Microsoft Student Partners

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!

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!

Sign up now at: imagine.wamsp.com.au

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…

Straight from the grapevine it looks like great things are coming for Semester 2! Apart form the launch of Dreamspark (coming soon!) we are in early stages of preperation for a developer oriented event at UWA.

As usual there’ll be heaps of free giveaways and aawesome prizes to pick up – so make sure to stay tuned for more details!

Got suggestions? Questions? Anything else? Feel free to leave a comment below…

This is the first year WA has had Microsoft Student Partners, and don’t we have a lot planned!!

Already, at Curtin, we have decided we shall be running a version of XNA Game Camp and Creating Unit Testing in Visual Studio 2008.

For those of you who don’t know, XNA is the gaming platform that has been developed by Microsoft. With XNA you can develop and deploy games for both PC and XBox 360 and soon to be Zune! If you ever wanted to start learning how to develop games, then here will be your chance! Your local MSP will have more information about when the event will be run at your university.

Unit Testing has been integrated into Visual Studio 2008. Now you can create unit tests for sections of code, create test groups, run tests and view the results. We will be showing you how you can maximize the use of this within the VS 2K8 package and hopefully make your life a little easier when your lecturer asks “Where’s your tests and results for your modules?”

Allan
MSP (Curtin)