Friday, December 22, 2006

XNA Game Studio Express 1.0 Released

The game development studio for X-box 360 was released recently. This is one of the more anticipated SDKs ( for me at least) that was promised to come out at the end of year. The studio works with C# and visual studio express, so its free to download.

If any of you are interested in playing around with it look at the links listed below. Also if there is a bit of interest in having someone demo it, I can organise early next year a speaker either during or before uni starts. (interest based)


Links:

XNA
Visual Studio Express

Friday, December 15, 2006

Imagine Cup 2007

This morning Brad from CSE sent out an email in regards to the imagine cup and possible help if anyone needs it in regards to university students and obtaining a memtor. I want to also add that if you have any questions that you would like a response from MS send them to me and ill get you an answer or if its more complicated in contact with someone that might be able to help.

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Vista and office campus launch

There is talk beginning about a campus launch for vista and office 2007 to be early in the start of the fall semester 2007. I hope to get interest from societies at the university for this launch and possibly with some luck a little bit of faculty interest.

If you fall into this category or are interesting in general contact me and ill love to hear your thoughts.

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

How msdnaa works

Hi everyone,

i recently received a question on how all the CD keys work with MSDNAA I'm going to put a disclaimer here that this to the best of my knowledge is correct, but there might be mistakes, i have done everything to avoid them. Alternatively if you want to read the actual contracts and legal stuff contact me and ill get that for you, or alternatively contact SS or the help desk and at least on of them should have all that documentation.

The school has two types of software that is receives from MS the simplest to deal with is something that does not require activation. For this type of software there is a generic CD key for all students and staff who want to use it.

The second type are products that require activation, this includes vista, for this the school gets pools of keys that they hand out to students on request, most of these keys are single license and as for all MSDNAA they are for educational purposes.

Now just to note MSDNAA is not MSDN! MSDNAA has a subset of software that is available on and MSDN subscription and also the licensing wise you get much more out of the normal MSDN subscription. Now we as students don't have access to www.msdn.com, however the school should have access to the subscription part of this site.

I hope this helps

Alex

Monday, December 04, 2006

Vista keys now available

The Vista business CD key can now be requested from the CSE website.

I received the following email from SS

Please note the Business version is the only version that will be
available to us (and you). For information on what the differences
are between the many versions, please consult the Microsoft Vista
site :
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/editions/default.mspx

Keys can be obtained from https://status.cse.unsw.edu.au/accinfo/
and, until our webservers are upgraded to Apache 2.0 (probably not
until the new year), the DVD must physically be borrowed from the
Help Desk.

It is likely that the keys released to MSDNAA will work
with any other Vista DVD release, but I can't say for sure.

Help Desk hours are currently 1:00pm to 3:00pm Monday to Friday

Thanks to SS for organising this.

Monday, November 27, 2006

MSDNAA and Office 2007

I was told today by a microsoft staff that Office 2007 will not be available with a MSDNAA but "there is a special student promo coming out around O week" I don't know what this will be but i will blog when details are out. If you want to be notified leave a comment or contact me.

Monday, November 20, 2006

Vista Media

Hi all, i just thought i would upload a bit a screenshots of vista, firstly this is the new windows-tab, that exists along with alt-tab



Secondly there is a new start button, which now doesn't exist.



lastly for this post the start menu, note the alpha blending


Friday, November 17, 2006

Vista released on MSDN

Hi every just a quick note for anyone that wants to get a copy of vista, the help desk should be getting copies of it very soon and making it available for students. If anyone has problems installing or getting their hands on a copy just contact me and ill help you how I can

PS - good luck for all of us that still have exams left

Monday, November 06, 2006

Official launch date

Quick note vista office 2007 and exchange 2007 are scheduled to have a business launch for the 30th of November 2006. The general consumer launch is still early next year with and unconfirmed date. If your interested in getting it from MSDNAA check after the launch date as it should be there by the 30th but I'm not 100% sure

Friday, November 03, 2006

Post Ready summit

Well now that the presentation of vista and office 2007 is ready we have a couple of exciting things "available" on the market, well available soon. I urge all of you who haven't had a chance to look at these products to at least grab a copy of office and have a play around.

