Vista and Office 2007 Launched

Yesterday saw the release of Vista and office 2007, at a midnight launch in Harvey Normans around Australia. This was marketed by Greg Harvey selling the first copy of Vista and a couple of them signed by Bill Gates. While this in itself would be exciting most institutions have had access to it for 2 months and those of us who risked the beta builds or even alpha builds may have been using for more than a year.

So what got me interested in the launch was the look of the casing that the product is sold in, and unfortunately I was rather disappointed! I expected a shiny metal case but only saw plastic, but at least it was not cardboard like so much other software is sold in.

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

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.

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.

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