Required Verbage - students, educators, technology and Microsoft

Free Online Azure Training for UK Students

From our partner ICS - 

Windows Azure - countdown to launch – for Students

The 'Countdown to launch' webinars are highly interactive live 1 hour sessions focused on helping you get the most out of your limited free ‘Dip into Windows Azure’ trial. The webinars will cover:

• 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
  

Time is of the essence and spaces are limited. Participation in the Dip into Windows Azure Trial is available and free of charge until 17th November 2009 so reserve your place now.

Presented by Mark Hirst - Senior Developer at ICS Solutions.

Exchange 2010 Voice Mail Preview Fun

We’ve just been migrated to the latest version of Exchange. With the 2007 release, all my voice mail has been handled by Exchange – you get a handy little player embedded in the email window + the option to take notes.  It’s a genuinely brilliant productivity tool.

With the 2010 release, Exchange now creates a text preview of the message. And this is where the fun starts.  Apparently it works just fine with an American accent, but either I’m getting some very strange messages *or* it’s struggling with the British intonation.

My latest vm:

I will hundred so I'm calling flavor in skills fast I'm just a quick call and let you know I've.
Been talking to underwater shut down in personal our phone number projects info for is and thanks Anthony like thing might be quite keen for in terms of you mentioned call -- under such as quick cool just check would be interested in person so I'm not for thanks calling from some things in life and while and see whether it might be west and balkanize fy now I have a conversation with them.
00 yeah if you give me a call back on 700-7362 six trying I don't know I wouldn't phoenix we can check israelite side

Dare I listen?

Andy

UK Imagine Cup – Calling all problem solvers!

What is the Imagine Cup?

The imagine cup is the world’s premier technology competition for students.  In 2009, more than 300,000 students from 142 countries entered the competition making it a truly global event.

This is a chance for your students to really exercise what they have learnt in the classroom by putting it to use to solve real-world problems.

This year we are working with UK-based charities such as the Royal National Institute for the Blind, TearFund, and Leonard Cheshire Disability to produce broad project briefs for your students. This means that they’ll have the opportunity to address real issues which have an immediate impact on people’s day to day lives.

Why would my students be interested?

The Imagine Cup

· allows students to apply classroom learning in a practical situation, stretching their problem solving and technical skills

· is a great way to enhance a student’s CV, not only demonstrating their passion for technology but also demonstrating their grasp of current tools and technology

· is an opportunity to win great prizes! In addition to prizes for the winning UK teams, there is the opportunity to compete against teams from around the world at the worldwide finals in Poland.

What do I tell my students?

We’ve prepared an email for you to send to your students. This contains all the information they need to get started, as well as links to the website for registering. Please distribute this to your students to give them an opportunity to participate.

In addition, we have a presentation deck available for use in the lecture theatre.

Where can I find out more?

· UK Imagine Cup site: http://www.imaginecup.com/gb/sd.aspx

· UK Imagine Cup PowerPoint deck can be downloaded from here

· UK Project Briefs can be downloaded from here

Andy

Announcing the UK Student Azure Trial – hurry, hurry hurry!

I’m pleased to announce that we’ve launched a free Azure trial for UK students and developers (and academics of course) – can I encourage you all to encourage your students to sign up as quickly as possible? 

Let me know if you need a canned email to send out to the masses!

Of course, can I also encourage you all to have a quick look at the site as well?  It really simplifies the sign-up process, and we even deploy a sample application into your very own square foot of the cloud, just to get things started! 

www.azureadvantage.co.uk

Signup code – ADE02

Andy

Nice summary of modelling tools in Visual Studio 2010

Useful for the classroom – Soma describes UML tools in VSTS 2010

Already in available in MSDN AA (hat tip: @ericnel)

Innovative Teachers UK announce Songsmith availability

Great news for the classroom karaoke – the UK Innovative Teachers Network team have just announced that community members are now able to download Microsoft Research’s Songsmith at no cost, and are even suggesting how it could be used in teaching!

Link: http://blogs.msdn.com/teachers/archive/2009/09/10/happy-birthday-to-you-free-resources-for-teachers.aspx

Windows 7 RTM now in MSDN AA and ELMS!

I’m very excited to announce that Windows 7 RTM is now available for download in MSDNAA and ELMS!

