Lisa from Microsoft will be presenting at 2 events at UWA on the 27th August.

The first event is for ENGINERING AND COMPUTER SCIENCE students and the second is for BUSINESS students.

Meet the Company!

Fulltime and Intern

Software Development

27^th August

5pm

CSSE 1.24

People here love their work because they get to think big and dream big. Right now we’re looking for the next generation of Microsoft innovators. If you have talent and a passion for technology, this could be your big moment. 

Come find out more about our fulltime and internship opportunities technical opportunities in the United States!

Bring your résumé for a chance to win

Tons of great Microsoft

Prizes will be raffled and

FREE FOOD will be provided!

Questions? Contact uwa@student-partners.com.au

Meet the Company!

Fulltime and Intern

Marketing, Sales and Services

IN AUSTRALIA!!!

27^th August

4:00pm

CSSE 1.24

People here love their work because they get to think big and dream big. Right now we’re looking for the next generation of Microsoft innovators. If you have talent and a passion for technology, this could be your big moment. 

Come find out more about our fulltime and internship business opportunities in Australia.

Bring your résumé for a chance to win

Tons of great Microsoft

Prizes will be raffled and

FREE FOOD will be provided!

Questions?  Contact uwa@student-partners.com.au

Just a reminder that the IEEE Networking Forum is coming up on Thursday 30th July 2009.

In this economy, you want to give yourself the maximum exposure to recruiting companies as possible. The IEEE Networking Forum gives you a chance to talk to future employers and also get valuable information.

Students from all four major universities in Perth will be attending.

Head to http://www.ieeenetworkingforum.org for more info.

Question: Do you know what IDE stands for?
Question: Do you know what languages Visual Studio can use?
Question: Do you like free pizza?

If you answered yes to the last question, then this event is for you!

The Curtin MSP’s will be demoing off Visual Studio – showcasing its ability as an IDE and why it has become industry standard.

So, even if you think you already know everything there is to know about Visual Studio and IDE’s, come along anyway – there will be heaps of giveaways and FREE PIZZA.

For more information, either click the poster (left) or visit http://curtinvs.eventbrite.com/

- Daniel
Curtin MSP

[ Are you graduating soon? And don’t know what to expect from your IT career? ]

We can help! 

The Microsoft Students to Business program together with Excom Education

Bring you the opportunity to clarify this and many questions you might have

Just join our Live Meeting session, this Thursday 23th of April at

12 pm Singapore, Malaysia and Philippines

11 am Indonesia

2 pm (EST) Australia

4 pm (NZST) New Zealand

To join just click on the link bellow

Join the meeting

AUDIO INFORMATION

Computer Audio

To use computer audio, you need speakers and a microphone, or a headset.

Telephone Conferencing

Choose one of the following:

· Start the Office Live Meeting client, and then in the Voice & Video pane, click Join Conference.  The conferencing service will call you at the number you specify. (Recommended)

· Dial the conferencing service directly, and enter the participant code shown below:
Australia: 1800202713

Malaysia: +12034808000

New Zealand: 0800448997

Philippines: +6328608611

Singapore +6568888008

Indonesia: +8134574
Participant Code:                        2758513

FIRST-TIME USERS

To save time before the meeting, check your system to make sure it is ready to use Office Live Meeting.

TROUBLESHOOTING

Unable to join the meeting?  Follow these steps:

            1.         Copy this address and paste into your web browser:

https://www112.livemeeting.com/cc/_XML/microsoft/join

            2.         Copy and paste the required information:

                        Meeting ID: 29JJ8P

                        Entry Code: S~[x38<&F

                        Location: https://www112.livemeeting.com/cc/_XML/microsoft

If you still cannot enter the meeting, contact support.

NOTICE

Office Live Meeting can be used to record meetings. By participating in this meeting, you agree that your communications may be monitored or recorded at any time during the meeting.

By attending to this conference you will qualify for a chance to receive a complimentary copy of Microsoft Office Professional 2007. (1 participant will be randomly selected*)

Want to know more about S2B? register today!

