Academia Students Feed

Join us on Facebook!

edunhill — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 07:49:00 GMT

We’ve recently set up a new facebook page which features a regular stream of student content including this blog! (in fact if you’re reading this on facebook then you probably don’t need to read on ;))

Please take a look at the site, become a fan and let us know what you think on our wall. We also have a monthly student newsletter called The StudentZine which is a digest of the best stuff from facebook.

Technorati Tags: Facebook,studentzine,studentzone,microsoft,students

Windows Azure Online Training for Students

edunhill — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:28:47 GMT

This will probably be particularly interesting for those of you who read my previous post on free student access to Azure. ICS, our partner on this offer are running a series of online training sessions later this week specifically for students.

Each session will cover the following:

- Overview and demonstration of Windows Azure
- How you can benefit from your free trial
- Understanding Windows Azure and the Azure platform
- Azure pricing and Proof of Concept offerings
- Next steps in your Azure adoption
- Azure resources available to you
- Q&A session

You can find out more and register for free here.

Technorati Tags: Azure,.NET,Students

Imagine Cup 2010 – Compete Now!

edunhill — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:27:32 GMT

On Monday we launched this years Imagine Cup competition in the UK.

The Imagine Cup is the worlds largest student technology competition with thousands of the best and brightest students from around the world competing for the opportunity to represent their country at the international finals (this year to be held in Warsaw) and ultimately win in their category.

The competition has four categories this year:

Software Design

This year we’ve worked with some of the UK’s leading charities to provide you with a selection of project briefs to form the basis of your entry. There’s a good range of briefs all addressing real world problems identified by our partner charities. I would really recommend using these briefs (although this is not compulsory) as they will get you off to a flying start.

You can find out more and download the project briefs here.

Game Design

As ever we anticipate Games Design being a very popular category this year. The competition is largely the same as last year but with one key difference – you can now use either XNA or Silverlight to build your game.

We are also planning on running a series of X48 type events where all entries would be submitted as Round 1 entries – once we have more details I’ll post them here.

Find out more about the Games Design competition here…

Digital Media

The Digital Media competition is designed for your team to create a video as interesting and as enticing as possible so that people want to pass it on, share it, and get the entire world to vote for it. The videos that become the most viral - win! This is a chance for those who've always enjoyed creating videos and multimedia experiences, to develop one that can change the global community.

Visit the Digital Media competition page to learn more.

IT Challenge

IT Challenge highlights the art and science of developing, deploying, and maintaining IT systems that are efficient, functional, robust and secure. You, as a growing IT professional may think you have the base set of tools and techniques, but are you ready to consider a customer's unique needs and configurations that will make all of the pieces of a specific system fit together?

Visit the IT Challenge competition page to learn more.

Now is the time to jump in so check out the UK site, register and compete!

Technorati Tags: Imagine Cup,Student Competition,XNA,Silverlight,.NET

Try Microsoft’s Cloud Platform for Free!

edunhill — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:02:25 GMT

Windows Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform allowing you to build and deploy scalable .NET applications online.

Cloud Computing is a hot topic and likely to be a key part of of many organisations IT strategy moving forward. As a student now is the time to learn more!

We are making a limited number of developer accounts available to students for free - all you have to do is register here being sure to select ‘Student’ in the audience category drop down and using the promo code ‘blog’.

Once you sign up you will receive an email with your login details and links to help you get started.

This offer is strictly limited so if you want to get ahead in the field of cloud computing you should register now!

Technorati Tags: Cloud Computing,Windows Azure,.NET,Student

Imagine Cup; UK Bags 1st Place in Short Film and 3rd in Games Development

edunhill — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:19:19 GMT

We’re now all back from Cairo and fully recovered from the heat and sleep deprivation. The great news is that across the board the UK teams excelled with both the Short Film and Games Development making it on stage at the final.

Our Short Film team (Fulham Four) were from the London Film Academy and created an excellent short featuring a mummy particularly keen on interior design which went down very well with the judges and bagged the top spot. Once we have their film online I’ll post a link.

Sanguine Labs, our Games Development team haled from Bournemouth University and beat off stiff competition to secure third place with their game DEFILE of Eden.

