Me about things...

Imagine Cup 2010… Ready, set, go!

2009-10-16T10:58:11Z

Technorati Tags: ImagineCup

I am very glad to announce that we just launched the UK Imagine Cup 2010!

Last year I was (for the first time) closely involved with the 2009 edition and I was deeply impressed with the commitment that the students put into their solutions and proud for the results the UK team achieved (you can read more about those in my “A year in numbers” post if you are interested)!

One of the most common feedback we heard in the last few years is that students at times find it difficult to identify a problem to address for their entry and so this year for the Software Design competition we’re working with five charities to provide you with project briefs to use as a basis for your entry. These briefs have been designed to give you the opportunity to address real world issues which affect people around the world every day.

Of course you are not required to use one of these brief! If you have a great idea in line with the 2010 Imagine Cup theme “Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems” we would love to see it!

If you are interested in joining the Software Design competition then, entering the competition is really easy! All you need to do is write a brief on how you plan to solve the problem you identified using Microsoft technology! It’s that simple!

And the steps to do this are also very easy:

Go to the UK competition page
Download the briefs (if you want to use one of those)
Sign up for the competition
Form a team of up to 4 people
Download the Software Design template for Round 1
Fill it with a description of your idea
Send it to us by 11.59 p.m. on 16th December 2009

As you can see, we tried to make it as easy as possible for you to enter the competition! But as usual, if you have any questions about this, please get in touch!!!

Are you a UK student? Get Windows 7 and Office 2007 CHEAP!

2009-10-06T19:46:35Z

We just launched this great offer for UK students… You can buy Office Ultimate 2007 for £39.50 and Windows 7 Home Premium or Professional for £30.00.

All you need is to have a valid “.ac.uk” email address (as those provided by most UK Universities and Colleges), so not just Computer Science students but pretty much everyone! I think this is quite cool and a great back-to-school surprise! :)

All you need to do is go to http://www.microsoft.com/uk/education/studentoffer and answer a simple question… Are you a UK student? :)

This offer is also available in other countries, so check your local Microsoft website for more information… the US offer is available on the quite cool http://www.win741.com/ website.

And if you study or are interested in software development or websites design, I would also recommend you go to http://www.dreamspark.com where you will be able to download most of our Developer tools and platforms at NO COST!!!!!

UPDATE: As @poetofzwan made me notice on Twitter, of course if your department at Uni has a MSDN-AA subscription, you can get Windows 7 for free. To find out if that is the case, I would recommend you ask your department and especially see if they provide self-service access using ELMS!!!

Technorati Tags: Windows 7,Dreamspark,Microsoft,Office

Introducing the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0

2009-09-28T19:14:42Z

One of the most common issues that people approaching Web Development with Microsoft products complain about is how difficult it can be to set up all the software they need. Getting a machine up to speed is kind of a hassle because you need to go and get IIS7, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition, SQL Server 2008 Express Edition and the .NET Framework. And you need to know where to go and get those, which is not always obvious!

We tried to address this and also provide a simple way to install all sorts of frameworks, languages and applications that can help you kick start your development. So the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (Web PI for the closest friends) was born.

Even better, last week we announced the release of version 2 of Web PI which adds even more goodness like, for example, PHP!! Right, you read it correctly, Web PI is the easiest way to install and configure PHP on a Windows machine!

So, what is it exactly? Web PI is basically an installer that when launched will take care of automatically installing all the components and pieces of software you need to start developing web sites. To get it, just go to http://www.microsoft.com/web and click on the Download button. Launch the little (about 2MB) installer and you will get a window like this from which you can select the various components you want to install:

Not only it will download, install and configure the platform components, you can also click the Web Applications tab and it will allow you to select popular open source applications like WordPress, Drupal, Gallery, Moodle and may more. They also will be downloaded, installed and configured!!! All in all, with a few clicks you are ready to go.

