Microsoft Student Partners

If you were looking for big announcements regarding Mesh at PDC – you may be slightly disappointed, then again, this may a couple of birthdays rolled into one!

The 3rd major company to take the leap (after Amazon’s S3 and Google’s App Engine), Microsoft are attempting to hit the ground running and shake up the cloud industry with the release of Windows Azure. To quote from the official site, Azure is a 64-bit operating system on top of which your cloud services will run and more importantly, scale.

There aren’t a lot of demo apps that currently exist – although perhaps the best application that I can use to demonstrate the (future) power of Azure is Live Mesh. As you can see from the following architecture overview Mesh is an integral part of Azure and the services strategy at Microsoft (in fact, Live Mesh’s logo has now become the overall icon for Live Services) and is itself built on top of Azure:

Azure Services Overview

You can Register for the Tech Preview (includes download links), and while you’re waiting for an invite you can play around with the SDK local environment (which should simulate Azure). Note that you will require Vista or Windows Server 2008 to run this (XP not supported) and the correct bit version (32 will not work on 64 under WOW).

Instead of waffling about what Azure will be, I’ve found the following links to be super helpful:

Azure Main Site

Overview (Microsoft Watch)

MyCloud wiki

Video: Introducting Windows Azure

Video: Windows Azure for Developers

What will be your first cloud app?

Thanks to a tip off from ScottGu we bring you news of the release of Silverlight 2!

Silverlight 2 supports Windows and Mac (and you can always check out Moonlight for linux) and comes with an improved toolkit for everything from standard & custom controls to networking and media streaming support.

Developers will be particularly interested in the Getting Started website which includes walkthroughs from the obligatory “Hello World!” right through the usage of controls and database bindings.

Check it out!

NB Don’t forget to uninstall any betas before installing the release version

It’s that time of year again – exams are bearing down, stress is building up and projects are due. In order to help relieve the stress a bit UWA MSPs are running a Halo shootout during swot vac! Held after all of your projects are handed in but just before the real exam stress sets in this your oppurunity to frag your friends and let out same steam.

We’ll be holding 2v2v2v2 games (i.e 4 teams of 2 per round) in a frag count shootout afterwhich the leaders will progress to an elimination ladder. There’ll be a slew of prizes and giveaways on the day, not just for the winners but also for random criteria (such as most frags in a single game etc).

When? November 4th
Where? CSSE 1.24
Team? Bring your buddy along on the day, otherwise, randomly assigned by our robotic overlord

Signup: http://events.wamsp.com.au/halo

See you there!

Another very cool development from another Microsoft incubator division is a program called Touchless.

Touchless allows you to create Multi-Touch applications, simply by using your webcam to detect movement.

The Touchless SDK team have also got a demo to download to show this off.

I’d love to see a whole bunch of Touchless apps coming from Australia students.

Luke
UWA MSP

http://twitter.com/ekulmi

Direct to you (and the world) comes Microsoft Research‘s (MSR) latest project gone wild – WorldWide Telescope. The program takes utilises other MSR projects such as PhotoZoom and PhotoSynth to create an interactive 3D view of space as we know it, overlayed with images from all your favourite telescopes.

WorldWide Telescope - Splash Screen

The project includes imagery from Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer and others and claims to provide you with the same quality of imagery that NASA scientists use.

WWT will show you all of the objects in your current viewport (along the bottom), selecting any of these will zoom in and display information about the object.

Not to be restricted just to space, It’s easy enough to tell WWT that you are sick of looking at the sky and that you’d rather look at panoramas of alien planets, bringing up Mars as seen by Oppurtunity and Spirit:

Is that my shoe?

Just back from Imagine ’08 – what an awesome event!

The event was opened by Luke who stepped everyone through a number of videos highlighting the Power of students. Luke also discussed Dreamspark which has finally landed Down Under and Imagine Cup ’09. Who knows? Maybe this year we’ll finally see a UWA team!

David then stepped in with “Gaming your way onto Facebook” – an awesome demo which stepped through the creation of a Popfly shoot-em-up which was then published, with leaderboard, to Facebook.

Next we ran a quick session about the MS Internship process. UWA has 3 interns going this year, the second highest from any university (apart from UQ), beating out universities like UNSW and USyd and decimating Victoria (none!). Great news for anyone at UWA who may have thought that being too far over West was a disadvantage.

I then followed up with a quick overview some online services being offered by Microsoft – Deep Zoom, Photosynth and Live Mesh, if you haven’t checked them out – do so! Don’t forget to sign up for the UWA Live Mesh Comp as well and beat out the other unis (including our blog brothers from Curtin)…

From there we moved to on to the IEEE supported free BBQ for participants where we handed out a boat load of swag and prizes to some happy recipients.

We’re always interested in feedback – so leave us a message (or two) with what you thought.

See you at our next event!

There’s only two days before Imagine 08 so if you haven’t already registered CLICK HERE to register now.

Luke
UWA MSP
http://twitter.com/ekulmi

What it is?

The Student Daze MSP Summit 08 is the first of what will be an annual event to bring together the top MSPs at the Microsoft HQ in Remond, WA. MSPs from each of the 13 regions meet for 2 intense days to help shape the MSP program for the year to come. Up to 4 MSPs from each region are flown to Redmond to make a group of around 50 MSPs.

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