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Just as we’re heading off to Cairo for the Imagine Cup worldwide finals I want to give you a flashback to the UK final event…
Previously I published the slides from all of the Microsoft Research talks delivered on the day and now, finally I have the videos online!
Getting from A to B: Fast Route Finding Using Slow Computers from Ed Dunhill on Vimeo.
Curing Cancer, Halting Global Disease Outbreaks, Preventing Dangerous Climate Change from Ed Dunhill on Vimeo.
Proving that Software Eventually Does Something Good from Ed Dunhill on Vimeo.
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Regular readers will know all about the Imagine Cup but for the uninitiated it is the worlds largest student technology competition which Microsoft runs annually. 2009 has been a bumper year for the UK with 14 students travelling to Egypt this Friday to represent the UK in the Software Design, Embedded Development, Games Development, Short Film and IT competitions.
We will be sure to let you know how the teams get on in Cairo but we’re certainly hoping at least one of them will be bringing home some silverware!
If you want to support the UK Software Design Team (TKCL from Kings College) then your in luck because this year for the first time part of the judging is based on a public vote. All you need to do is visit peopleschoice.imaginecup.com find TKCL (toward the bottom of the page and click vote!
You can follow all the teams on the UK Imagine Cup Blog, YouTube Channel and of course on Twitter.
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Have you ever wanted to create your own game but don’t want to get your hands dirty with code? We now have the answer… Kodu!
Kodu allows you to build games using traditional programming paradigms such as conditional statements and loops but without having to fire up Visual Studio. Basically you start with a blank world which you can customise, add characters and set up interactions. Multiplayer is supported as is sharing created games online using Xbox Live Community Games.
Its great if you’re just looking for a bit of fun and its also a neat way to introduce children to programming.
Kodu is available for purchase (or demo) on Xbox Live Community Games. You can find out more here or watch a demo from GDC below:
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Just a quick signpost to the Ultimate Steal, a programme that allows UK students purchase Office for a seriously reduced price.
I’m sure I’ve blogged about it before but thought it was worth resurfacing as its a cracking deal and for those of you in your final year your last chance to grab a bargain.
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Windows Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform allowing deployment of .NET applications with flexible scaling. My colleague Paolo recently wrote a great introductory article for our Faculty Connection newsletter which outlines the fundamentals.
Over the coming months I will be writing a series of posts focussed on getting you started developing with Azure. In this first post I will walk you through setting up the development environment.
The development environment for Azure consists of Visual Studio and the Azure SDK. You can user either the free Visual Studio 2008 Web Developer Express Edition or a full version of Visual Studio 2008 (such as those available through MSDNAA and DreamSpark). For this article I will be using Windows 7 as my operating system but you can also use Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008.
Once you have installed Visual Studio please update it to download SP1 which includes .NET 3.5 SP1 both of which are requirements for the Azure SDK. Finally, before installing the SDK you need to enable ASP.NET and WCF HTTP Activation. To do this on Windows Vista or 7 follow these steps:
1. From the Start menu, choose Control Panel | Programs | Programs and Features.
2. Click Turn Windows Features On or Off.
3. Under Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5.1, select Windows Communication Foundation HTTP Activation.
4. Under Internet Information Services, expand World Wide Web Services.
5. Under Application Development Features, select ASP.NET.
6. Under Common HTTP Features, choose Static Content.
7. Click OK to install the selected features.
You can now download and install the Azure SDK and the Azure Tools for Visual Studio. The Azure SDK provides a simulation of the cloud on your desktop so you can test applications locally and the Tools for Visual Studio include the Windows Azure project types.
We’re now set to develop our Azure web application, for this example we will build a simple ‘Hello World’ application but using the twist is that rather than running it as a single instance as you traditionally would we will fire it up with 5 instances.
First open Visual Studio, select ‘File>New>Project...’ From the ‘Project types’ box select Cloud Service and from the ‘Templates’ box select ‘Web Cloud Service’, enter a name for the project and click OK.
When the template loads you will notice in the ‘Solution Explorer’ we have a solution with two projects. The first project contains the cloud service which features two XML files containing the service configuration (.cscfg) and the service definition (.csdef). The second project is the web application itself where you will find a blank default.aspx file which is familiar in traditional ASP.NET development. For the purposes of this tutorial we will make a small change to the default.aspx file so double click it and in the left hand pane add the text ‘Hello World’ between the ‘<div>’ tags. You can now press F5 to setup the development fabric and deploy your application for local test.
Your application should then launch in your web browser and display ‘Hello World’. If you look in your system tray you should notice an icon displaying two gears, this represents the Azure Development Fabric. Right click the icon and select ‘Show Development Fabric UI’. In the interface you can expand the application we have just built and you will see that there is one instance running. A single instance is the default configuration for a cloud application but if we want to scale our application and run multiple instances it is a simple matter of changing the XML configuration file I mentioned earlier. To do this go back to Visual Studio, stop debugging and open the .cscfg file. In the left hand pane you should be able to see a tag containing ‘Instances count="1"’, change the 1 to 5 and press F5 to rebuild your application. If you reopen the Development Fabric UI you will now see that there are 5 instances of our application running.