Both our Software and Embedded teams placed in the top 12 internationally and our IT Challenge competitor in the top 10. Overall excellent results considering at the beginning of the competition there were more than 300,000 students in the mix! For all the results see the official Imagine Cup website.

Everyone had a great time and the highlight was definitely the closing ceremony held in front of the pyramids (see above photo). Next year the Imagine Cup final will be held in Warsaw so start thinking about your entries now and you might be joining us next year! Visit imaginecup.com to find out more.

Technorati Tags: Imagine Cup,Students,Microsoft,Cairo

Student Celebration Day Videos

edunhill — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 16:13:00 GMT

Just as we’re heading off to Cairo for the Imagine Cup worldwide finals I want to give you a flashback to the UK final event…

Previously I published the slides from all of the Microsoft Research talks delivered on the day and now, finally I have the videos online!

Getting from A to B: Fast Route Finding Using Slow Computers from Ed Dunhill on Vimeo.

Curing Cancer, Halting Global Disease Outbreaks, Preventing Dangerous Climate Change from Ed Dunhill on Vimeo.

Proving that Software Eventually Does Something Good from Ed Dunhill on Vimeo.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft Research,Students,Imagine Cup,Route Finding,Computational Ecology,Termination Bugs

Cairo here we come...

edunhill — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:17:00 GMT

Regular readers will know all about the Imagine Cup but for the uninitiated it is the worlds largest student technology competition which Microsoft runs annually. 2009 has been a bumper year for the UK with 14 students travelling to Egypt this Friday to represent the UK in the Software Design, Embedded Development, Games Development, Short Film and IT competitions.

We will be sure to let you know how the teams get on in Cairo but we’re certainly hoping at least one of them will be bringing home some silverware!

If you want to support the UK Software Design Team (TKCL from Kings College) then your in luck because this year for the first time part of the judging is based on a public vote. All you need to do is visit peopleschoice.imaginecup.com find TKCL (toward the bottom of the page and click vote!

You can follow all the teams on the UK Imagine Cup Blog, YouTube Channel and of course on Twitter.

Technorati Tags: Imagine Cup,Microsoft,Kings College,Software Design,Student

Office Ultimate for £38.95

edunhill — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 16:59:17 GMT

Just a quick signpost to the Ultimate Steal, a programme that allows UK students purchase Office for a seriously reduced price.

I’m sure I’ve blogged about it before but thought it was worth resurfacing as its a cracking deal and for those of you in your final year your last chance to grab a bargain.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft Office,Student,Ultimate Steal

Getting Started with Azure #1

edunhill — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:06:27 GMT

Windows Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform allowing deployment of .NET applications with flexible scaling. My colleague Paolo recently wrote a great introductory article for our Faculty Connection newsletter which outlines the fundamentals.

Over the coming months I will be writing a series of posts focussed on getting you started developing with Azure. In this first post I will walk you through setting up the development environment.

The development environment for Azure consists of Visual Studio and the Azure SDK. You can user either the free Visual Studio 2008 Web Developer Express Edition or a full version of Visual Studio 2008 (such as those available through MSDNAA and DreamSpark). For this article I will be using Windows 7 as my operating system but you can also use Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008.

Once you have installed Visual Studio please update it to download SP1 which includes .NET 3.5 SP1 both of which are requirements for the Azure SDK. Finally, before installing the SDK you need to enable ASP.NET and WCF HTTP Activation. To do this on Windows Vista or 7 follow these steps:

1. From the Start menu, choose Control Panel | Programs | Programs and Features.

2. Click Turn Windows Features On or Off.

3. Under Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5.1, select Windows Communication Foundation HTTP Activation.

4. Under Internet Information Services, expand World Wide Web Services.

5. Under Application Development Features, select ASP.NET.

6. Under Common HTTP Features, choose Static Content.

7. Click OK to install the selected features.

You can now download and install the Azure SDK and the Azure Tools for Visual Studio. The Azure SDK provides a simulation of the cloud on your desktop so you can test applications locally and the Tools for Visual Studio include the Windows Azure project types.

