Academic tech·days 09

Markus Stolze is Professor for User Interfaces at HSR Hochschule für Technik Rapperswil. He is also a member of the recently founded Microsoft Innovation Center at the Hochschule für Technik Rapperswil. Markus has more than 10 years of experience doing industrial research in the areas of User Experience for decision support, eCommerce, and business services.

In my presentation I will introduce the basic architecture of Rich Internet Applications and the new user experiences that they enable. In particular, I will demo some of the Rich Internet Applications that have been developed with Microsoft Silverlight and I will walk through a short illustration of how an application can be rapidly developed using Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend. I will finish the presentation by pointing to advanced features of Silverlight.

In his role as Development Platform Advisor, Olaf Feldkamp advises Swiss software companies regarding the Microsoft development platform. He has conducted several technical hands-on workshops and is a regular speaker at Microsoft events. His background includes a degree in computer science, a postgraduate degree in business planning and several years of work experience as a developer in major projects for the Swiss government.

Windows Mobile-based devices are widely deployed around the world. Much of what drives the popularity of these highly portable devices is their rapidly improving hardware capabilities. Windows Mobile and the .NET Compact Framework put these powerful device capabilities and much more into easy reach of developers. One of the main goals of the latest Windows Mobile developer platform was to simplify line of business application development and deployment. This session starts with an introduction to Windows Mobile development and runs through a sample application which includes SQL Server Mobile.

Adam Kortylewski is a full-time information technology student at the University of Basel. Parallel to his studies Adam is working 20% of his time as a Lead Microsoft Student Partner Basel at Microsoft Switzerland. As a Microsoft Student Partner, game development / Microsoft XNA is Adam`s area of expertise.

This presentation gives introductory level overview of games development with Microsoft XNA. XNA is a .NET based game development framework, which enables game development for Windows-based PCs, Xbox 360 and Zune. This presentation explains what XNA is, what kind of tools XNA Game Studio 3.0 provides for a hobbyist or academic game developers and how to get started with games development with XNA.

Nils Thuerey is a post-doctoral researcher at the Computer Graphics Laboratory at ETH Zürich. In March 2007, he received his PhD in computer science from the University of Erlangen. He has worked in the field of high-performance fluid simulations with free surfaces using, among others, lattice-Boltzmannn methods. The algorithms are now available as part of the open source application Blender. In addition, he has worked on the topic of real-time fluid simulations for computer games, in collaboration with the AGEIA research group.

The topic of this presentation will be the ETH Game Programming Lecture that is taught for the third time now this year. Groups of three students each have to realize a complete game for the Xbox360 from scratch within the 14 weeks of a semester. To help them organize the process, regular meetings are held in which the students can present their ideas, alpha- and beta-versions, or testing results. The talk will give an overview of the course, show some of the impressive games created in the last years, and give an overview of our experiences with the XNA programming environment.

Jean-Pierre is involved as project leader in applied research projects since 10 years, mainly in the building of new solutions with new technologies for various entreprises in different domains (user interface, eTourism, business processes, mobile applications, etc.).He's actually teaching the industrialization of Software Engineering based on VSTFS.

This presentation demonstrates how Mesh enables sobees application to synchronize data and metadata between multiple computers and users in a "Software + Services" approach. sobees is a powerful social desktop aggregator developed by Swiss startup deskNET SA located in EPFL's Parc Scientifique. deskNET is a Microsoft partner specialized in rich applications development based on .NET 3.5 SP1, WPF and Silverlight.