With these two new products there will be a big change in MS products, while the cooperate world will now have a new office format, sharepoint, etc. This for us as students and future IT employees we will need to know these products.

The summit itself presented a huge mirage of technologies that show an interesting new direction for Microsoft. The summit had one problem, if you were keeping up with the latest beta there were no real surprises in store. However some of the MS partners were pushing interesting new things, from seagate's new 650 gigabyte hard drive to Wacom's development tablets.

Also for those of you interested in aspect of development with MS technologies and some of the new stuff coming out, have a look at my other blog, I'm going to talk about windows workflow.


Saturday, October 28, 2006

Ready Summit 06


Microsoft is holding the ready summit 06 in Thursday two weeks. Everyone is invited, there will be a show case of vista and office 2007.

To Register

Friday, October 27, 2006

Basics of C#

Hi everyone,

its been a while! I'm going to be doing an introduction to C# and .Net in the beginning of the holidays some time early December. If anyone is interested in joining leave a reply with your email and i will try to organise a time which suites the majority

good luck with your exams

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Tech.Ed 2006


Its the time of year for Tech.Ed 2006, and we are lucky enough that this year it will be in Sydney. This year's Tech.Ed will be in the convension center in Darling harbor, from Tuesday 22nd August to Friday 25th August.

We, the students, have our own day on Tuesday that is especially designed to help students to make the transition from study to a member of the workforce when the time comes. If your interested in the latest Microsoft technologies or just want to see what is the most happening things come to Tech.Ed during the FREE student day, and catch some of the many give aways for free things. I hope to see you all there!

Register

Monday, July 10, 2006

Visual Studio 2005 Competition


Thanks to everyone that entered the Visual studio competition, all the entries were great. I hope that you all managed to learn something and host of all enjoyed yourself. I would love to show you all the entries however due to time/resource limitation I have only uploaded one of the entries.

The page was made by Jonathon, and thank you for letting me share it with everyone. For anyone that is interested the site was built using ASP.Net 2.0 and atlas, the new June Atlas release is out.

Thursday, June 22, 2006

TechNet and MSDN Flash

Microsoft currently is promoting a bimontly newsletter they have about windows vista and office 12.

You and a friend could be exploring New Zealand on a fantastic adventure holiday. Staying in Queenstown, you can choose from a range of activities; take off on a heli-flight, thrill to a Shotover Jet experience, bungy jump, go trout fishing, enjoy wine tours and massages for two, float away on a hot air balloon and ride the rapids white water rafting!

For a chance to win, simply join TechNet Flash
(for IT professionals) or MSDN Flash (for developers). If you’re not already a subscriber, you can sign up here for these fortnightly newsletters that will keep you up to date with the latest information, offers and training available on Windows Vista.
http://www.microsoft.com/australia/technet/innovation/promotion.aspx

Its free to signup so if your interested or would like to win some great prizes click on the about link.

Saturday, June 17, 2006

Windows Vista

I recently installed windows, it looks cool and my computer runs a lot faster, with the upgrade from a 32 bit version of windows XP to the 64 bit version. However like with any beta it crashed once for me when I was installing drivers. That however could be I am having problems finding 64 bit drivers for a couple of my secondary hardware(webcam, TV tuner, and finger print reader). The most surprising of this is that the finger print reader is a MS product, and they haven't put any 64 bit driver for it.

But the speed increase more than makes up for the increased amount of alpha blending. They have packaged a new search into the task bar, which is fast compared to the old find documents. There is also windows gadgets that have been introduced on the side bar of the window. This has removed the necessity of using third party desk top searches and custom add-ons.

Also they have a cool new scrolling/tabbing feature which will its really not needed and over the top is just cool! Now if anyone has some decent 64bit video codecs please tell me where I can get them

Thursday, June 15, 2006

New webpage

Hi everyone,

as a tribute to procrastination 2006 I've put up a new atlas powered webpage at http://aspspider.org/alex699/. Hope have a play around with the with the two data control objects they are both database powered. Also the maroon rectangle is is movable, however don't move it below the bottom control on the page as it can't go below it.