Any questions please contact s2bapac@microsoft.com

We were treated to two awesome days of presentations, workshops, gaming, food, prizes and plenty of free stuff.

Day 1 kicked off with some intros to awesome programs available to students such as DreamSpark, Imagine Cup, Students 2 Business, Microsoft Student Partners, MSDN-AA, Student Tech Clubs, Channel8 and more. Microsoft provided lunch with a chance to checkout some cool technologies in the cafeteria. The afternoon continued with presentations from Microsoft staff on Microsoft programs such as It’s Not Piracy, Microsoft Learning, MSPress, IT Academy, Imagine Cup and technologies such as Windows Live and Windows Mobile.

After a big first day, we all jumped into the bus and headed to the Great Northern Hotel for dinner and drinks.

Around 9pm we made it back to Microsoft Australia and went straight to the Xbox room. We were lucky to be able to play Halo Wars before its release along with other great games. Gears of War 2, Call of Duty and Forza seemed popular!

At the end of the night the MSPs were shocked to hear they would all be given Xbox 360s along with 4 games and an extra controller! Microsoft has gone out of their way to ensure when MSPs share their love of technology with the community, they can actually share it!

After a quick refresh on the previous days content, Day 2 started with a presentation from GP on where MSPs fit into the big picture at Microsoft. Michael Kordahi followed with an awesome presentation on the future of technology. Andrew Coates demonstrated Live Meeting and Nick Hodge presented on Microsoft’s Open Source program. Lunch was provided by the guys from Atomic Magazine who asked us to give away their magazines at our events… awesome for students all-round!

But one of the highlights for me, was each MSP getting up to present a 5 minute demo on stuff they are passionate about.

Of course there were prizes throughout the event, for the best questions and the most involvement from MSPs.

After  2 full days, MSPs headed back to their homes, Xbox under one arm, and various other loot under the other and heads full of ideas on how they can share their passion, excitement and love of technology with their fellow students.

In fact, some already have, such as Sean’s O-Week Presentation along with his post on new stuff added to DreamSpark.

All Aussie MSPs are fired up and equipped, so join us for an awesome 2009!

Luke
Aussie MSP Lead
The University of Western Australia

Microsoft has now announced some great new features for this service, and is renaming it Outlook Live.

Some major new features are:

• Multiple browser support (IE, Firefox, Safari)
• Instant Messaging within Outlook Live
• Threaded conversations in Conversation View

All the Microsoft Student Partners in Australia are currently on Outlook Live so you should be hearing a lot more about it in the near future.

Checkout the official press release at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/feb09/02-1220MLiveEduPR.mspx

Checkout awesome video demo at http://edge.technet.com/Media/Introducing-Outlook-Live/

Luke
WA MSP

On that note, don’t forget to tune in to hear Steve Balmer’s talk in Sydney this Thursday – more details on the Liberation Day website!

Good Luck on your exams!

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!

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.

Day 0

I flew from Perth and met Edmund (Sydney Uni MSP) and Andrew (Australian ADE) in Sydney going onto to San Francisco and then Seattle. The flight was especially long for me coming from Perth, but the Qantas service was good and we arrived safe and sound.

We have been put up in The Westin Bellevue which is across the road from the Microsoft Bellevue office and a couple of minutes away from the main Redmond campus.

Across the road from MS

Luke & Ed at Dinner on Day 0

Day 1

Everyone met bright and early in the hotel lobby. We were taken to the main campus where we were served a hot breakfast of scrambled eggs, potato cubes, sausages, bacon and fruit along with coffee of course. We all got given forms to sign, little bags full of goodies, access to the Microsoft Guest internet access and passes.

mm coffee

First up was Sam Gazitt who did a presentation on Popfly. Most of the MSPs were pretty up-to-date on Popfly so brushed over some of his presentation and showed us some cool demos.

Sam showing off Popfly

Blogging @ MSFT

Australian Frank Arrigo headed up a panel of bloggers including Jeff Sandquist, Major Nelson, Twitter Maven. It was excellent to hear from these guys about what blogging means in this age and to a company like Microsoft. We heard a bit of policy stuff on Microsoft blogging, which allows their employees to blog and voice their opinions quite freely. Twitter came up and it was decided it was also just as important as traditional blogging. Jeff seemed to really like FriendFeed.