We’re now set to develop our Azure web application, for this example we will build a simple ‘Hello World’ application but using the twist is that rather than running it as a single instance as you traditionally would we will fire it up with 5 instances.

First open Visual Studio, select ‘File>New>Project...’ From the ‘Project types’ box select Cloud Service and from the ‘Templates’ box select ‘Web Cloud Service’, enter a name for the project and click OK.

When the template loads you will notice in the ‘Solution Explorer’ we have a solution with two projects. The first project contains the cloud service which features two XML files containing the service configuration (.cscfg) and the service definition (.csdef). The second project is the web application itself where you will find a blank default.aspx file which is familiar in traditional ASP.NET development. For the purposes of this tutorial we will make a small change to the default.aspx file so double click it and in the left hand pane add the text ‘Hello World’ between the ‘<div>’ tags. You can now press F5 to setup the development fabric and deploy your application for local test.

Your application should then launch in your web browser and display ‘Hello World’. If you look in your system tray you should notice an icon displaying two gears, this represents the Azure Development Fabric. Right click the icon and select ‘Show Development Fabric UI’. In the interface you can expand the application we have just built and you will see that there is one instance running. A single instance is the default configuration for a cloud application but if we want to scale our application and run multiple instances it is a simple matter of changing the XML configuration file I mentioned earlier. To do this go back to Visual Studio, stop debugging and open the .cscfg file. In the left hand pane you should be able to see a tag containing ‘Instances count="1"’, change the 1 to 5 and press F5 to rebuild your application. If you reopen the Development Fabric UI you will now see that there are 5 instances of our application running.

As you can see it is very easy to run up multiple instances of our application and this works exactly the same when you deploy your application to the cloud which I will cover in my next post on Azure.

Technorati Tags: Windows Azure,Visual Studio,Cloud Computing,.NET

Free MCTS Certification Through DreamSpark

edunhill — Fri, 08 May 2009 17:08:28 GMT

For a limited time Microsoft is offering free vouchers to sit an MCTS exam through the DreamSpark programme. The MCTS (Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist) stream is aimed at developers and IT professionals and is available in multiple flavours relevant to a raft of developer and infrastructure technologies. Full list of MCTS certs.

DreamSpark is available to all HE students through direct verification as well as schools through an onsite admin. If you are a school pupil and would like access please direct a member of staff at your school to the sign up page so they can register the school for free.

As well as free exams DreamSpark provides a range of Microsoft products for free:

Find out more about the free MCTS offer.

Technorati Tags: MCTS,MCP,Microsoft,Student,DreamSpark

Student Celebration Day Slides

edunhill — Fri, 01 May 2009 10:31:00 GMT

To follow on from yesterday’s post I wanted to share the slides from the MSR talks:

MSR Overview - Andrew Herbert
Getting from A to B: fast route-finding using slow computers - Simon Peyton-Jones
Curing Cancer, Halting global Disease Outbreaks and averting Dangerous Climate Change - Drew Purves
Proving that programs eventually do something good - Byron Cook

Videos will follow next week.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft Research,Imagine Cup,MSP

Student Celebration Day

edunhill — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 14:12:23 GMT

Yesterday we held a big event at MSR (Microsoft Research) Cambridge to celebrate the success of UK MSPs and Imagine Cup Contestants.

The day included a series of fascinating talks from MSR and Microsoft (slides and video to follow shortly) and culminated in an award ceremony for MSPs and Imagine Cup winners.

Team TKCL (Kings College) with their route finding application Pioneer won the Software Development competition and will be representing the UK in Cairo later this year. Runners up were Vision Creative from Reading/Aston with their CityCycle application and TravelPrint from Aberystwyth University.

We also highlighted the success we have had in Games, I'm positive that the 22 teams competing in round 2 of the competition will produce some awesome games and we’ll end up taking some of them to Cairo.

MSP awards were as follows:

Imagine Cup Registration Award – Andrew Smylie
Ultimate Steal Award – Andrew Smylie
DreamSpark Award – Gareth Young
Most Innovative Event – Honourable mention – Gareth Young, Winner – Warren Rieutort-Louis
MSP Star Award – Runner up – Sergei Golubev, Winner – Chris Alexander

We encouraged the use of twitter throughout so you can check out the reaction on the hash tag #imaginecup.

