Microsoft Student Partners

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Kicking off what will hopefully become a twice-yearly event, the UWA MSP’s launched the first UWA Installfest that CS has seen in a long time! The event included free copies of Microsoft software from MSDN-AA, including handouts of Office Ultimate trial CDs (to be used in conjunction with “It’s Not Cheating“).

Luke doing some installing…

A local UWA MS enthusiast (*not* one of the MSPs!)

P.S. Keep your eyes peeled for information about our upcoming Xbox XNA demo…

If you live in Perth, Australia, are a student and would like to be involved in the Imagine Cup 2008 competition, please contact us asap.

Three WA MSPs are entering as a team into the competition and we require a graphic artist for some of our program artwork.

You would need to be experienced in creating digital artwork and be ready right away.

If you are interested please contact us on the contact page.

Luke
MSP (UWA)

As my day job is working in an Accounting practice I come across problems all the time, that can be solved with computers.

One day I was given the task of looking up the historial share prices of stocks. Given the number of stocks, this wasn’t going to be a nice job, as I would have had to lookup each stock individually.

Another problem that existed was all the major finance websites that have historical data often get it wrong. Just plain wrong. I’ve found errors with Google Finance, Yahoo Finance, etc, etc.

So to do this job, I made a little .NET program called StockPrice.

Using Visual Studio 2008 I was able to very quickly (about an hour) come up with a multi-threaded program that grabbed historial prices from 3 major sites and compared them to each other, giving what it thinks is the most likely price on that day. Further more, Visual Studio 2008 allows me to OneClick publish the program for automatic updates and installation from the web.

If you are interested, please download it and take a look. I am very interested in any feedback you may have. I am happy to support it to an extent at http://forum.wamsp.com.au.

You can check it out at http://www.tidesoft.com.au/stockprice

Please note: The way Google Finance displays historical stock prices for ASX stocks is not consistent. Thus, often the Google price will be out by a day. Be sure to check the date returned on each source.

Luke
MSP (UWA)

One of the common issues that I have is that I want to join in on Open Source projects (because their doing something cool, for experience, etc); but they are usually in some weird\archaic language (like C or PASCAL) whereas I’d MUCH rather use C#.NET. Alternatively, they have a Linux setup and would prefer other developers to be using Linux as well (to avoid cross-OS issues before a final release is ready).

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

UWA MSPs are pleased to announce Installfest 08.

The idea behind InstallFest is to help out students and staff get software on their PCs that they may normally find difficult, such as downloading large amounts of data from MSDNAA.

We will have hard media available for people to install from, and Installfest techs available for questions.

Venue: Computer Science Room 1.24
Date: Monday 7th Apri
Time: 1pm – 3pm 

For more information, please post at http://forum.wamsp.com.au