If anyone is interested I can send you the files for this page and the other pages that I've put up previously.

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

New possible web server

Hi I'm interested in how many people would be interested in getting a webserver that will run ASP.net, SQL server2005 and IIS 6? I am looking to get something that can be used by students for educational purposes So if your interested or would like to help if I can get something to materialize please contact me.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

New website

I've created a new website for sign ups for the new event that I want to have. It will be a build your first website event where I hope I can get a computer room or in the cse lecture theatre, if I can't get a computer room together. Also please do not sign up on the page as the the hosting that I am using has DB problems, I can't write anything to the database. Also as you "may" have noticed its also painfully slow, I'm hoping to move the website to a new server in the near future.

In addition hopefully I will have some copies of Vista and office by the end of this week, otherwise I will burn some copies for those who really want to get their hands on some copies.

Ps. Good luck with your exams

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

VS2005 Express

FYI VS2005 Express will be available from the help desk from tomorrow afternoon

Monday, June 05, 2006

VS Launch

We had a great VS2005 launch today, thanks to everyone that came today for making it such a great event. A special thanks to Andrew for his speech and Bernard. Here are the pictures from the event - Below Competition

The competition - The competition in principle is very simple; find a way to cube a number ie x^3. The requirements are you must use VS2005 with asp.net 2.0, Example (type a number into the second text box). The best prizes will be given to the most interesting "submission", while everyone will get a prize. The submission needs to be email me the source code files, by the end of June.

Saturday, June 03, 2006

Ajax.Net JavaScript

Here is the source code for the Java script for the site published in the last post! The site took me a total of an hour to make with all the bugs i got because im using a new product. And BTW its free, made for the use of the .net community

Ajax.Net

I recent went looking into Ajax and how it can relate to .Net 2.0. You will find that a vast majority of ajax articles and sources refer to php and how to combine the two technologies together. So with a little help in the right direction if found Ajax.net

Have a look at a little sample i created Ajax.net example

Wednesday, May 31, 2006

VS2005 Launch Posters

The first Set of posters have gone up around CSE on Monday! Have a look for them around campus, the next set will be up at BIT

Outside Bugle and Pipe

Outside help desk towards the BBQ tree

Outside help Desk looking from Mech Eng Ball

Saturday, May 27, 2006

"The reason to switch"

I've been seen rather recently some of the mac switch commercials on the bogs and group emails that I have been receiving. So I want to share with you some of the more "serious" and comic ones that exist

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Vista and office 12 Beta

A couple of days ago the office 12 and windows vista beta were released to the general public. We at unsw are going to have the opportunity to receive a copy of the beta CDs to install for all the students.

I will blog again when I get the CDs and start distributing them for students that are interested! There will also be an opportunity to get a copy at the CompSoc install fest early next semester.

Sunday, May 21, 2006

Binfsoc Indoor soccer Comp

The binfsoc Indoor soccer competition was held last Friday, and from all accounts it was a great success. On the left we can see some of the participants with with most of them I was told being the winning team. The winners received a copy of VS Express and one of the newly released Windows Vista pens.

Benfsoc can be found at http://binfsoc.bioinformatics.unsw.edu.au/ I look forward to other events, which hopefully I can make next time.

Friday, May 19, 2006

Windows Vista Beta & Office 12 Beta

Microsoft is about to release windows Vista and Office 2007 Beta versions. This release will be aimed at computing professionals and also at computing students, and therefore we at UNSW will be able to receive a free version.


Windows Vista will be able to from the end of the semester, hopefully it will mean that there will be copies for any staff/students at the vs2005 launch seminar. There will also be copies of the software available at the COMPSOC install fest to any interested Parties. I am hoping to possible have some sort of install fest before the end of the semester.

