UK Academic Team Blog : .NET

The Future of .NET Languages

ukacademia — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 17:14:32 GMT

Hello,

Following on from the article on Microsoft Azure Services Platform, I thought I’d also point you in the direction of a further independent article, this time on The Future of .Net Languages and written by Damon Armstrong. Based in Texas, Damon is a senior architect with Cogent Company and is author of 'Pro ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming'. He specializes in Microsoft technologies with a focus on Web application design using ASP.NET.

The article begins …

At this year's Professional Developers Conference (PDC 2008), Microsoft® was quite forthcoming with specifics about the future for developers on the Microsoft .NET® platform. In this article, we will take a quick look at some of the upcoming features in the .NET 4.0 Framework, the new Microsoft F#® language, and discuss the long-term vision Microsoft has for the .NET Platform in the years to come.

To read further, please click .Net

As always, if you have further questions regarding this article or .Net. please do get in touch by emailing unacinfo@microsoft.com.

Best,

Allison

Microsoft Azure Services Platform: Opening Up Cloud Computing

ukacademia — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 16:46:37 GMT

Hello,

I thought I’d tell you about an independent article on Microsoft Azure Services Platform, written by David Jacobs of The Jacobs Group. David has over twenty years of computer and networking industry experience. He has managed leading-edge software development projects and consulted to Fortune 500 companies as well as software start-ups.

The article begins…

IT departments have long faced the problem of planning for and providing sufficient processing, storage, and network bandwidth to meet the needs of the busiest times on the calendar. Application developers have distributed processing between workstations and servers within a single enterprise but crossing enterprise boundaries has proven more difficult. End users have struggled to remember a different login ID for each service they use.

Microsoft® Azure™ Services Platform addresses these issues by moving computing "into the cloud." With the Azure Services Platform, processing and storage moves from individual corporate servers and websites to large Microsoft data centres.

With cloud computing, corporate processing, storage, and network capacity no longer must be scaled to meet the highest expected level of demand. Microsoft's data centres contain processing and storage resources sufficient to meet maximum levels of demand.

Cloud-based applications and storage make it easier to share data. Enterprises can make applications available to partners without requiring users to remember different login credentials for the services each partner provides. Because all partners access the same cloud resident data, changes made by one application are automatically available to all.

While applications that execute in the cloud must be designed for the Windows environment, non-Windows based applications can access services on the Azure Services Platform using industry standards. Applications communicate with the cloud using HTTP and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), while services and data are identified and accessed using URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers). Developers administer services on the Azure Services Platform via a browser-accessible portal.

To read more please click Azure.

As always, if you would like to discuss this article or obtain further information, please do not hesitate to contact me on ukacinfo@microsoft.com.

Best,

Allison

Mix it up!

ukacademia — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 23:29:00 GMT

Hi! I'm Alfred Biehler, working with Microsoft UK alongside Claire in Microsoft's Developer platform group. My focus is on all our UK developers, and I've been given the opportunity to attend the MIX conference at Las Vegas. My expectations of the event was high, and I'm not disappointed!

For starters: You can join in this amazing event by going to http://www.visitmix.com. You can see the sessions on http://sessions.visitmix.com, and/or you can even attend a UK re-run later this year in the UK... more details to come.

Let me briefly share with you the biggest wow moments for me during the first keynote, that just finished:

IE 8 beta is available for download now. (This beta is intended for developers). Amongst the new capabilities shown in IE8, was the ability for web apps to detect and act on losing a network connection, and a back button that really goes back - even on AJAX pages!
SQL Server as a service has been announced. This is huge! I've been talking about this since the end of 1999, and it's fantastic to see this now becoming available. This would allow developers to build applications that draw data from "the cloud", without the need to manage and run the database yourself.
Silverlight 2 beta 1 has been announced, with awesome demos, including how we'll experience the Olympics in a few weeks, how HardRock Cafe has a memorabilia site utilizing DeepZoom (seeing a 2bn pixel photo, zooming into any area very quickly), Aston Martin's virtual showroom experience and more.
I really enjoyed seeing also some of Microsoft's partners (that also competes with us) on stage, e.g. AOL email using Silverlight, and DoubleClick (Google) for building Silverlight Adverts.
And lastly - we saw demos of how Silverlight apps just worked on Nokia phones after the agreement that has been reached yesterday with Nokia to support Silverlight on their phones.

One statistic that blew me away, was that we're getting about 1.5 million downloads and installs of Silverlight per day.

If you do have a moment - go and have a look at the sessions @ Mix online!

Alfred

Robotics and .NET Fundamentals webcasts

ukacademia — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 18:41:33 GMT

Dan Waters has posted a series of introduction level webcasts on his blog. The content includes:

Introduction
Getting Started
- Setting up the Create
- Serial port communication in VC# Express
- Teaching the robot to sing
More on serial port stuff
- Setting up and utilizing Bluetooth
- Driving the robot in a square
Intro to VPL and MS Robotics Studio
- Learning how to drive the robot via a dialog box
- See how you can use VPL to create a program without writing any code whatsoever
Introducing Autonomous Behavior
- Using the iRobot Create's sensors and a flow diagram to back up when an obstacle is encountered
- Conclusion to the series

and you can access it here.

