Thursday, November 13, 2008

DreamSpark 2.0

A couple of weeks ago Microsoft released a new version of DreamSpark. For those of you who don’t know what DreamSpark is, it is a ‘product’ from Microsoft that gives students a selection of free software. This is a parallel product to MSDNAA, and lets students download the software on the internet and not be dependent on their schools to actually buy MSDNAA, however it does offer less software, but still enables students to get nearly all the software that they need for development with visual studio.

DreamSpark now offers the follow

  • Visual Studio
  • SQL Server
  • Windows Server
  • XNA
  • Expression

The only catch at this point is you need to validate that you are a student, to do this you either need to go to a university on a list that is provided or have a ISIC student. At this point if you are a UNSW student you will need to have an ISIC card to access this service, they can be purchased from STA travel on campus or many other places.

 DreamSpark_BG

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Microsoft Student Partner

Microsoft is looking for another student partner at the university of New South Wales (UNSW). If anyone is interested please have a look at the following links, and if you are interested either apply online or send me an email with you contact details and I will forward it.

below is a link to the poster for position

Sunday, November 02, 2008

Windows Azure and the student community

The release of windows Azure gives us students the ability to build new cloud services. Now while this sounds like a marketing ploy it more or less has my head spinning about the possibilities of what I could do. There are so many great programming languages and frameworks that exist out there, but probability the ones with the biggest corporate languages out there are .Net and Java, however the concept of Azure has taken it to a new level.

The framework is currently in CTP phase and as such there is a queue to get a login and unfortunately like everyone else I need to wait my turn to get a login to the service. There is a CPT download for the local development environments so time to download to installers and develop your killer apps.

I will post some code soon for those that are interested in seeing what an Azure can do.

In the mean time here is a link to Windows Azure

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Steve Ballmer in Australia

Microsoft is hosting an event power to developers, on 6th November in Sydney, the talk will be in the afternoon and will present Microsoft's strategy into cloud computing. This will be on the back of PDC that is currently in progress, and based on what information that we will be released on cloud computing.

The event is unfortunately invite only and because of that and the extremely high demand for tickets, there is no chance for everyone to get tickets. The upside is that it will be streamed on the internet, and during this exam period it will let us watch the event online and not waste time getting to and from the event

For more details look at the Power To Developers websites.

Monday, October 27, 2008

Worldwide Telescope

Hubble searches for dark matter Microsoft research released the worldwide telescope recently and this is a program that really make me say WOW, in a similar way as when I saw Google maps for the first time.

This program in its essence is similar to many of maps programs out there where you can find an image of the world and then zoom in till you get to a house level. So for me it is surprising after Google was first over the line with Google Maps and Google Mars, Microsoft releases the Worldwide Telescope.

Io

The program lets us explore space and the universe in a way that static images that we see in books or find on the internet just cannot compare with. There are also guided ‘tour’ of the universe for those of us that do not have a degree in astronomy.

We can also explore other planets including Earth during the day or night, the night sky as we can see it from telescopes, and also  images from probes that have left Earth, including the Mars Landers.

You can download the program – here

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

New MSP contact email

If any of you are looking to contact me in regards to anything to do with this blog or things I am involved with Microsoft please use my new MSP email alexMSP@live.com

Saturday, October 04, 2008

Internet Explorer 8 beta 2

Download Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2I would like to suggest that anyone that does web development or just interested in new browsers have a look at internet explorer 8. This is probably the most ground breaking version of internet explore since the browser wars of internet explorer and Netscape. The new application includes several unique prices of functionality such as accelerates, these are little add-ins such as page translation, and email from web clients that give you quick access (right click) to useful pieces of software.

There are also some much hyped addition such as privacy mode and web slices which give you very similar functionality to Google reader, however since this information is maintained on you local computer then Microsoft or Google does not have you functionality.

This release is also meant to be more compliant with w3 standards, while in the same time it provides a features the lets you see website in ‘compatibility mode, that is based on the rendering engine of previous internet explorers.

You can down load it here