The blogging Panel

Open Source Software at Microsoft

A whole session on open source at Microsoft. Karri tooks us through a whole bunch of stuff as to what projects Microsoft are involved in and a bit about the Open Source Lab (an actual physical lab) at Microsoft dedicated to improving interop. Craig Wicks, a member of the OSS team was super interesting, as he gave his take on what it is like to actually work on open source at Microsoft on the IronRuby team.

Lunch

We were all given $14 each to spend at the Microsoft Cafe in the next building. Edmund and I shared a salad as I think our stomachs were still on Australian time. There was heaps to choose from though.

Live Mesh

One of my personal favourite sessions of the Summit. Jeff Hansen from the Live Mesh team came to talk to us about all the cool things happening in Mesh and Cloud Computing. Some of the stuff is under NDA but what I can say is that PDC will be huge! Lots of stuff happening.

XNA Community Games

Dave Mitchell from the Xbox team came and talked about XNA Game Studio and the Xbox Live Community Games program. We got a sneak preview at the new Xbox UI (which is very cool) and some avatars. He talked about developing community games and how they are published through the Live Community Games program.

Company Store

All session’d out, we got out of the room and went to visit the Microsoft company store. We each got given $80 to spend at the company store! How generous Leandro, thanks!

put to good useThe MS ECompanyStore

House of the Future

We took the MS Shuttle to the house of the future. Very very very cool. We visited the Microsoft Executive Briefing Center and got a tour around the House of the Future. Unfortunately we weren’t allowed to take pictures. Basically there were lots and lots of displays and lots and lots of RFID

free candy in the MS shuttles

Party and Xbox 360 comp

Pizza, beer, lots of Xbox’s, Rockband… a big party at the MS office in Bellevue. All the MSPs, speakers and some of the Xbox dev team were there.

Day 2

Joe Wilson

Joe Wilson is the Worldwide Director for DPE at Microsoft. He came and had a casual chat with us about the big picture and how MSPs and Microsoft fit into it.

Scott Guthrie’s Keynote

The highlight for most MSPs of the event, Scott Guthrie who also won the best presenter for the event, picked some topics directly from us and talked on them. Silverlight, cloud computing and WPF were some of the topics talked about, as well as some upcoming stuff that we can’t blog about…

MSPs with Scott

MSP Discussion

We had a discussion with Jen about the MSP program, what we liked and what we wanted improved as a kind of precursor to the workshop after lunch on shaping the program for the upcoming year.

Lunch

Lunch was with more lunch vouchers at another Microsoft Cafe.

Having lunch

Workshop

We did a lighting session to get ideas to improve the MSP program. We then ranked them and split into 3 groups to work on the top 3. Each group looked at the problem, worked on a solution and had to do a presentation at the end.

coming up with ideas

Astoria 2 / SQL

Pablo Castro gave a talk on Astoria. It was very cool as it is also related to some of the Live Mesh technologies. Basically Astoria allows you to interact with data using traditional HTTP POSTs and GETs.

Cloud Computing

David Lemphers, also an aussie talked about cloud computing from the infrastructure point of view. He basically went through how to build a cloud computing service from the data centre up. It was amazing looking at what actually goes into providing a cloud computing service.

Jobs at Microsoft

Carrie Read, who I’ve met personally quite a few times and who is such a great person did a presentation on Jobs at Microsoft and internships.

Andre Furtado

Andre is an Ex-MSP, a serial finalist in the Imagine Cup and now a Microsoft employee in Redmond. He talked about his experiences from being involved with the MSP program, Imagine Cup and gave us some tips for working at Microsoft.

Party at Lucky Strike

The private bar and bowling alley at Lucky Strike in Bellevue was hired out for our closing party. We had dinner and drinks, bowling and lots of Rockband on the big screen.

