions like this that have discouraged people from becoming involved in this industry. For some reason this misconception is one that heavily sticks with our industry. What a lot of people fail to realise is the technology sector particularly seems to be working hard on ensuring that employees can achieve a suitable work-life balance. Many leading companies now make how they promote this work-life balance a big selling point to potential employees.

There are of course, those of us for whom these late night ‘coding sessions’ are self inflicted. Time management becomes an essential skill to learn to successfully navigate through rigid deadlines at university and at work. Luckily, today there is an abundance of tools available to help with this: Zoho Planner, Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook. The emergence of online technologies also means that we are no longer restricted to the ‘old pen and paper’, which doesn’t provide any help when you’re at work and it’s at home. Many of these technologies also facilitate the sharing of information between friends and colleagues. It’s definitely worth looking into getting yourself set up with some form of time management tool. You’ll soon realise how much more productive you can be when you are more accountable for your time.

In keeping with the theme of time management, and sharing information with others we’ve created a calendar which we will continually update with events and dates which are worth knowing about. Make sure you keep up to date with what’s going on at the Massey Palmy campus by checking out our calendar: Massey University Student Partner Calendar

XML: http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/cbn2orbs76gpnd64o36qmd12o0%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic

If you know of any events that you think others would be interested in, make sure you add them. It’s your calendar to!

So … for those of you at Massey Palmy, to relieve some pre-deadline stress and forgot about looming exams we’re having our final presentation for the semester this week!

UPCOMING EVENT: Microsoft Student Partner Presentation

Come along and join us! You can score some great giveaways!

UPCOMING EVENT: .NET User Group Meeting

When: Tuesday 3rd June - @ 6.00pm
Where: MUSAC
Speaker: Ivan Towlson, Senior Dev. Mindscape in Wellington

(P.S. Title thanks to inspiration from Tooks, who has a blog post with the same name)

Ashleigh is the Microsoft Student Partner for Massey University in Palmerston North

What Can I Do With My CS/IS/IT Degree

nzacad — Sun, 25 May 2008 13:35:00 GMT

What can I do with my CS/IS/IT degree?

David Carr

You may be beginning out your university experience, or, like myself, you may be nearing the end of your degree. Undoubtedly you’ve done quite a bit of coding over the years, in your spare time and for papers you’re studying, but the question in the back of your mind is there: “what can I do with my CS/IS/IT degree, skills and experience?” Perhaps you are considering further study, or what to go into research, but if you are like me, you’re thinking how will creating a linked-list, or a connect-four game, or a database application for recording book titles help me to get a job with a cool company, working on exciting projects, and earning the big dollars?

As I see it, there are a few options to consider when planning the roadmap to your career in IT.

You could work in IT for a corporate. In New Zealand, IT seems to split into specific functional tasks operating over different sections of the SDLC, including Business Analyst, Developer, Tester, and Support.

You have two options here, the first working with a tech company, who focus on IT products and services, examples spring to mind like Microsoft, Bravura,or SilverStripe. Perhaps if you are studying a conjoint or double-major, you might want to look into non-technical roles within an IT organisation – for example, IT skills are a huge help in marketing roles.

The other option is to work in IT for a non-IT company, such as any of the large banks or insurance companies, or large motor companies like Ford or BMW. Again this gives you the ability to work in an industry which really interests you, such as automotive, while building a career in IT.

In general, corporate companies can be well set up for training and on-the-job learning, and there’s nothing quite like getting a name-brand employer on your CV.

You also have the very exciting opportunity to work for yourself. New Zealand a great place to start a business, for so many reasons, each of these alone is worthy of its own blog post. Personally I have been very interested in this space, taking my spare time now-and-then building small websites and business tools (invoicing and pricing Excel workbooks, etc) for friends or business contacts, being paid increasingly more as my experience and skills develop, and I hone my business acumen. ‘Going it alone’ is an exciting path which often allows you to learn and grow faster than with a corporate, but on the converse, you are limited by your own motivation (or lack thereof!). If you still have a while to go at uni before you graduate, why not get coding, and get a web 2.0 app online. If you work hard on this before you graduate, you may have created yourself your ‘first job.’

