Background

First, a quick bit of background to let you know where I’m coming from. I’m a self-taught C# and .NET programmer – so this is the first book I’ve read on the subject. I wasn’t expecting to learn much about C# itself in the book, more the technologies that were added in .NET 3.5 (LINQ, extension functions, etc). Luckily, I was pleasantly surprised.

Look and Feel

Overall, the book reads like a technical manual. Marshall writes in a very dry fashion, and it’s not the type of book you would read from end-to-end for the sake of reading a book. The use of code samples and real life examples help solidify lessons are fantastic to understand the technical jargon used. All of the paragraphs are kept short and concise are often intermingled with MSDN style documentation and examples.

Typically, the learning curve in each chapter is quite sharp, starting with basic knowledge about the subject and rapidly accelerating to the newer and complex features that .NET 3.5 introduces. The chapters are very content heavy, but this load is lightened by attempting to replicate the examples are trying out new knowledge in Visual Studio while reading. Mixing reading with coding is probably the best way to maximise the learning from this book.

Target Audience

Marshall requests a basic knowledge of programming and Object Orientated concepts. I would also add that a basic knowledge of C#, .NET and Visual Studio are highly recommended. This book is by no means a ‘C# for Dummies’ style guide. The book is more angled towards .NET 2.0 programmers looking to upgrade, Java (or other OO) programmers looking to switch languages or a Computer Science student who wishes to learn .NET.

Content

To say the least, this book is fantastic. Marshall demonstrates her mastery of .NET in the deep level of knowledge presented in this book. There were a great number of things that I learnt for the first time while reading this book, even basic concepts of C# (did you know that C# has a ?? operator?). The topics presented spread from basic Visual Studio usage to LINQ, delegates and the operations of the .NET Garbage Collector.

I’ve learnt a massive amount from this book, and am much more confident in using some of the new features in .NET 3.5 such as Lambda functions and LINQ. The book also contained quite a lot that I would have never learnt from my self-learning such as the internal workings of the Garbage Collector and using some advanced debugging and profiling tools.

Conclusion

Reading this book was beyond valuable for me. I have improved my coding techniques and now understand other coding examples much easier. I would highly recommend this book to anyone with some experience with Object Orientated languages and techniques who wishes to start coding in C# .NET 3.5.

More info and books at http://www.mspress.com.au/ 

- Daniel Paoliello
Curtin MSP

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

Either way, take some time to check out http://talkingaboutwindows.com/ – here you’ll find videos portraying all aspects of the Windows 7 development and the Industry’s response to it. Not only this, but below each video is a comment section where, unlike watching the same video on YouTube, you are likely to get a response from Microsoft.

(As a side note, its also a pretty cool demonstration of the power of Silverlight)

- Daniel
Curtin MSP

I thought I might as well work on my MCPD as .NET is one of my primary tools I use to write software.

I got myself a copy of Microsoft .NET Framework – Application Developer Foundation which is part of the self-paced training kit for the MCTS Exam 70-536.

At 794 pages this book is pretty huge. I was kind of overwhelmed at first. However when I started self-studying I found each chapter is broken down into bite-sized lessons. Each lesson is generally specified for about 40 mins, but I found I could read the lesson, and do the included exercise in about half that time. This was great for me, where often I’d only have 20-30 mins here and there to spend on this, and I could easily start a lesson knowing I could finish it off in the time I had free between other stuff I was doing.

The book itself has 16 chapters (listed below) on the fundamentals of the Microsoft .NET Framework. Although it says it expects the reader to have some experience, I found it explained well enough for even newer developers to understand.

Every lesson is followed by both a summary and a small multi-choice lesson review, which is great as we know the key to learning is repetition. Additionally each chapter also gives a summary and a review, along with case scenarios and suggested practices.

Like most Microsoft Press books, this book also comes with a companion CD. This includes practice tests and exam questions from each chapter. One thing I found on the CD was an included PDF of the entire book! This was great for downloading to my phone and notebook and being able to read a lesson when I had a spare 10 mins.

A couple of things I found useful were:

• The small lesson sizes
• “Real World” examples and best practices
• The integration of lessons and exam objectives
• Mini labs

Microsoft also provides resources for universities to teach Microsoft Certification through the IT Academy program. This would allow you to learn through some structured program at your university.

For the rest of us, the self-study training kits are a more cost-effective approach than a third party institution, which for me as a student is not really a feasible choice. But the book provided everything I need to pass the exam.

You can get a copy of this book at www.mspress.com.au.

I also have a copy of Microsoft .NET Framework – Application Developer Foundation to give away to a UWA Student, along with a second-shot exam voucher. To enter, please leave any comment below, and I will randomly draw a winner within the next week. Please use your @student.uwa.edu.au E-mail address in the comment.

Luke
Aussie MSP Lead
The University of Western Australia

The Windows 7 blog has been updated with just this, communication back to the community on changes made directly based on users’ feedback.

Check it out.