Of course depending on your bandwidth it may take more or less time to download all the bits necessary (potentially you may be installing 131 products and downloading up to 22GB of installers) but once you selected all you need, you can forget about it and it will do all the work for you!! Pretty handy!

So... I would suggest you go, download and give it a go. And if you want more software of course, go to http://www.dreamspark.com where you can find the FULL version of some of the tools Web PI would install (like Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition or SQL Server 2008 Developer Edition) and much more.

Happy coding!

A year in numbers

2009-09-02T18:54:45Z

As someone who works with Academics and students my year starts and ends in line with the Academic year (which is also more or less aligned with the Microsoft fiscal year but that is a different story).

So every year before term, we look back at what we have done “last year” and start thinking about what to do “next year”, so I thought I would share with you some of this.

We kicked off “in style” with the Student Technology Day. It was a full day of talks and demos that we run on October 1st at the Royal Festival Hall in London. More than 300 students joined us there to learn about some of the cool things we are working on in search and ranking in games. But the real highlights of the day were Steve Ballmer’s keynote and (at least if you ask me) my session on Future User Experience and the Microsoft Surface.

After such a great start we (meaning myself and my colleague Ed Dunhill) started travelling across the country for the Inspiration Tour a national series of technology talks for students where we showed some of our coolest technologies around design and games development.

In total we visited 35 Universities and met about 3,000 students in just more than three months. It was quite busy and tiring with all the travel up and down the country but I really enjoyed visiting so many places and meeting so many enthusiastic students!

Here is the list of all the Universities we visited:

One of the technologies that has generated (and keeps generating) a lot of interest in students and Universities is XNA (for those who don’t know it, it is a technology and a set of tools that allow games development on PCs, Xbox 360 and mobile devices such as the Zune). Last year for the first time we organised X48 a marathon gamecamp where students and indie developers use Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio 3.0 to create a game in less than 48 hours on the theme of Evolution.

It was a spectacular event were the students consumed tons of pizzas, Red Bulls, Coke and created a lot of code and some really cool games (which you can find listed here).

While doing all of this, we also run the 2009 Imagine Cup. The Imagine Cup the Imagine Cup is a global student technology competition focused on finding solutions to real-world issues.

The competition encourages the world's most talented software designers, programmers, game developers, and digital media enthusiasts to tackle, head on, issues related to: hunger relief, poverty, education, disease control, healthcare, the environment and other crucial problems facing our world today.

During the course of the year, we provide support, mentoring and advice to the competitors and it culminates with two main events: the UK final and the Worldwide Finals.

Last year we run the UK Finals at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, in an event we called Student Celebration Day, which was an event packed with interesting presentation by researchers at MSR and an award ceremony (you can see all the videos in Ed’s blog).

Eventually from the UK, 5 teams qualified for the worldwide finals:

Team TKCL (Kings College) won the UK Software Design category with their smart routing application Pioneer
Sanguine Labs (Bournemouth University) qualified for the finals in the Games Development category with their DEFILE of Eden
uUH (University of Hertfordshire) qualified for the finals in the Embedded Development category with their InterHome Energy-Efficient Intelligent House
Fulham Four (London Film Academy) qualified for the finals in the Short Film category
Abdul Rauf (University of Reading) qualified for the finals in the IT Challenge category

The experience of the finals in Cairo was simply fantastic!!! We had a great time with all the competitors presenting their projects but also enjoying visits in the best spots of the city (pyramids, the Sphynx, the Egyptian museum, the Saladin fort, etc).

At the end we also had an incredibly good result:

The Software Design (Team KCL) and the Embedded Development (uUH) teams both qualified for the second round and finished in the world’s top 12.

The Games Design team (Sanguine Labs) won the third prize

The Fulham Four team won the overall competition, which is an amazing achievement!!!

All in all was a really busy and successful year. Now we are busy finalising the details of what we’ll do this year.

We of course would welcome any feedback on what you would like to see from us so especially if you are a student or an academic in the UK, please get in touch!