Information Technology and more generally computers have an incredible crossover with business, which has only become more apparent to me as I have progressed though uni and the workplace. Working part-time in IT at an insurance company for the past two years, and I am frequently reminded of the way IT is so closely linked with the way a business generates its revenue, and how vital IT is in today’s businesses. This gives you, the up-and-coming IT professional, an excellent opportunity to help mould the successes and triumphs of New Zealand’s businesses, no matter which path you choose to follow in your IT career.

What about you, though? It would be great to hear your experience or views on what you plan to get up to post-graduation.

David is the Microsoft Student Partner for the University of Auckland, check out his blog here: http://www.davidcarr.co.nz

Intro To Web Frameworks

nzacad — Fri, 23 May 2008 02:56:00 GMT

Introduction to Web Frameworks

Jed Laundry

It's always been a recurring theme that developers love to code their own solutions, especially when it comes to websites like blogs etc. Using an existing package such as WordPress is so quick and easy, its almost uncool. Besides, when you write your own code, you can fully customise things to suit your needs. I've been down this path many times; I used to write everything from scratch, and by the end I had a stock template for designing a site. I really loved the fact that all of my pages would render start-to-finish in 0.0149s (without caching), not to mention that I could recycle code from just about anywhere. But writing your own sites has major disadvantages and setbacks; it takes a lot longer to get done, there's no explicit group of people to turn to if you come across problems, you have to start worrying about security, and unless you have a keen insight on architecture it can quickly get out of hand. This is where web frameworks can come in really handy.

In today's developer dreamland, there really is a large group of stable frameworks that can not only handle high-volume traffic, but make it incredibly easy for developers to write code without worrying about mundane details, such as security. A lot of these are open-source, and are supported by such a vast community that any problem you encounter can be solved quickly with a few well-crafted searches. Depending on requirements, you're (mostly) free to "Shut up and hack". knowing that at the end of the day you're not going to break the build. Not to mention, there's a decent framework for just about any programming language, so while some features are framework-dependant, most things you can do with python can be done with ASP.net, can be done with php, and can be done with Ruby.

Another big push towards frameworks has been the drive behind MVC (Model, View, Controller) archetectures. MVC, for those not in the know, is a really productive way to code, as it encourages code reuse and tries to keep your application segmented, making sure you've properly defined contracts between functions. It was originally developed in the 1980s for Smalltalk applications, however with the recent Web 2.0 uprising it became apparent that it applied quite nicely to web applications. Clean URLs is probably the best example of this; in a correctly implemented MVC archetecture, a URL will be comprised of www.your-domain.com/class/function/id, or some variant thereof depending on your requirements. For example; on my site, for each blog post I use /article/id/random-human-readable-text format.

So, there are already numerous frameworks out there, and as I said they are written for a myriad of languages. Django for phyton, CodeIgniter for php, DotNetNuke for ASP.net just to name a few. But if you're a fellow Microsoft student geek, you should definately have a look at the upcoming ASP.net MVC extensions. It's currently in preview stage of development, and the team is always looking for suggestions on what developers would like to see in a final release. I strongly suggest you to go have a look at it (http://www.asp.net/downloads/3.5-extensions/), have a play and see what you can come up with. It's not a production release, but I've yet to be able to break it. And, if you have suggestions, make your voice heard so that when it does hit release status, the features you need are in there. Heres an idea; make a blog application using ASP.net MVC, and blog about your experiences, and your feedback to the team!

About Jed

Jed is the Microsoft Student Partner for the University of Waikato. He is a second year BCMS student, works part-time as a developer for Alcatel-Lucent, and keeps a blog at http://www.jlaundry.com/

Step Up - Get Connected With the Industry

nzacad — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 13:35:00 GMT

Step Up - Get Connected With the Industry

Student Partner Program

Get connected with Microsoft and the IT industry, step up and become a Student Partner, a Microsoft Student Representative on Campus. We presently looking for Student Partners in both Otago University and Victoria University. If you are interested in building your network of contacts and getting ahead of the pack, this is your opportunity to become a Student Partner on your campus. Read more here