UK Academic Team Blog : Software design

Imagine Cup Registrations

ukacademia — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 14:44:17 GMT

Hello Everyone,

Interest for the Imagine Cup has been strong and we can confirm the various categories are now open for competition. From experience we know that the next couple of months will be key in getting great UK representation in the Imagine Cup.

Here are just a few of the reasons for encouraging your students to compete:

- PR: The Imagine Cup attracts the attention of both regional and national newspapers, together with technology and education press and news websites such as the BBC. Having students from your university compete in the Imagine Cup is great for raising the profile of your university in two important ways. Firstly it demonstrates the quality of your graduates to IT employers and makes them more attractive as employees (e.g. Dominic Green, UK winner of the 2008 competition) and secondly, it attracts new students to your university.

- Skills Development: Fundamentally the Imagine Cup is about helping students get real world experience with Microsoft technology. The skills learned during the various competitions compliment their studies and are invaluable when students apply for jobs with IT companies.

- Students Inspiration: With every technology interest area catered for, the competition is a great way to channel students’ passion for technology out of class.

We want as many UK institutions and students to get involved with the Imagine Cup as possible, and to help you participate we provide:

- Giveaways for students: Every week we give away web cams and Starbucks vouchers. We also hold a monthly draw for a Dell laptop, providing everything a student needs to see them through their studies and the Imagine Cup competition.

- Donation of an Xbox 360 gaming lab kit for your university: The university with the most registrations will receive 4 Xbox 360s, 8 wired controllers and an assortment of the latest Xbox 360 titles. You are free to use them for XNA development or as a social/recreation area for students.

If you would like to receive regular updates on the registration numbers from your university then please let me know and I will happily send them to you. You can contact me by telephone (0118 909 3409) or if you prefer by email (mailto:ukacinfo@microsoft.com).

And just to give you an idea of how we are doing so far, here are the top fifteen universities with the highest number of registrations:

University	Registrations
Brighton	89
Birmingham City	38
Cumbria	38
Bradford	37
Reading	35
Robert Gordon	35
Derby	31
Nottingham	24
De Montfort	23
Keele	23
Cambridge	20
Hull	20
Imperial College	20
Brunel	18
RHUL	20

If you would like to know more, them please email or telephone me. I’ll look forward to hearing from you.

Good luck,

Allison

Student Technology Day - Future User Experience Technologies

ukacademia — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 18:02:22 GMT

Hello All,

Filmed at the Royal Festival on 1st October, please find below the session by Paolo Barone on Microsoft Surface:

If for any reason you cannot view this clip, please do let me know.

Best wishes,

Allison

ITA Student Pass

ukacademia — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:00:27 GMT

Hello,

I’d like to tell you a little about the ITA Student Pass which gives students access to a large number of e-learning courses free of charge. The e-learning materials will provide your students with access to training on real-world technology and industry-recognised certification.

You might even envisage an opportunity to incorporate some of the e-learning into the curriculum for new courses or simply to replace existing materials.

If you would like your students to have access to Microsoft e-learning materials I can supply, upon request, a series of unique codes for you to distribute to them.

To see a demonstration of what e-learning has to offer please click demo.

For the codes themselves, please email i-allmc@micrsoft.com with a subject header of ITA Student Pass.

With Best wishes,

Allison

MSDN: What’s New in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1?

ukacademia — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 17:32:02 GMT

Hello,

I want to invite you along to a free half day event taking place in Exeter on 23rd October 2008 and which was created with developers in mind.

Technical experts from the UK MSDN team will deliver a range of demos and provide insight into the latest enhancements across many areas of the .Net Framework. This is your opportunity to broaden your knowledge base and stay ahead of these latest developments.

If you think this is something you’d like to attend, you can find out more or register by clicking here.

In the meantime, have a lovely weekend.

Allison

Microsoft Certification for Windows Embedded CE 6.0

ukacademia — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 12:28:20 GMT

Hello All,

I know that many of you are considering incorporating the Microsoft Certification Program into your curricula so that graduating students supplement their degrees with an industry recognised certification.

With this in mind I thought you might like to know about the the free Preparation Kit for the Windows Embedded CE 6.0 Exam 70-571 together with the 50% off voucher which you can redeem against the examination until 5th January 2009.

If you’d like to learn more, please click here.

And good luck!

Best,

Allison

remix UK – a 48 hour conversation

ukacademia — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:51:25 GMT

Hi Everyone

If you have been wondering 'where next for the web?' this event might just be for you and there is an early bird saving for the first three hundred people to book. Click here to reserve a place.

And if you have any ideas for a topic you would like to see presented at remix UK and have a good idea of just who you’d like to present it, there is a chance you can get it added to the mash up.

Best for the weekend,

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

Imagine Cup - Software design deadline extension, new mentor service and extra prize

ukacademia — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 14:57:00 GMT

Students competing in the Software Design category of the Imagine Cup will be delighted to learn that the deadline has been pushed back to January 9th. This gives everyone chance to work on their submissions over the Christmas holidays.

We realise that it is in the last stages that students need the most assistance and so to take the pressure of you, their lecturers, we have a team of impartial techies on standby ready to provide a free mentoring service. Please have your students get in touch so that we can link them up.

In addition we have added an extra bonus prize for the 15 teams that make it through to the next stage: free professional training from innerworkings on a .NET developer interface that integrates directly with Visual Studio.

Claire