Learning to program Windows 7 apps

2009-07-16T15:45:00Z

In the last couple of days, we made a number of announcements at the Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans. One of the most interesting things we released (and that all developers may want to take a look at) is the XP2Win7 project, which features PhotoView, a WPF application that runs on XP.

So… what is so cool about this? Well, if you run the same application on Windows 7, it will take full advantage of all the innovative features such as Taskbar, the Sensors and Location Platform, and Multitouch, as well as those introduced already in Windows Vista such as Application Recovery and Windows Search.

The objective that Tim Sneath and Jason Zander (who showed this app at the conference) wanted to achieve is to

“show developers how to take advantage of the new Windows 7 features while keeping backward compatibility with older windows versions. We also wanted to show a managed code application that uses a lot of the native API that are not present in the .NET Framework, and by doing so to lower the bar for.NET developers as they target Windows 7”

One thing I found actually quite cool is that

As a reference “educational” application, the application contains functionality that you do not normally find in regular applications, like a Crash button that will crash your application to demonstrate Windows 7 Restart Manager capabilities.

Really a nice touch :)

Other features used in the application are:

Windows Search
UAC
Scheduled Task
Windows 7 Taskbar Integration
Transactional File System
IO Optimization
Event Tracing for Windows (ETW)
Microsoft Management Console
Windows 7 Libraries
Windows 7 Sensor and Location Platform
PowerShell
Preview Handler
Aero Glass
Trigger Start Services

And by the way… did I mention we released the full source code??? Go download it here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/XP2Win7

bxp9tr2eni

The Microsoft UK Student Partner Programme

2009-07-16T15:07:22Z

As every year, applications for the Microsoft Student Partners programme in the UK are now open.

Being a Microsoft Student Partner is a great opportunity to get in touch and work with us and learn more about our technologies…

And with Silverlight 3, Expression 3, Visual Studio 2010, Windows 7, Office 2010 all just launched or about to launch, there is a LOT to learn!!!!

If you are interested to sign up we ask you to… video yourself. Exactly, we are not looking for a paper resume, references, etc… we want to see you, who you are. We want to feel your passion for technology!!!

So… if you are interested, record that video, publish it somewhere on the web (on YouTube, Vimeo, wherever you like) and email us a link at UKMSP@microsoft.com.

If you want to know more check out team blog or go to the worldwide Microsoft Student partner website.

Hope to see you soon!!!!

PS Hurry up because the deadline to submit the video is July 31st!!!

Interview with team KCL, winners of the UK Imagine Cup

2009-07-02T12:43:44Z

Some days ago I had an opportunity to have a chat with Christian and Iulian, the two members of the team KCL from Kings College in London who created a system called Pioneer which aims to reduce pollution in large cities by reducing traffic congestion.

You can find the video they submitted for the Imagine Cup final (and also vote for their entry if you like) here:

http://peopleschoice.imaginecup.com/default.aspx

I really like their work and their project, and wanted to publish some of the questions I asked them.

Q: What is the problem you’re solving and why did you choose it?

The problem we tackled is air pollution in large cities. As we are students living in London, we are directly confronted with this problem. This is why we saw how urgent it is.

Q: That sounds like a tough task, so how exactly did you solve it?

Well, first of all, we had to find out why big cities are so polluted. We found statistics from Greenpeace saying that more than 80% of urban pollution is caused by cars. And in particular, the pollution comes from traffic congestion.
Our solution aims to minimize traffic congestion through a central car routing system. By minimizing traffic congestion we could decrease air pollution significantly!

Q: That sounds interesting, so how exactly would such a routing system look like?

Basically, you have to think of it like a navigation system in your car. From a users perspective it looks the same way as other navigation systems look like. But on conventional navigation systems, routes are calculated on your small device, where our solution is based on a server that knows the position of all cars at any time. Based on that information, the server calculates your optimal route and sends it to your device.