Congratulations to all those who won a prize and thank you to all the other students that travelled to Cambridge for the event.

As mentioned above I’ll shortly make the slides from the event available and we’re hoping to have the videos on Channel8 next week.

Technorati Tags: Imagine Cup,Students,Microsoft Research

MSDNAA Software HowTo Video

edunhill — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 19:43:55 GMT

MSDNAA is Microsoft's subscription for technical schools/colleges and universities which allows them to offer their students access to a whole raft of Microsoft Software for free.

Access is granted in one of two ways - either physically (an administrator downloads and burns relevant software and then lends the discs out to students) or online (the administrator uploads students email addresses into the system which generates and sends credentials to each student so they can login and download the software they need directly). If you're a member of staff at a secondary school/college/university who wants to find out how you can get MSDNAA then drop me an email, if you've already got it and want to start administering it online then take a look at this video.

If you're a student and want to find out if your institution has MSDNAA then you can do a search (if you can't find your institution then why not send your tutor an email with a link to this post ;)).

If you have been emailed a login for the online system and are wondering how to get started and download some free software then you're in luck, one of my counterparts in the States Hilary Pike has put together a great video tutorial.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Software,Students,MSDNAA,ELMS

IT Academy Student Pass - Free eLearning

edunhill — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 13:31:54 GMT

A little while back I posted about a great new programme we launched which gives students free access to official Microsoft eLearning courses.

To sign up you need a unique code which authenticates you as a student, the great news is these codes are now available (along with a bunch of free software) from DreamSpark. For more information about DreamSpark take a look at my posts here and here and to see exactly what's included in IT Academy Student Pass take a look at the official site.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft eLearning,DreamSpark,IT Academy,Certification,Student Pass

Imagine Cup Registrations

ukacademia — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 14:44:17 GMT

Hello Everyone,

Interest for the Imagine Cup has been strong and we can confirm the various categories are now open for competition. From experience we know that the next couple of months will be key in getting great UK representation in the Imagine Cup.

Here are just a few of the reasons for encouraging your students to compete:

- PR: The Imagine Cup attracts the attention of both regional and national newspapers, together with technology and education press and news websites such as the BBC. Having students from your university compete in the Imagine Cup is great for raising the profile of your university in two important ways. Firstly it demonstrates the quality of your graduates to IT employers and makes them more attractive as employees (e.g. Dominic Green, UK winner of the 2008 competition) and secondly, it attracts new students to your university.

- Skills Development: Fundamentally the Imagine Cup is about helping students get real world experience with Microsoft technology. The skills learned during the various competitions compliment their studies and are invaluable when students apply for jobs with IT companies.

- Students Inspiration: With every technology interest area catered for, the competition is a great way to channel students’ passion for technology out of class.

We want as many UK institutions and students to get involved with the Imagine Cup as possible, and to help you participate we provide:

- Giveaways for students: Every week we give away web cams and Starbucks vouchers. We also hold a monthly draw for a Dell laptop, providing everything a student needs to see them through their studies and the Imagine Cup competition.

- Donation of an Xbox 360 gaming lab kit for your university: The university with the most registrations will receive 4 Xbox 360s, 8 wired controllers and an assortment of the latest Xbox 360 titles. You are free to use them for XNA development or as a social/recreation area for students.

If you would like to receive regular updates on the registration numbers from your university then please let me know and I will happily send them to you. You can contact me by telephone (0118 909 3409) or if you prefer by email (mailto:ukacinfo@microsoft.com).

And just to give you an idea of how we are doing so far, here are the top fifteen universities with the highest number of registrations:

University	Registrations
Brighton	89
Birmingham City	38
Cumbria	38
Bradford	37
Reading	35
Robert Gordon	35
Derby	31
Nottingham	24
De Montfort	23
Keele	23
Cambridge	20
Hull	20
Imperial College	20
Brunel	18
RHUL	20

If you would like to know more, them please email or telephone me. I’ll look forward to hearing from you.