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

.Net BBQ

I have managed to get a initial OK from all the main societies to host a BBQ after the .net seminar on the 5th June The BBQ will start at 1ish. I again invite everyone to attend the event and hope that we can learn something from the lecture, and carry something useful away.

Additionally Andrew Coates will be the guest speaker, he is currently the Microsoft developer evangelist for NSW and ACT. He will be the lecturer during the event. There will be also other Microsoft staff at the event, there attendance is to be confirmed.

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

MSDNAA

I'm just blogging abit about MSDNAA, firstly the Microsoft Developers Network Academic Alliance (MSDNAA) is a core part of the Microsoft students services. This pack represents firstly a easy way of getting any development software you might need from the Microsoft.

You can get the software from the Help Desk@CSE in the mechanical engineering building, and remember the news and beta software is available.

Monday, May 15, 2006

Rescheduled VS2005 launch

The Launch for Visual studio 2005 is being post-poned to 5th June 2006. It will be held at k17 in the seminar room.

We have the following events lined up

  • Presentation by Andrew Coates on visual studio 2005 and MSSQL 2005.
  • Microsoft give aways
  • Copies of visual studio Express
  • BBQ hosted by the CSE societies
I encourage everyone to come along to the event and see what there is to offer, also there will be some Microsoft staff at the event so its a great place to network.

If anyone is interested in playing around with the new Visual Studio:

  • Click on the link below to download Visual Studio Express
  • Leave a comment and I will contact you; or
  • the Help Desk@CSE has CSE MSDNAA subscription, so any CSE students/staff can get a full very of VS and other MS products

Sunday, May 14, 2006

Innovation 2006

Innovation 2006 is upon us again, and this year we are being promised a huge line up. I know that at UNSW there has been some positive and negative talk, and more than anything anticipation of what will be included in windows vista. At innovation we will be let into loop of what is going on in Microsoft with the new development of their new operating system.

I would like to also encourage all those people that are converting to the new Mac os, and losing there touch with windows to some along and see what this new huge release will be!

Microsoft will also introduce office 12 and talk about their new product from a developers point of view.

If your interested in the details http://www.microsoft.com/australia/technet/events/innovation/ otherwise contact me and ill help you out any way i can.


Saturday, May 13, 2006

Sesoc Trivia

I'm a little bit behind on my blogging so expect some catch-up in the next few days! The first thing that I am going to be writing about is the SESOC trivia two weeks ago. The event is a trivia "challenge" similar to pub trivia that is held by the Sesoc every semester. It is the only one of its kind that is run in CSE and therefore has a unique place in the school. The other thing about the event it has been since the time I remember been sponsored in some way or another by MS.

I was not able to attend the event however I only heard good things about it! I however managed to have a large distribution of Visual studio express and people did take them. This is a positive sign of uptake and interest in .Net.

I will post the pics when I get them.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

VS2005 launch

I've had some of the first things come together for the visual studio launch. I have been running around about mainly because this is the first presentation that I am making so I am not too sure about everything that needs to be done and mistake that seem trivial to others I've had some problems. Firstly securing some computers - Bernard however said that I can get some from MS.

so far I have the following things ready
-> Computers ( thanks to Bernad and a couple I have dug up)
-> VS2005 Kit (got it a while back)
-> Speaker
-> Tenative plan on what needs to be done

what needs to be done
-> Confirm Date
-> Book room ( based on above)

Saturday, April 08, 2006

Ive started to think about what activities i want to hold and to be a part of on MS behalf in UNSW. There are several traditional ones that have constant involvement since i started being a student at the university and others that i can get involved in. These involve some of the following
- Trivia
- BBQs
- Game nights
- computer game competitions.

The BBQs that are being held would only be usefully if they are close to the .Net 2.0 launch that i am still in the planning stages of organizing. Others like trivia i have contacted the relevant students and have plans at differing stages with them.

Thursday, April 06, 2006

I have began conversing with some of the student societies about the events that they are holding. This at this point involves SESOC, COMPSOC and CSE revue. Currently Sesoc and Compsoc are just hosting some smaller events and their requests for prizes is really nothing too big to deal with however CSE revue brings a bit of a problem.