Q: So, on the bottom line, the user will get a route that avoids heavy traffic and therefore he saves time, fuel and the environment?

That’s right, but that’s not everything: After we did first simulations, even we were surprised how efficient pioneer is, so we went even further by taking traffic lights into account. Pioneer is now a platform for the future city. It is able to switch traffic lights according to real time traffic data, which decreases congestion even more.

Q: That sounds brilliant, but can you give any numbers? For instance, by how much do you reduce traffic congestion?

Yes, we implemented a simulation module that gives some numbers. The average person drives the car 76 minutes every day. Our simulations show that with pioneer, everyone can save up to 10% of this time.

Q: And do you have any plans with pioneer for the future?

Oh yes, indeed we have big plans with pioneer. The next step is what we call the “Dynamic City”.

Q: What does that mean?

Let me explain it with an example: Imagine you are driving to work in the morning rush hour and you’re taking one of the major roads into the city centre. Your road has 5 lanes, two of them going into the city and 3 out of the city. Our system would change the direction of lanes according to the traffic needs. In this situation, it could would happen that the system automatically changes the road so that 4 lanes are going into the city. That would dramatically decrease congestion on that road.

Q: This is all good an well but… aren’t there already too many GPS navigation systems?

Absolutely. This is why our system is based on open APIs that 3rd party can use to leverage it. Companies like TomTom could tap into it to get routing information in real time and participate to reducing congestion.

Also, how many times did it happen to you to get in your car and not remembering the exact address you are going to, or not finding it on the map? The pioneer’s architecture allows to do some very nice things such as planning a route while sitting at your PC and send it to the mobile or GPS device making it easier to plan a trip without bad surprises.

Q: I know that planning routes taking in account real time traffic information is not a trivial problem.

Yes, and this is probably the biggest strength of our solution.

Conventional algorithms are far too slow for large numbers of queries on large graphs like the ones representing large cities.

Our solution have a pre-processing step which makes it efficient enough to serve hundreds of queries a second on even very large city graphs which allows us to make it possible to do real time routing so that we can include traffic data in the calculations.

The research paper describing the details of how this has been achieved will be published early next year.

Q: Wow, I think this idea has potential in the future. I wish you all the best and good luck! Before we close though, can you tell me how and why you decided to participate to the Imagine Cup?

We heard about the Imagine Cup last year and this year we decided to submit an entry because we though we had a good idea and a great technology. We also think it is a great opportunity for us to make a good experience on a real project which we could potentially turn in a real product and business. Last but not least we think it is a great opportunity for us to have something in our resume that will show our participation and commitment and that will surely be very interesting when we finish our studies and start looking for a job.

To learn more, go to the project website where the team will publish info about their work http://pioneer-routing.com/

A few Windows 7 RC tricks

2009-05-07T18:24:42Z

As many of you should already know, we recently released Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) for Technet, MSND, MSDN-AA first and for everybody else a bit later.

I installed it as soon as I could and have been playing around with it for a few days already and found a couple of things I thought I would share.

How to provide feedback

The Beta version of Windows 7 had a Send Feedback link in the title bar of every window and that is gone now. The reason why is because being an almost final version, we want to test the “real thing” and the link on the title bar is not intended to be there in the final release.

So what to do if you do want to provide feedback? Quite simple:

1. Click on the Start menu
2. type CMD and hit Enter (this will open a command window)
3. type “rundll32.exe FeedbackTool.dll,ShowWizard” and hit enter again

This will open the Send an Issue report screen that you can use to send your feedback:

You can also create a link on the desktop to point to the same:

Right click on the Desktop
Click New –> Shortcut
In the Type the location of the item enter “rundll32.exe FeedbackTool.dll,ShowWizard”, then click Next
Choose the name you prefer (I called it “Send Feedback”)
Click on Finish

Where are the nice backgrounds?

The release candidate shipped with a number of very cool backgrounds which are all available via the Control Panel\Appearance and Personalization\Personalization applet.