As you can see it is very easy to run up multiple instances of our application and this works exactly the same when you deploy your application to the cloud which I will cover in my next post on Azure.
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Microsoft are currently running a competition where you can build an IE8 Accelerator, Web Slice or Visual Search to win and Xbox 360 Elite as well as promotion for your project in a range of Future Publishing titles.
Mike Ormond has all the details - this is a great opportunity to grab yourself a cool prize and get something neat on your CV and best of all its really easy to get started.
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For a limited time Microsoft is offering free vouchers to sit an MCTS exam through the DreamSpark programme. The MCTS (Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist) stream is aimed at developers and IT professionals and is available in multiple flavours relevant to a raft of developer and infrastructure technologies. Full list of MCTS certs.
DreamSpark is available to all HE students through direct verification as well as schools through an onsite admin. If you are a school pupil and would like access please direct a member of staff at your school to the sign up page so they can register the school for free.
As well as free exams DreamSpark provides a range of Microsoft products for free:
Find out more about the free MCTS offer.
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To follow on from yesterday’s post I wanted to share the slides from the MSR talks:
Videos will follow next week.
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Yesterday we held a big event at MSR (Microsoft Research) Cambridge to celebrate the success of UK MSPs and Imagine Cup Contestants.
The day included a series of fascinating talks from MSR and Microsoft (slides and video to follow shortly) and culminated in an award ceremony for MSPs and Imagine Cup winners.
Team TKCL (Kings College) with their route finding application Pioneer won the Software Development competition and will be representing the UK in Cairo later this year. Runners up were Vision Creative from Reading/Aston with their CityCycle application and TravelPrint from Aberystwyth University.
We also highlighted the success we have had in Games, I'm positive that the 22 teams competing in round 2 of the competition will produce some awesome games and we’ll end up taking some of them to Cairo.
MSP awards were as follows:
- Imagine Cup Registration Award – Andrew Smylie
- Ultimate Steal Award – Andrew Smylie
- DreamSpark Award – Gareth Young
- Most Innovative Event – Honourable mention – Gareth Young, Winner – Warren Rieutort-Louis
- MSP Star Award – Runner up – Sergei Golubev, Winner – Chris Alexander
We encouraged the use of twitter throughout so you can check out the reaction on the hash tag #imaginecup.
Congratulations to all those who won a prize and thank you to all the other students that travelled to Cambridge for the event.
As mentioned above I’ll shortly make the slides from the event available and we’re hoping to have the videos on Channel8 next week.
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A really quick update on X48 – all the games are now online so you can see for yourself what can be achieved with XNA, 36 hours and a crate of Red Bull!
Seavolution – The winning game from X48
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It’s all over - early Saturday evening 80 exhausted students left Derby University for home after spending 36 hours producing some awesome games using XNA.
The top three prizes went to:
First Prize - Huddersfield Green's Seavolution
Second Prize - Huddersfield Orange's Involved
Third Prize - Team Newport's Bellis Perennis
and there were a bunch of other quirky prizes such as cheesiest game which went to Hull’s Evo.
X48 Awards Ceremony
To all those who took part – congratulations. Not only was I amazed by the quality of the games produced but also your unquenchable thirst for Red Bull!
For those that weren’t there you missed a treat, keep an eye on the official X48 site as all of the games will be posted there shortly.
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What: X48 is 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.
Where: University of Derby
When: Friday 20th - Saturday 21st March 2009
As you can see from the above pictures X48 is ticking over nicely and already some really cool ideas are emerging.
Check out the action as it happens on Twitter and our Vimeo Group.
Incidentally the Imagine Cup Games Dev teams progressing to Round 2 have been announced and the best bit is we have 22 from the UK. Why not check out the leaderboard!
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Kudos to Paolo for getting to this one first.
Simply put when Windows Mobile 6.5 launches an accompanying app store dubbed Windows Marketplace for Mobile (codename SkyMarket) will also launch.
Developers will be able to build mobile applications and for $99 PA sell them through Marketplace receiving a 70% revenue split. What’s really neat is that for students this fee will be waived through DreamSpark.
This looks like it will be a great way to show off your C# skills and maybe earn some cash at the same time. Why not check out the Windows Mobile Developers Portal to brush up on WM development.
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Lionhead Studios, developer of the Fable and Black and White series are looking to recruit the best and brightest grads with strong C++ skills.
Ideally candidates would have a passion for video games, creative flair as well as considerable C++ experience.
This would be a great opportunity for the right grad – if you think this is the job for you take a look at their website to apply.
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My colleague Paolo is in the process of arranging a series of regional training days to introduce teaching staff at universities and design schools to rich application development using the Silverlight platform. The days are free to attend and will run towards the end of this month in London, Bristol and Birmingham.
You can get all the details and sign up at Paolo’s blog