Just a little background on them they are the biggest society in CSE and they have from the very beginning received considerable sponsorship from Microsoft. The amounts that they are talking about is a bit out of the range of give aways that I am allowed to authorize, so I helping them with ideas about a proposal to Bernard and anyone else at MS who needs to be involved in this.

Currently I have them thinking about getting the development that is required for the show to be moved to a .Net 2.0 platform, in C# or C++. The main benefit of this is that it will get the some of the best students in CSE involved in some pretty complex .Net development and also to start the conversion to .Net for all future projects. The long term aim would be to migrate everything that is currently built to .Net but this would require considerable support and "hand holding".

The best case option would be the development of .Net student community

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Ive spent the last couple of days getting in contact will all the computer related societies. That hasn't been much of a problem except for one of them. WIC or women in computing is on the official list of CSE ( school of computer science and engineering societies) but no-one including the female students that i have asked know who is the head of society. My current course of action it to send and email to the exec and hope for the best.

The main official societies of UNSW that are affiliated to CSE are :

BINFsoc COMPSOC CSE Revue SESOC Women In Computing

There a couple of smaller ones that are not related directly to CSE but do have some involvement, eg game development society. Ill start contacting the small semi CSE related societies in the next couple of days.

Pictures "borrowed" from www.cse.unsw.edu.au

Saturday, April 01, 2006

I Spent some time putting up poster for the imagine cup and i didn't think that it would be so difficult to organize something like putting up posters. Our school is extremely strict on where you can put up posters going to such and extreme as fining people!




As you can all see that there really aren't many pictures and the quality really has something to look for, well i learnt that lighting does have something to so with taking pictures. There were more posters but the photos didn't come out

Friday, March 31, 2006

Imagine Cup 2005

We at UNSW are very competitive, with the number one competition being the Robocup; however the imagine cup is nothing to laugh at. So on that note the Email below was sent out to the whole student body

Hi all,
Back in 2004 we had several students in the top 100 of the world list, and one who was the first ever to get 100% on the first round.

It would be great to see us do well again this year.

Cheers,
Brad

>Hi Brad,
>
>We have launched our new student competition Imagine Cup 2006. There
>are some great prizes for both students and faculty.
>
>Information regarding the Australian Imagine Cup finals are here
>http://ww
>w.microsoft.com/australia/msdn/students/imaginecup/
>
>Please let your faculty and students know about the competition. It
>would be great to see some winning entries from the UNSW!
>
>The prizes are:
>The top three groups will compete at the Australian Finals in Sydney
>for the following prizes.
>
>1st place winning team
>
>Represent Australia at the international final of the Imagine Cup
>2006 Software Design invitational
>Return economy scheduled flights
>Return transfers
>Hotel accommodation for 6 nights
>Breakfast, lunch and dinner at the venue for the Imagine Cup 2006
>Software Design Final The Academic Mentor will receive AUD$2000
>
>2nd place winning team
>
>Xbox 360 Gaming Pack valued at $649 and The Academic Mentor will
>receive AUD$1000
>
>3rd place winning team
>
>A copy of Microsoft Vista and 2007 Microsoft Office system at Launch
>The Academic Mentor will receive AUD$500
>
>Thanks, Deeps.
>

--


hopefully we(UNSW) can have such a great result again

Thursday, March 30, 2006

New MSSA at UNSW

Hi, my name is a Alex and I am the new MSSA at UNSW.

Im currently a third year at UNSW and doing software/biomedical engineering, still a long stretch of uni ahead of me. Ive been a programmer for a while, starting my "career" with the exciting adventures of future basic(basic on Mac) since that time ive grown to hate basic and im not the biggest fan of macs!

I received my VS .Net launch kit today and im amazed what Microsoft is willing to give away to students, and all the things that have been prepared for .Net 2.0 product launch. My only concern is that ive never done something like this before so im hoping to get some help on my first product launch/MSSA event.