On 1st of October at the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank, London we hosted an awesome event with Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO) keynoting and a host of other top speakers flanking him.

We've now got all the sessions online so if you couldn't make the event you can find out what you missed and best of all the videos are delivered using Silverlight.

All of the other sessions can be found here.

Yesterday saw the first of this academic years Inspiration Tour events at Bradford University.

This year we're running two sessions; one focusing onrich application development using Silverlight/WPF and the other on XNA games development. The content is designed to introduce these technologies and give an insight into their commercial application (with lots of cool demos along the way).

We have a really busy schedule over the next couple of months, with the below dates already booked up. However if your university isn't on the list and you want us to come and see you then drop me a line and we'll try and squeeze you in.

• Blackpool and the Fylde - 14/10/2008
• Hertfordshire - 15/10/2008
• Liverpool Hope University - 16/10/2008
• UEL - 21/10/2008
• Sunderland - 22/10/2008
• De Montfort - 28/10/2008
• Reading - 29/10/2008
• Glyndŵr University - 04/11/2008
• Aberystwyhth - 05/11/2008
• Aston - 11/11/2008
• Edge Hill - 12/11/2008
• Canterbury - 13/11/2008
• University of West Scotland - 17/11/2008
• Glasgow Caladonian - 18/11/2008
• Abertay - 19/11/2008
• Edinburgh Napier - 20/11/2008
• Robert Gordon University - 21/11/2008
• Brighton - 25/11/2008
• Staffs - 26/11/2008
• Huddersfield - 03/12/2008
• Greenwich - 09/12/2008
• Teesside - 10/12/2008
• Birmingham - 21/01/2009
• Westminster - 21/01/2009

Ever fancied getting some more letters after you name and improving your job prospects when you leave uni? Then Microsoft certification is for you!

We're making a whole bunch of official eLearning content available to students for free through the IT Academy Student Pass programme. These courses will give you everything you need to learn to take a MCP exams and get ready for industry!

To sign up you need a unique code to authenticate yourself as a student, if you want one click here to email me. Once you've got your code you can register here.

For all the details check out the official website.

I've done a few events recently and showed off a new Microsoft technology called DeepZoom which is powered by Silverlight. DeepZoom allows you to publish incredibly hi-res images online (potentially we're talking terrabytes) allowing users to access them without first having to download the entire image. It does this by creating multiple versions of the image at different resolutions with the hi-res versions chunked up into small bits. When the user first accesses the image they are presented with a low res zoomed out version but as they zoom in and navigate the image only the relevant hi-res chunks are downloaded thus saving bandwidth.

That might all sound fairly complex but the experience it creates is incredibly intuitive, take a look at the Hardrock Memorabilia Site (if you want to be impressed press 'v' and then zoom out!).

The really neat thing about DeepZooms is that they are pretty easy to put together using the free DeepZoom Composer. I've been promising a video showing how to use the composer for a little while now so here it is:

 NB: You need .NET 3.5 for the Composer to work

(For some reason its not clear in the video how I stitch the photos - Simply select the photos to stitch, right click and select 'Create panoramic photo...')

In the above example I use another cool feature in the Composer which will automatically stitch together multiple lo(wer)-res images to make a single hi-res image for your DeepZoom. If you want to try it for yourself with my images they can be downloaded here.

From today Photosynth is publicly available so you can not only view others 'synths' but create and upload your own using the free Photosynth tools.

Photosynth is a new technology which allows you to stitch a collection of digital photos of a location or object into a 3D, 360 degree experience.

Each synth is created by detecting overlap/similarities in 3-300 photos and then stitching them all together to form a 3D recreation of the subject.

Photosynth is based on Seadragon technology, to find out more and download the tools visit photosynth.net

Part of the prize for winning the UK finals of the Software Design competition of the Imagine Cup was a trip to our head office in Redmond to work with the Popfly team. Dom and Ben flew out on Sunday night and from the video Ben's just posted on his blog it looks like they're having a good time already.

If you're interested in finding out more about how product teams inside Microsoft work then it's well worth keeping an eye on the guys blogs (above) over the next week or so.

The XNA team just announced a new mini game called Movipa. Its basically a jigsaw game where you have to reorder the pieces to make the image complete the cool thing is it uses animations rather than static images.

The game is available for free and ready to compile but as with all creators club content you can use the source in your own creations!

You can find this game along with a whole bunch of code complete examples in the content catalog and other full games in the starter kit section of the site.