Claire

Tales from the Inspiration Tour

ukacademia — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 17:52:00 GMT

The Inspiration Tour is underway and our presenters Ed Dunhill and Ben Coley have so far presented at Manchester Metropolitan University and Staffordshire University. Check out their blogs to read comments from the students and to access links to some great accompanying resources.

Next they are off to Bradford, Hull, Essex and Aberystwyth, oh and stopping by Nottingham to help with GameCity. Those of you who have already booked a date should now have an email from me with the electronic version of the flyer and in the next few days you should receive a poster tube with some hard copies too.

Don't forget to let me know how many students will be at your session so that I can send you enough t-shirts and other items to give out. One smart university set up a simple registration system so that they would know when the event was sold out and conversely, if more marketing needed to be done.

If you have any questions about the tour or still haven't booked your slot yet then please email me i-claipe@microsoft.com. You can check date availability here

Claire

Technorati Tags: Inspiration Tour, Students

Inspiration Tour

ukacademia — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 16:28:00 GMT

We’re very excited in the Academic team, we’re just about to launch the “Inspiration Tour” and we can’t wait to go out and meet you all.

Ed Dunhill

Ed and Ben will be out on the road during the next six months, so why not take a look at our Inspiration Tour web page to find out more and beat the rush to reserve your tour date now!

Ben Coley

The aim of the inspiration tour is to bring technology to you and your students, everything from the . NET platform to some of the really cool stuff that’s around at the moment like Silverlight, XNA and Microsoft Embedded technologies.

Spaces will fill up fast so please email us if you are interested in securing a date.

New book for your summer reading list

ukacademia — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 13:00:00 GMT

Those of you who teach Embedded programming, including those of you involved in our Embedded Pilot Group, should treat your bookshelves to a copy of Embedded Programming with the MIcrosoft .NET Microframework. This useful tome by Donald Thompson (Microsoft Research) and Rob S. MIles (University of Hull) is your essential guide to developing for next generation embedded devices.

Find it here

Microsoft Press ISBN13 -978-0-7356-2365-1 ISBN10- 0-7356-2365-1

Happy Reading

Claire

Summer reading

ukacademia — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 13:11:00 GMT

It may be July and raining but hopefully the sun will soon appear and we can all head to the beach with a good book. Make sure you pack some sun-cream and at least one of the following. Happy holidays!

Mobile Development

Microsoft® Mobile Development Handbook

by Andy Wigley; Daniel Moth; Peter Foot,

Publisher: MS Press

ISBN-10 0-7356-2358-9

ISBN-13 9780735623583

WPF

Applications = Code + Markup

by Charles Petzold,

Publisher: MS Press

ISBN-10 0-7356-1957-3

ISBN-13 9780735619579

Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed (WPF)

by Adam Nathan,

Publisher: Sams

ISBN-10: 0-672-32891-7;

ISBN-13: 9780672328916

Silverlight

Silverlight 1.0 (Due October 2007)

by Devin Rader, Jason Beres, J. Ambrose Little, Grant Hinkson

Publisher: Wrox

ISBN-10 0470228407

ISBN-13 978-0470228401

XNA

Professional XNA Game Programming: For Xbox 360 and Windows

by Benjamin Nitschke,

Wiley

ISBN: 9780470126776

Expert One-on-One XNA Game Programming : For Xbox 360 and Windows

by S. Boyd,

Publisher: Wiley (due in Aug)

ISBN: 9780470149485

AJAX

Introducing Microsoft® ASP.NET AJAX

by Dino Esposito,

Publisher: MS Press

ISBN-10 0-7356-2413-5

ISBN-13 9780735624139

WCF

Microsoft® Windows® Communication Foundation Step by Step

by John Sharp,

Publisher: MS Press

ISBN-10 0-7356-2336-8

ISBN-13 9780735623361

General .NET introduction

Understanding .NET, 2/E

by David Chappell,

Publisher: Addison-Wesley and Benjamin Cummings

ISBN-10: 0321194047

ISBN-13: 9780321194046

Programming for .NET in C# (C# for Java Developers)

By Allen Jones, Adam Freeman

Publisher: MS Press

ISBN-13 9780735617797

ISBN-10 0-7356-1779-1

Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Step by Step

By John Sharp

Publisher: MS Press

ISBN-10 0735621292

ISBN-13 978-0735621299

ASP.NET

Programming Microsoft® ASP.NET

By Dino Esposito

Publisher: MS Press

ISBN 9780735619036

ISBN-10 0-7356-1903-4

ADO.NET

Microsoft® ADO.NET

By David Sceppa

Publisher: MS Press

ISBN 9780735614239

ISBN-10 0-7356-1423-7

The MSDN team are touring - want them to come and see you?

ukacademia — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 14:53:51 GMT

This is an interesting one. Normally, our launch events are large and occur at only a few venues (typically Edinburgh, Harrogate, Birmingham, London and occasionally Bristol).

However, the Vista Developer Launch is going to be rather different. After the launch event in Reading, the team are hitting the road and looking to run a series of small presentations across the country.

Of course, they'll need a roof over their head, and an audience.

And this is where the Universities come in - would you like to play host to some of our best technical presenters?

If so, have a look at this. Logistics will finally dictate which locations we can visit, but this could be a great opportunitiy to draw in local business and also amuse your students...

Andy