Luke
Aussie MSP Lead
The University of Western Australia

Check it out!

Windows Vista Resource Kit, Second Edition

By Mitch Tulloch, Tony Northrup, and Jerry Honeycutt with the Windows Vista Team
ISBN: 9780735625969

An in-depth resource kit with all the information you need to administer Windows Vista (now with info on SP1). Sign up to download the entire e-book from here (PDF, 44.8 MB).

Microsoft® Visual C#® 2008 Express Edition: Build a Program Now!

By Patrice Pelland
ISBN: 9780735625426

Not sure where to start on Visual Studio, .NET and C#? Then grab a copy of this book and Visual Studio Express and start learning! Sign up to download the entire e-book from here (PDF, 7.8 MB)

• Windows Server 2008
• Visual Studio 2008 Professional (2005 also available)
• SQL Server 2008 Developer
• Expression Studio 2
• XNA Creators Club – 12 month subscription (via Game Studio 2.0 but don’t forget to check out 3.0!)

Dreamspark 2.0 - new look website

Shibboleth to the rescue! (UWA login)

Tip for UWA students: Login with your student number and library password (i.e. card barcode), hopefully the interface will become somewhat more user friendly as we progress. For those who really care, UWA are using Shibboleth.

The biggest feature of course if the ability to create games and distribute them through Xbox Live Community Games.

Remember, as a student you can get access to XNA Game Studio free of charge through DreamSpark!

Luke
UWA MSP

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?

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

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!

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…

Note: This post relates to Microsoft Internships for the Software Desgin Engineer (SDE) and the Software Design Engineer in Test (SDET) positions. It is also aimed at Australian students but might also be helpful to anyone applying for a job at Microsoft.

Microsoft offers US winter (AU summer) internships to Australian students currently completing university each year for the 3 months Dec – Feb. The internships are opportunities to work with a real Microsoft development team in Redmond. They are paid positions, including flights to the States. The process generally begins around the middle of the year, with offers going out around September. For this year, 2008, the offers have just been made.

Preparation

Preparation is the key to getting an offer. You proceed through a variety of interviews on varying technical content. Here is how I prepared.

- Subscribe to Channel 8 and do a search on the archives for internships, interns, jobs and interviews. Channel 8 is a MSDN blog with a huge amount of quality content for students. Update: They now have a Careers section which is awesome!

- Subscribe to the Microsoft Jobs Blog. Also read through the archives. This blog has a huge numbers of tips, reader questions, sample interview questions and other content to help you get your offer.

- Study all the content at MIS Laboratory. This page has a good number of links to content that help, especially with behavioral interview style questions. It goes through the STAR technique and other techniques on how to answer questions such as “How do you move mount Fuji?”

- Become a fan to the Microsoft Careers Facebook Page and ask questions to the HR teams and checkout information posted there.

- Google/Bing for interview questions. I spent a huge amount of time just putting in queries that relate to questions. You can learn a lot from the experiences of others, and often people will have put up solutions to the problems they received.

- Practice solving problems. Actually do them. I went back over my previous labs from units at university that I knew would help me, such as writing simple string functions. Also, I competed in the ACM Programming Competition which was excellent preparation for writing code to interesting problems.

- Practice interview questions. Actually do them. You can find lists of interview questions online. Youtube has a lot of interview videos. But you need to focus on the doing and not just the reading.

- I found some very helpful practice is to re-write basically library functions. One way to do this is look at the basic C functions such as strstr, strtok, etc and re-write their functionality in another language, such as C# or Java. Look at basic string manipulation, number calculation functions, etc. Translating the functionality heaps you understand it, and is especially helpful if you choose to use another language in the interview.

- Apply for other Internships. As I personally have not a lot of time, I only applied for one other. A Google Internship position in Sydney. Not only does this force you to prepare, but it also help introduce you to some of the processes that these companies use.

- Ask for help. Try to find someone who has already been through the process (successful or not). You can normally find someone by asking your local Microsoft Student Partner.

- Learn about the products and determine what you’d like to work on. Generally interviewers want to see specific interest rather than, “I’m happy to do anything.” It shows you are focused and know what you want. So research the products.

- Read the book. How to move Mount Fuji.

- Brush up on your maths. Particularly discrete maths and basic binary maths.

Some more help preparation links (thanks Google )

- http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-google.html
- http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/five-essential-phone-screen-questions
- http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/what-you-need-to-know

Process

Getting an internship offer is a multi-stage process. Here is how it worked this year. It may change, but it will probably follow a similar format.

1. Respond to the advertisement for the internship when it comes out around mid year. It is normally posted on http://blogs.msdn.com/msozacademic/ and we’ll most likely post it on here too.

2. You will generally start off by sending your Resume by E-mail to the Australian recruiters in Redmond.

3. First lot of questions come through by E-mail. You basically fill out all the questions and send them back. The questions primarily relate to your current studies and previous experience in computing.