You've probably all heard something in the IT press about Live Mesh over the last couple of months well now you have a chance to go try the tech preview yourselves! Sign up is now open to UK users and if you already have a Live ID then all you need to do is go to mesh.com and log in.

To find out more about the tech preview take a look at the official site and the team blog.

Before you get too excited it is worth noting that currently the tech preview only includes access to the end user application, things will get really interesting when the SDK is released for developers. To find out more about the developer technologies and get on the waiting list for the SDK tech preview check out this page.

Over the last couple of weeks there have been some exciting announcements trickling out through the official XNA blog...

Firstly the release of Schizoid the first game built using XNA to be published on Xbox LIVE Arcade - from the official site:

"Cooperative gameplay is redefined in the fast-paced and unique Schizoid! Control red and blue ships, ramming them into enemies of the same color to destroy them. But be careful, because if you hit the opposite color, you will be destroyed. Quick thinking and quicker reflexes help you seize victory, but sharp teamwork provides the best chance of earning gold medals along the way. Schizoid offers more than 120 levels of challenge, playable in either single-player or co-op mode, plus the brain-melting Uberschizoid hardcore mode, in which one player controls both ships!"

Secondly more details have been provided on the Xbox LIVE Community Games publishing platform, basically there are 3 steps to getting your game online - 1) Build your game using XNA Game Studio 2) Submit your game for peer review and set a price 3) Sit back as other users play your game and you collect up to 70% of the revenue! More details on the XNA Blog here.

Thirdly XNA Team have put together a series of interviews with various people from the XNA community; Torpex games (creators of Schizoid), Albert Ho (Group Program Manager on the XNA Community team) and a profile of Mother Gaia Studio from Brazil (winners of Games Dev category of the Imagine Cup).

This afternoon we had the prizegiving for the Imagine cup '08 in Paris where next year's venue and theme were announced.

Next year we will be hosting the competition in Egypt and the theme will be anything that addresses one or more of the UN Millennium Development Goals (opposite). Hopefully the theme will give everybody more creative freedom in next years competitions. The website has been updated with all the details and it's well worth checking out Channel 8 to see what went on at this years competition.

Now we're all off to the farewell party then we're getting the Eurostar back to the UK tomorrow morning and its back to business as usual...

Both our Software Design and Embedded development teams put in a sterling effort but unfortunately neither progressed to the final. At least we can take consolation in the quality of the entries that did progress, the quality of work produced by our international peers is outstanding.

The format of the photography competition is slightly different and we won't know how Jason our competitor from the UK did until this afternoon when all the winners are announced. His photo essay looked fantastic so I think we're in with a real chance.

Tom Randell the mentor of our SD team Resolve Evolve Solve kindly videoed their presentation and it is now up on Soapbox so if you want to see their project look no further!

Video: EnviroMatch Presentation

Over the past couple of weeks our UK finalist teams have been spending every waking hour preparing for the Imagine Cup final where they'll be tested to their limits and ultimately have the opportunity to win the worlds largest and most prestigious student technology competition.

This year the Imagine Cup's theme is focused on maintaining a sustainable environment, to find out more about what Microsoft's commitment to the environment take a look at http://www.microsoft.com/environment.

I've been working closely with the teams (hence the lack of activity on my blog - sorry) to ensure they are at the top of their game and can stand up to the judges scrutiny.

We arrived in Paris by Eurostar yesterday morning (5am start for me as I traveled form Bath) and had the pleasure of opening the weeks competition with a welcome reception at Paris Town Hall.

 

We have teams in Software Design (Ben Nunney and Dominic Green), Embedded Development and Photography. Today is round one of the final which means that from 2pm all the teams will be presenting and ultimately only 12 teams will progress to the next round. I have the pleasure of sitting in one some of the Software Design presentations so will get to see what the rest of the world have to offer.

We should know if our SD/ED teams have progressed to Round Two by tonight so look for an update later on :)

In the meantime check out Joe Wilson's video blog from the competition on C8.

This is a great opportunity for any budding film makers out there...

All you need to do is use information from this page to write a script, film a creative video and submit it online and you could be jetting off to Macau!

To find out more and check out the T&Cs visit bringitalltogether.asia

Thanks to Paolo for spotting this.

In this the last in a series of five articles on Microsoft Web Development we look at creating an input block to allow your web service to be used in Popfly.

Building our block

For the purpose of this tutorial we will implement a block that will take XML data (in the form of an RSS feed), process and display that data. This will demonstrate the principles of building an input block in Popfly using JavaScript. In this tutorial we will build out put functionality into our block so we can display our data formatted with html, it is very easy to tweak the output so it can be transformed and displayed using further blocks.