Edmund with the girls

Playing Rockband

Summary

Student Daze was an awesome experience, meeting MSPs from all over the world, and helping to shape the future of the program. We had tons of fun, and if you are an MSP, it’s definately something you should work towards achieving.

Luke
UWA MSP

We’ll elaborate a little more on the program and plan closer to the date, but for now – head over to imagine.wamsp.com.au and sign up so that you don’t lose your spot!

Don’t forget to tell / bring your friends!

For those who somehow missed the posters plastered around uni…

Mobile Smackdown!

Hannibal, Murdoch, B.A. Baracus and of course, face (i.e. the M-Team), took us on a wild ride around the current world of Windows Mobile devices, while injecting a bit of team spirit with swag throwers around the room and heaps of mini-mobile games that lead to giveaways of high-end devices such as the new Palm Treo and HTC Touch Diamond.

The M-Team:

And Colonel Decker even made an appearance:

Colonel Decker was also in on the party, travelling towards the M-Team’s location in realtime.

Between different demos people from the audience were brought up for miscellaneous games including, mobile Guitar Hero 3, eating cat food (!!!) for a mobile phone (3), and even a bench pressing competition. Who said that geeks can’t do push ups?

Congrats to all those who won things – especially the guys who ate the strudel & catfood and especially the guys who did the pushups and dispelled any myths about geeks being out of shape (I bet some of them are *cough* Wii Fit *cough* owners).

Some of the demo’ed devices (the on-screen interfaces reflect what is happening on the actual device):

One thing I was particularly impressed with was the lack of targeted competition bashing. There were small jabs, such as the consumption of apple & blackberry strudel, little reminders that sometimes it’s nice to be able to replace a battery and a small video about Google’s Android, but all in all it was kept friendly and humorous. Everyone was amicable – when someone emailed in to participate in a challenge and left the footer “Sent from my iPhone”, this was taken extremely well by the presenters. It’s nice to participate in an extremely fun (and loud) presentation about products and their capabilities rather than a clear competition bashing fest.

Google take a beating from CNet

There was also a viewing of the cool unboxing of the Omnia i900. Not a Microsoft movie (or Samsung) as such, but well worth the watch.

Kudos go out to the smackdown team (Windows Mobile in Australia, Rog42) as well who organised a massively awesome session with giveaways that literally, rained down from the sky!

Microsoft have had a very good relationship with Novell over their SUSE offering (although a quick search will show you that both companies have suffered a lot of online negative rap about these deals) although I’m still impressed that they would show it in a demo.

But I was blown up when Tux made a showing!

          

(and yeah, the photos are blurred – sorry )

• The Keynote started with a general TechEd collaboration video that emphasised MSDN and TechNet as community oriented sites
• Afterwords there were quick words from Tracy Fellows head of Microsoft in Australia, intKeyroducing the keynote speaker
• The Keynote speaker was Amit Mital lead (and one of the founders) of the Live Mesh team. He showed a video that emphasised connectivity between al devices (think tv, mobile, house (alarms, door locks), computers) via the cloud. So much so, that when a laptop gets destroyed in the movie the main actor gets a different machine and loads it up with his info and gets his own desktop back.
• Dr. Niel got up and demoed two instances of software + Services (the current mantra from Microsoft, emphasising a move to the cloud). He also “let slip” and showed off Live Mesh on his mobile (this was live, not recorded), by syncing photos between his mobile and laptop.

Photo Goodness:

Stay tuned for more!

Sporting over 3500 delegates who will participate in over 200 sessions TechEd Sydney just kicked off with an amazing KeyNote that included free runners, concept videos (hopefully widely available soon) and, of course, the keynote speech by Amit Mital, lead of the Live Mesh project.

For those who haven’t checked it out yet Live Mesh is designed to allow automatic synchronisation of files (and later settings, applications – you name it) between multiple devices.

As part of the tech demos one of the presenters “let slip” and, in a worldwide first, showed Live Mesh for mobile which automatically synced photos he was taking of the keynote with his laptop! With the promise of Mesh developer APIs in a few months (think synch across all devices, even non-Microsoft, such an iPhone or your friendly coffee maker), Mesh is definitely something to keep your eyes on.