Some of them are common for all installations and some are “localised”. So if you are in the UK you will see a United Kingdom section on top of the standard ones:

Now, what if you want to access the files? Easy, just open a Windows Explorer window and go to one of the following folders:

C:\Windows\Web\Wallpaper

c:\windows\Globalization\MCT

(you need to type this address as the MCT folder itself is hidden and you cannot get there just browsing)

How can I create my own background slideshow?

One of the things I like most of Windows 7 is how easy it makes to customise your desktop and how it has a built in method of using a slideshow as desktop background.

But since I prefer to set up my own slideshow with some of my photos and some that were built in, how can I go about that?

Simple… create a folder somewhere (I did it in the picture folder) and call it something like “Desktop Backgrounds”. Put your own photos there (may be using also some of the built in ones discussed above).

Open the Control Panel\Appearance and Personalization\Personalization\Desktop Background applet (right click on the Desktop, click on Personalize, click on Desktop background).

In the Choose your Desktop Background window click on Browse, select your newly created folder and you are all set.

Really easy but a great effect!!!

PHP on Windows Training Kit

2009-05-03T12:28:05Z

We just launched a the PHP on Windows Training Kit that developers can use to learn how to build PHP applications using Windows, IIS 7 and SQL Server 2008 taking full advantage of the platform.

The guide includes demos and hands-on labs covering several aspects of the various capabilities that the Winodws platform allows PHP developers to use such as:

PHP & SQL Server Demos

Integrating SQL Server Geo-Spatial with PHP
SQL Server Reporting Services and PHP

PHP & SQL Server Hands On Labs

Introduction to Using SQL Server with PHP
Using Full Text Search over Office Documents in PHP

PHP on Windows Hands On Labs

IIS Access Control Features for PHP
Using IIS 7.0 Media Features in a PHP Application
Troubleshooting PHP
Migrating PHP Applications to IIS 7.0

So, if you are a PHP developer and want to learn more about what the Windows Plaform offers you, go ahead and download the kit.

New Deep Zoom Composer supports DeepZoomPix

2009-04-20T16:32:53Z

The DeepZoom team just released an updated version of DeepZoom Composer which now supports native upload of your composition to the really cool DeepZoomPix (I blogged about DeepZoomPix a few days ago when it was launched).

The previous version of Composer allowed you to upload to another service called “PhotoZoom” which has now been replaced by the more powerful DeepZoomPix (and actually if you already uploaded any composition to PhotoZoom, you will find that they will be available and working great in DeepZoomPix).

Just one note… to install the new version you *MUST* uninstall the previous one first!

One caveat if you are planning to use it though: Please do note that DeepZoomPix is just a technology demo. It is something that we are only planning on keeping until the end of the year (Dec 31st), and after that, we are not sure what will happen to the service. Please do not use this location as a permanent storage location for your photos.

You can always take a look at how it has been created looking at the developer resources page and you can go to Codeplex to download the underlying framework that powers it: Jellyfish (which as I stated in my previous post is Open Sourced)

DeepZoomPix: bringing together Silverlight and Azure

2009-04-16T14:00:55Z

Have you ever wondered how Silverlight could take advantage of the Azure platform?

Well, we just released DeepZoomPix a fantastic photo sharing site that takes advantage of both these technologies to provide a truly innovative way of sharing your photos.

It uses DeepZoom to compose your photos into compositions that are then presented to the visitors in a very interactive way. All the images are stored in the Windows Azure Services Platform, specifically Windows Azure Storage.

The result can be shared with friends either sending a link or embedding it into a blog or webpage, the only requirement is to have the Silverlight plug in installed.

Here is a sample I created using photo from a recent visit to a Zoo near London:

Full details on how the site has been built are also available on the site if you are interested and think about doing something similar… and the good news is that the source code of Jellyfish, the framework created by 2nd Factory and used to create this, is released under Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) on CodePlex!