Firstly, head over to http://www.popfly.com and login with your Windows Live ID. Then using the toolbar at the top, select Create Stuff > Block. Now we can start building our data input block...

When you first view the ‘create block’ screen, you’ll see a bunch of XML – this is the definition of the block so that you can provide customisation through Popfly’s user interface. Seeing as we’re creating an RSS-reader block, we’ll call ours “RSSFeed”.

1. Where it says class=“HelloWorldClass”, change it to read class=“RSSFeed”.

2. You’ll notice below there is a group tagged ‘operations’. This is where you can build different behaviours for your block to have. For this block, we’ll implement one operation: getItems. This will simply return all the titles from our RSS feed.

3. Rename the default operation from “hello” to “getItems”.

4. Inside the description tags, change the description, to something such as “Gets the titles from the RSS feed.”

5. Above the <outputs> group of tags, create another group called inputs.

6. Create an input tag with the name=“url”, required=“true” and type=“feedURL”.

7. Give this new input tag a new description, such as “The URL of the RSS feed.”

8. If you like, you can give this a <defaultValue> property, I’ve set mine to my blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/edunhill/rss.xml.

9. Under the <outputs> group, change the isArray property to “true”, change the type to “custom” and add object=“RSSItem” – this will show we’re outputting a list of RSSItems.

10. After the <operations> group, add a new group called <objects>, so we can quickly define what an RSSItem is.

11. Create a new <object> tag, with name=“RSSItem”, then give it another tag called <field> with the properties name=“title”, type=“title” and isArray=“false”.

12. That’s it! The block is now defined so Popfly can understand it. Hopefully you should have something that looks like the below:

Now, we have to head on over to the “Block Code” tab, to write the code that will actually make the block do it’s thing.

1. Change the HelloWorldClass text to read RSSFeed.

2. Rename the first “hello” function to “getItems”, and add url in the brackets after the word “function”.

3. Then inside the function, type the following:

var returnResponse = environment.getXml(url);

return this.__formatResponseDataRSSItem(returnResponse);

These lines download the RSS feed into a readable format for use with our block.

4. Create another RSSFeed.prototype. called “__formatResponseDataRSSItem” – this will return the article titles as an array of strings (lines of text) for use with our block.

5. Inside the new function, add the following code:

var resultArray  = new Array();

var itemNodeList = resultXML.getElementsByTagName('item');

var resultNodeCount = itemNodeList.length;            

var resultArray  = new Array(resultNodeCount);

for(var i = 0; i < resultNodeCount; i++)

{   

    var itemNode = itemNodeList[i];

    if(itemNode)

    {                

        var title =         itemNode.getElementsByTagName("title").length >= 1 ?        itemNode.getElementsByTagName("title")[0].text : "";

            resultArray[i] = new RSSItem(title);

    }

}

return resultArray;

This code iterates through each of the titles in the RSS XML document and adds them to our resultArray, which is in turn, returned to the block for output.

6. The two final things to do are define (in code) an RSSItem, and then define how our block will pass it’s data to another block (or optionally, how it will output the data).

7. Define another function called “RSSItem” with “title” as a parameter, then insert the code: this.title = title;

This code defines RSSItem as ‘having a title’.

8. Finally, we need to output some sort of data. Create another RSSItem.prototype. called “toString” and insert the following code:

var html = ""; 

html += "<strong>" + this.title + "</strong><br />"; 

return html;

This code simply outputs all the titles in bold as html to be read either by the user, or another block.

And that’s it! Now our block is totally built and configured, hopefully you’ll be looking at something like this:

Now we can quickly test the block, by clicking the “Save and Run” option to the top-right of your screen. Give the block a name, like RSSFeed, and Popfly will create a new Mashup with your block. If you want to see what it looks like, you can hit preview and should be able to see a list of article titles.

You can change the code in step 8 above to output variables instead of html so you can hook this block up with a display or transform block.

I hope you've enjoyed the series, if you have any questions about any aspect of Microsoft Web Dev don't hesitate to drop me a line.

Regular readers of this blog will know that a huge amount of my time this year was dedicated to taking new technologies on the road and showing students how to get started with them.

In the end we travelled over 15,000 miles to speak to 4000 students at 60 UK universities!

We thought it would be cool to put together a video to summarise what the tour was all about and warm everyone up for next academic year.

You can see the video on Channel 8...