There’s something for everyone – technical sessions on every type of Microsoft (and some, just general) technology that you can think of, break out areas to relax and play Xbox, sandpit for mucking around on live systems and food (literally everywhere). 3 days of heaven

Stay tuned for photos and more updates as we progress through the next few days!

If you are a student and haven’t already registered, go to this page and register for FREE today.

The Student Day will be comprised of two sessions and includes the launch of Dreamspark in Australia, the Microsoft program giving students free Microsoft software such as Visual Studio 2008 Professional.

WA MSPs Luke and Oren will both be at Tech.Ed so we hope to see you there!

Luke
UWA MSP 

Tickets

We allowed for 220 tickets (the hall had 211 spaces) – all of which were sold out the week before the event. During the event we had about 230 participants (thank you to our volunteers for running around counting!) from which we got about 200 feedback forms. Here’s the general breakdown of participation:

As you can see, the majority of attendees were UWA students – although we had a great showing from other schools. Future events will focus on bringing in more students from other universities and attracting a larger crowd of year 11-12 students.

Session Feedback

Overall the feedback for the event was excellent – 99.7% of people indicated that they would like a return event and indicated that the general direction we went in was a good one. As you can see below most of the sessions fared well, although there are a number of observations after the graph:

1. The worst faring session was the 5 minute talk by iiNet who were one of our monetary sponsors.
   Next Time: we will endeavour to ensure that all talks by our sponsors are given by industry people and are tailored to the audience.
2. The Q&A session received excellent feedback although there were quite a few people who did not rate it either due to them not being there at that time or due to them believing it to not be relevant to their area of interest.
   Next Time: we will try to include representatives from the graphics and storyboard side of the industry

Overall Feedback

We were impressed by the level of written feedback that people provided and here’s the general breakdown:

1. Technical problems need to be sorted out before the event (the Xbox 360 was not responding during the demo, although it did wake up towards the end of the event)
2. Code demo needs to be given a bit slower to cater for non-coders
3. Presentations need to be more interactive

Summary

The event was an awesome success, most people enjoyed themselves and walked away wanting more – as did we. We have a whole slew of ideas for next year, and we’ll be asking for your ideas throught the year – for now though, we are always looking for more ideas so either post in the comments or just send us an email at uwa@wamsp.com.au.

Thanks again to all those who attended – we hope to see you, and everyone that missed out, next year!

]]> http://blogs.student-partners.com.au/wamsp/2008/05/quiet-before-the-storm/feed/ 0 http://blogs.student-partners.com.au/wamsp/2008/05/something-big-has-happened/ http://blogs.student-partners.com.au/wamsp/2008/05/something-big-has-happened/#comments Thu, 08 May 2008 14:48:05 +0000 oren http://www.wamsp.com.au/?p=70 Wooooh! We just got back from Game Camp ‘08 and despite a number of technical issues that caused some glitches when transferring our XNA demo to our Xbox 360, we had an awesome time!

Clocking in at around 230 participants with an XNA overview & demo, a number of industry and university presenters, and topped up with an industry Q&A panel the event was roaring success. There’s lots of feedback (thanks if one of these is yours!), I’ll let everyone know what the main points were when we finish collating it all.

Thanks to everyone who came along – I hope you enjoyed it all, we certainly enjoyed putting it on and are looking forward to WA Game Camp ‘09!

P.S. Keep on the lookout for source code, slides, photos and more from the event…

Register Now at xna.wamsp.com.au

WA MSPs Oren, Daniel and Luke joined the Microsoft Crew for Heroes Happen {2008} at the Perth Convention Centre today!

The event was to launch three major Microsoft products, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008.

Following the Keynote were individual tracks for each product detailing the new features and technical aspects of each. It was very informative, and the new features look awesome.

Each delegate got a pack of goodies, including a full version of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise.

If you go to Curtin or UWA and would like a free 90-day trial DVD of Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite please contact us and we’ll organise you a copy.

More pictures of the event can be found on flickr.

If you want to register or be notified of Microsoft events like this in the future checkout this link.