The release for MSDNAA includes the following:

· Windows 7 (x86 and x64) Professional

· Windows 7 (x86 and x64) Enterprise (VL Edition for labs)

We have started the process of loading the Professional SKUs into MSDNAA (ELMS) and are tracking for a availability date of 8/13.

Enjoy!!

Ulster University presents XNAFest

From my colleagues in Ireland…

 WWW.XNAFEST.COM

• Are you teaching a gaming course in September-2009 in your college / University?
• Are you planning to teach XNA?
• Would you like course materials to teach XNA for a full semester?

The Microsoft XNA Academic Summit (XNAFEST 2009) will be held at the University of Ulster, Magee Campus on the 28th-29^th May 2009. The summit is for academics currently using or considering using XNA as part of a video games course and the event will provide practical advice, tutorials and demonstrations from educators and industrial experts in this area.

We have an International line up of speakers from United Kingdom, Italy, Belgium and Ireland speaking at the event. The speakers have a wealth of industry and educational experience using XNA which they will share over the 2 days. 2 of the key speakers are Diego Colombo (Italy) and Riemer Grootjans (Belgium).

Diego Colombo worked on the game engine for SBK and MotoGP titles in Milestone. He has always been attracted by game technology and worked on XNA first prototype in 2006. Back at University of Pisa he taught courses on game design and game engine programming while carrying his research on meta programming for dynamic generation of game components. Now he works in Microsoft Ireland Research.

Riemer Grootjans received his degree in electronic engineering with a specialization in informatics at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Brussels, Belgium. Riemer maintains a website with tutorials for DirectX and XNA. In July 2007, he received the Microsoft MVP Award for his contributions to XNA community. Currently employed by Optrima - Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Riemer is the author of the book XNA 3.0 Game Programming Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach.

To see the detailed schedule for the 2 day XNAFEST please visit http://www.xnafest or see the attached PDF...

If interested in attending please register at http://www.xnafest.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=17&Itemid=11 as places are filling up quickly and we have set a limitation at 100 academics for the XNAFEST.

PHP gets some Azure love…

Reposting at its best – this is wonderful: http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=2776

May 13th, 2009

Microsoft makes available PHP development kit for its Azure cloud

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 3:16 pm

Microsoft has taken the wraps off a new software development kit (SDK) for testers interested in building apps in PHP for the Azure cloud.

Microsoft made the announcement at TechEd India this week — a show running simultaneously with TechEd 2009 in Los Angeles.

Microsoft collaborated on the PHP SDK with RealDolmen. Microsoft provided the funding for the development of the SDK (like it is doing with a Java SDK for Azure being developed by Schakra).

The PHP SDK for Windows Azure, known as PHPAzure, is an open source project, available for download from Microsoft CodePlex. The SDK “provides consistent programming model for Windows Azure Storage (Blobs, Tables & Queues), according to the CodePlex site.

On Microsoft’s Port 25 blog, Open Source Community Program Manager Peter Galli said Microsoft also is annoucing “the launch of a series of projects that offer samples and a toolkit that enable PHP developers to include Silverlight controls, Microsoft Virtual Earth maps and IE Webslices and Accelerators in PHP web applications; as well as automatically generated a simple “Create, Read, Update, Delete (CRUD)” PHP application from a table in SQL Server.”

Today’s build of the PHP SDK is considered a Community Technology Preview.  Milestone 2 is due out in late July, and the final in late August of this year.

Couldn’t have tweeted it better myself

… and thanks to the ever insightful Rob Miles, I don’t have to:

“Perhaps I’m reading too much into the whole thing, but at the moment I kind of regard Twitter as the digital equivalent of standing on top of a bus and shouting things out. And we know what we think of people who do that kind of thing.”

He also reflects on something I’ve never been able to confess to the twitterazzi – how the heck do you find time to listen to, filter, digest and then (natch) retweet the noise of 100’s of people all shouting at the same time?  I must have that multi-tasking gene missing or something. Yet many of my work colleagues do it, and give the impression that this is something that can be done while pinning down a day-job, or in ones sleep. Hints please…

Right – must twitter that I’ve blogged about twitter.