Good luck,

Allison

Student Technology Day - Future User Experience Technologies

ukacademia — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 18:02:22 GMT

Hello All,

Filmed at the Royal Festival on 1st October, please find below the session by Paolo Barone on Microsoft Surface:

If for any reason you cannot view this clip, please do let me know.

Best wishes,

Allison

Student Technology Day videos

ukacademia — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:23:45 GMT

Hello All,

For those of you who made it along to the Royal Festival Hall and, especially for those of you who had other commitments, please find below Steve Ballmer’s Keynote Speech:

If you have any difficulty in viewing the clip, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

With best wishes,

Allison

Microsoft Student Technology Day Videos Online - SteveB and more industry/MSFT greats

markjo — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 15:49:35 GMT

On 1 October 2008, Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer and a host of industry professionals discussed the next generation of computer science innovations with more than 300 students and lecturers from across the UK - the event was the Student Technology Day.

The videos are now all online in glorious Silverlight. And I've embedded the big man here, he was on fire that day:

The videos:

There is embed code on the site for you to put the videos on your blog/site/etc - Student Technology Day

Enjoy!

Imagine Cup, Competitors at the ready....

markjo — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:56:50 GMT

The Imagine Cup 2009 is in full swing. And there is no better year to compete - there has been so much going on in the world of Microsoft technology recently:

The Imagine Cup is one of the best and most fun ways to play with all the technology from .NET to Robotics to Silverlight to whatever you want really!

The competitions are now all open and it is the time for students who have passion, ambition and skill to step up to the plate and compete in the Imagine Cup.

Step 1 - Register for the Imagine Cup

You can win without even doing anything in the UK. We are giving away webcams every week, Starbucks cards and a monthly draw for a Dell Inspiron laptop. That should make competing a bit easier...

Step 2 - Compete

If you are an individual, go for one of the skills challenges - themes and categories

If you have friends who want to compete then it's going to be Software Design to enter in the UK. It is the competition that the UK are guaranteed a place in the worldwide finals, this year in Cairo. It is also one of the most inspiring as you go from problem->idea->solution.

You have until 31st December to get your idea in, then 2 months of fun coding to be eligible for the UK finals around Easter next year - Software Design details

Step 3 - If you need support then ask

Paolo Barone and Ed Dunhill are the guys to speak to - we have a team email which you can use to ask us a question or tell us about your idea/entry - ukacinfo@microsoft.com

And my Inbox is always open for IC related questions - Contact Me

And to see the kinds of things previous competitors do, check out our previous winners page

UK High Performance Computing Award

ukacademia — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:11:22 GMT

Hello Everyone,

The Windows Server HPC team have created a special award for UK Software Design competitors who use the Windows HPC Server in their Software Design solution of the Imagine Cup.

Microsoft want to stimulate the thinking of UK students about how HPC can change the world. We want students to think big, and to use the world’s fastest systems to solve the world’s biggest problems. That’s what the HPC prize in the Imagine cup’s about.

You know how mutli-core is about writing a program that uses more than one cpu? Well HPC (High Performance Computing) is the next step up: it’s about programming for hundreds or thousands of CPUs. This is for all the stuff that needs more compute than you can get from a single server. Think about online gaming, when you have hundreds of people simultaneously modifying a visual database – that needs more power than you can get one a single CPU. Think about calculating the temperature over 20,000 land sites in the UK and then projecting that forward into the future, one minute at a time, for 500 years. This all needs heavy duty computing – and that’s HPC. It’s the A380 of the computing world.

To win the HPC prize you don’t need to have a working system – but tell us how your design would scale-out from one CPU to a thousand. And explain how all that power would help. The award will be given to the Software Design teams who demonstrate technical competency with HPC, have a real world need for high performance computing and present the commercial viability of their implementation.

HPC is used in lots of places – last year the two winners used HPC for genetic engineering and motorway design. People in the UK use HPC for everything from theology to thermodynamics, archaeology to aerodynamics, gaming to genetics. How could you use it?

If you’ve got questions please contact your local HPC or SuperComputing Centre. Or email Michael...

Good luck and hope to see you at the finals.

Best,

Allison