Live Search and the April Fool’s Day

2009-04-01T17:32:59Z

Being April’s fool the Live Search team decided to join the party on their homepage. So if you go (quickly!!!) to the US version of Live Search clicking on the link below, you will find it has on the background the image of a “strange” animal:

http://www.live.com/?scope=web&mkt=en-US

It is a Jackalope and if you move the cursor on the Jackalope's nose you will see a little window describing it:

But the funniest part is the announcement hidden on the bottom left of the image:

Clicking on the link will take you to this page:

Of course… who else could it be?

Happy April Fool’s day!!!!

X48: Student games now available to download

2009-03-27T15:12:04Z

Last week at the University of Derby, we run X48, a marathon gamecamp where student and indie developers used Microsoft's XNA Game Studio 3.0 to create a game in less than 48 hours on the theme of Evolution.

Ed reported on the two days in this blog post and in a nutshell we had 80 students, more than 750 snacks, more than 550 drinks, 100,000 lines of code.

During the 2 days we and the students generated a lot of videos, photos and tweets which you can see here:

107 Videos and game demos http://vimeo.com/groups/x48
377 photos http://www.flickr.com/groups/1038141@N23/
A lot of tweets!!! http://search.twitter.com/search?q=x48

Most importantly, students were able to rise to the challenge and create fully functional games with XNA in less than 48 hours (more like 24 of actual development time). And they consumed a considerable amount of junk food and created a lot of code - http://www.daytum.com/x48

Now the games developed during the two days are available for download at the X48 website: http://www.x48gamecamp.com/games/

Go ahead, download a few, play them and let us know what you think!!!

Microsoft Surface: real design, development and use in education

2009-03-25T19:13:00Z

With all the buzz about Mix 09 last week, many may have missed that we just launched Microsoft Surface here in the UK.

Marc Holmes just posted a blog where he talks about the launch of Surface and the the media coverage that the event generated.

But the most interesting thing (for me at least) in the post is actually the video that has been shot at the Microsoft Technology Centre to document the process of designing and developing a very cool Surface application

Finguistic is a word-play application that the guys in the MTC put together with Research Machines and is designed to let kids build short sentences, spell words, etc by interacting with the Surface.

<\/param><\/embed><\/object><\/div>";" galleryimg="no" mce_src="http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/pblog/WindowsLiveWriter/9ecc3113b308_DB6C/videoda61461aa6c4.jpg">

This application (and a bunch of others) has then been used at the Churchend Primary School in Reading and we videoed the kids using it and the comments from some of the teachers… the result is simply amazing.

<\/param><\/embed><\/object><\/div>";" galleryimg="no" mce_src="http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/pblog/WindowsLiveWriter/9ecc3113b308_DB6C/videofd0dce5714b2.jpg">

I really think this is just the beginning of many applications we will see emerging using the cool technology and the innovative way it provides to interact with a PC.

If you are an academic in a UK University, College or design school and are interested in learning more about Surface and Surface development for your courses or research projects, please get in touch with me directly to have a chat about it.

Goblin XNA: A Platform for 3D Augmented and Virtual Reality Research and Education

2009-03-25T16:11:32Z

I just came across this project by the Columbia University Computer Graphics & User Interfaces Lab which I think is definitely worth looking at.

In their own words, Goblin XNA is a platform for research on 3D user interfaces, including mobile augmented reality and virtual reality, with an emphasis on games. It is written in C# and based on the Microsoft XNA platform.

One very cool project that have already been implemented with the platform are is the Goblin XNA AR Racing Game

It is an augmented reality mod of the XNA Racing Game Starter Kit.

It is the first game being created using Goblin XNA, and demonstrates the use of fiducial tracking, 2.5D and 3D widgets, and assorted 3D user interface techniques

The project has been supported by Microsoft Research and its source code can be downloaded from CodePlex.

This is a very interesting use of a technology that has been created to create games and is being used to do some very serious research.