(link: Rob’s musings)

ps – OK, so perhaps I’m not quite such a luddite with this – I certainly see a value for near-synchronous commentary on live events, and building ad-hoc communities with a short life-span. But I honestly don’t think I’ll ever have (or make) the time to filter out the drivel…

Spring is here – everybody Yodel!

From the “what date was it” department, we have a new Xbox game -

Alpine Legend. Rock on.

http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/a/alpinelegend/

Seriously. No really.

Glasses to match your Surface

One reason for the hiatus of this veritable organ, was BETT (click the link to untangle the acronym). Matt Fox, David Baines and myself spent the best part of a week running the Surface sideshow on the Microsoft stand.

Four footsore days saw over two thousand people catch our show. Hopefully none of them saw that it was repeating like a scratched record – the poor staff on the nearby stand heard my joke about twenty times a day. And surprisingly not one of them thanked me…

I was astounded by the number of people who wanted to buy a device at the show – they really are that good. Of course, when you have your Surface machine, what else could you possibly need?  How about matching glassware, the kind that surface can use to know *just* when you need a top-up. Check it out on YouTube!

Now – if we can get this to work in a wine glass, the local WAF will go through the roof… 

Teacher presentation resources

Earlier this week I was a guest of Bradford University (thanks chaps), and presented to local school teachers about how we need to excite students around ICT.

Core message was that kids of all ages are now demanding consumers of technology, and have accordingly demanding expectations when it comes to the classroom. And then we teach them to use MS Office (insert equivalent software here). Enthusiasm nose-dives, and they go and download more iPhone apps, rather than wondering how they can build their own.

So I demonstrated a bunch of MS goodies that we can use to encourage creative storytelling, exploration and downright fun amongst school students (as well as teaching them how to program!). Some you may know, some may be new – but they’re all freely available and linked below.

Photosynth	Deep Zoom Composer	Small Basic

WorldWide Telescope	Kodu

Andy

Apologies for the radio silence

… but things just went *bonkers*.

However, back now, and posting.

Whadaya mean – you didn’t notice?

Andy

Thinking about the Imagine Cup? Get yourself some time with a Microsoft expert!

My colleagues in Microsoft Learning are hosting two LiveMeeting sessions to clarify and guide prospective entrants to the Imagine Cup.  Has to be worth an hour of your time...

<snip>

Register for November 19 Software Design Live Session with Microsoft Experts

Join us for an interactive Live Session on Wednesday, November 19 (Thursday, November 20 in some regions)! In this hour-long, interactive session, Rogerio Panigassi will discuss the 2009 Software Design Invitational. This session will provide you with more information about the theme, timeline, worldwide requirements and learning resources featured in this year's competition. Rogerio Panigassi is a Senior Audience Marketing Manager at Microsoft and has been involved in Imagine Cup since the competition began in 2003. Rogerio became the Project Lead for Imagine Cup in July 2007.

Each Live Session is held twice, with the same material presented both times. Select the time below that is most convenient for you, and follow the directions to register with your Windows Live ID. Once you have registered, you will receive an email with information on how to download the free software you'll need to access Live Sessions. We recommend you download this software several hours in advance to avoid technical difficulties during the session.

Live Session times:

· November 19, 8am PST Live Session (What time is this in my region?)

· November 19, 8pm PST Live Session (What time is this in my region?)

Register for November 20 Embedded Development Live Session with Microsoft Experts

Join us for an interactive Live Session on Thursday, November 20 (Friday, November 21 in some regions)! In this hour-long, interactive session, Olivier Bloch will discuss Windows Embedded development. This session will provide you with a general overview of the Windows Embedded family, as well as demonstrate some in-market embedded devices and Windows CE tools. Olivier Bloch joined Microsoft in 2006 and is currently a Technical Evangelist for Microsoft in the Windows Embedded group. He discusses his development experiences and embedded technologies on his blog.

Each Live Session is held twice, with the same material presented both times. Select the time below that is most convenient for you, and follow the directions to register with your Windows Live ID. Once you have registered, you will receive an email with information on how to download the free software you'll need to access Live Sessions. We recommend you download this software several hours in advance to avoid technical difficulties during the session.

Live Session times:

· November 20, 8am PST Live Session (What time is this in my region?)

· November 20, 8pm PST Live Session (What time is this in my region?)

Andy