4. The next stage is a phone interview. It was done by HR recruiters from Kelly Services. It went around 30 mins long and tests you on very basic knowledge and problem solving skills. Some sample questions are:
- What is a stack/queue? How do you test a stack/queue? 
- Explain the differences in memory management between C#/Java with C/C++.
- Explain the differences between Language A and Language B.
- The 3 light switch problem
- Problem solving a slow elevator in a tall building (process question) 

5. If you pass the phone interview stage the next step was to attend technical interviews at the Microsoft office in Melbourne (Freshwater Place). Melbourne was the place for everyone I personally know (even Sydney guys) this time around, however some people have been interviewed in Sydney as well in the past. For us Perth guys, Microsoft flew us, all expenses paid to Melbourne for the interviews, and put us up in a nice hotel for the night. The technical interview stage comprised of 3x 30 min interviews. Two were technical, and one was HR. For each of the technical interviews you had to solve a particular problem in whatever language you wanted.

Result

The recruiting team did an awesome job, and had our results out to us within a week. It’s either a good E-mail or a not so good one.

Other Tips and Hints

- The interviewers are not trying to trick you. So just step through the problem and approach it using the processes you have learnt.
- Believe in yourself. It’s not just about smarts. Some smarter people missed out while others have got in.
- Prepare as if it is a real full-time, permanent job. That is, do your very best.

Luke
MSP at UWA, Ex-Microsoft Intern

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!

Often an issue when showing off aspects or presenting a demo with Windows Mobile is that the screen is too small, and you have to move your hand over the screen in order to interact with the device (making a PDA->Camera->Projector combination difficult), while devices with TV out are extremely rare (although the HTC Touch Diamond and Touch Pro will both have HTC’s extUSB, which has USB, Audio and TV Out).

So the solution? My Mobiler. This allows you to not only display the contents of your PDA’s screen on your computer, put also control it from there as well. It also features screen scaling and by IP or ActiveSync connection (making wired or wireless both options). Best of all it has a small resource footprint and is free!

I also use My Mobiler when adding in a number of new contacts or calendar items as it is a lot easier to do via my PC than my PDA (even though my PDA does have a full 50-something key keyboard).

So, My Mobiler  – De-Mobilising Windows Mobile and Re-Mobilising your Mobile demos and Mobile’s data!

- Daniel
Curtin MSP

Tech.Ed is of the largest developer conferences in Australia and is a great way to learn from the experts on the latest technologies and connect with other developers.

Day 2, on Tuesday the 2nd of September will be Student Day, so check it out if you are in Sydney at that time.

More information and online registration can be found at http://www.microsoft.com.au/teched.

Codeplex is self-described as “Microsoft’s open source project hosting web site”. So, while there are projects on there that Microsoft has started (eg AJAX Control Toolkit, bluePortal, Gimme and many others); there are thousands that are being run by individual teams. In fact, Microsoft has gone as far as to say guarantee it “does not control, review, revise, endorse or distribute the third party projects on this site” – ensuring that the community-oriented aspect of the Open Source projects is not questioned (personally, I believe that some of the projects should be reviewed by Microsoft…).

What Codeplex Offers for Developers

• File space and a great looking site to release their project
• A community of like-minded developers
• An integrated Issue Tracker and Discussion system; allowing the community to participate as well
• Ability to use any technology to create a project, and any licence to release it
• A Team Foundation Server for Version Control and Work Item tracking
• WebTrends to gain statistics on people viewing, interacting with and downloading your project
• SVN support (for those not wanting to use TFS)
• A completely Ad-less interface

What Codeplex Offers Everybody

Mainly, an easy and excellent way to find Open Source projects and communicate with the people managing and running these projects. To keep up to date, Codeplex also allows Syndications (RSS) for all projects - allowing you to stay up to date easily.

Codeplex is also working on the “Codeplex Client” that will allow anybody to get any piece of code from Codeplex without having to be a Contributor, Developer, Coordinator or even without requiring a registered account at all.

Codeplex is also always trying to improve itself; and so is self-listed (a MetaListing?).

Some Cool Projects

These are just some things that I thought were pretty nifty

For Developers

• AJAX Control Toolkit – An extremely useful set of ASP.NET AJAX controls
• BlogEngine.NET – An ASP.NET based blogging app
• Silverglobe – A Silverlight-based 3D globe\map
• Script# – Compile C# into JavaScript
• NetMassDownloader – Allows batch downloading of the .NET source code
• IronPython – Python for .NET (with Visual Studio 2005 integration)

For Everyone

• Rawr – For people who love World of Warcraft
• BeyondPod – RSS and Podcast manager for Windows Mobile
• GMobileSync – Allows Google Calendars to sync with Windows Mobile
• GameKnight – A Nintendo GameBoy and GameBoy Colour emulator (built entirely in C# and DirectX)
• Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manager – Allows multiple desktops in Windows

If you are spot a cool project, or are working on one, leave a link in the comments!

- Daniel
Curtin MSP