MSOZACADEMICIn case you missed it, XNA Game Studio 3.0 has now gone live!
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
Another very cool development from another Microsoft incubator division is a program called Touchless.
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
As I looked back over my photos from yesterday’s keynote (below) I realised that there wasn’t that much information about the Keynote in yesterday’s post. So here’s what went down:
Photo Goodness:
Stay tuned for more!
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…
Hot off the press – Group Shot is a nifty little toy from Microsoft Research that solves the group shot problem. Have you ever taken multiple photos of a group of people, only to be thwarted time and time again by different people closing their eyes?
Group Shot solves this by allowing you to select the “good parts” (i.e. all those open eyes) of all the images and then joining everything together into one final shot. You can use this to make sure that everyone in that family shot is looking at the camera, and that those unwanted photobombers are history!
Check out the example (and tutorial) or go straight to Group Shot for a download.
It’s exam period as well, so Good Luck to all, and stay tuned for exciting happenings coming to a University near you!
In what can only be described as “it’s about time” DreakSpark is set to land in Australia on September 2th during the Australian Tech. Ed 2008 (Sydney) Student Day.
What do I get with DreamSpark?
DreamSpark currently contains:
So what’s so great about DreamSpark you ask?
Yup, you get all the software it comes with via MSDN-AA anyway – but there are two big differences:
It’s nice to (finally) see DreamSpark make it’s way down South – we’ll keep you posted as more information roles in!
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)
I personally manage between 5-15 WordPress sites depending on clients needs at the time.
One of the biggest issues for me is keeping track of each site. Stuff like:
In addition, updating each site to the latest versions of first WordPress and then each plugin is a huge time eater.
What multiple site Admins such as myself need is a single, simple management interface that remotely retrieves information from each site and displays it in a dashboard style interface. In addition, the ability to push out changes, such as updates would really be the peak of multiple site management.
After some thought, I believe wordpress.org would be the best place to host this utility. Admins could login to wordpress.org with their wordpress login, and immediately see aggregate information of their wordpress hosted blogs. In addition, they would be able to add non-hosted blogs, and includes those in the aggregate.
Each blog information could be collected via a password protected RSS style feed. This feed could be turned on or off (default as off) in the options section of each blog.
The simpler the better. Eg. It could be as simple as a table such as:
| Blog | Address | Version | Status |
You could click on each blog to drill down or update, etc.
Rather than actually write the update module, the application could be set to simply “trigger” backups, updates, that were included in plugins, or if wordpress release official modules.
This idea could be extended to no end. Features such as the ability to write a single post and have it published to each of your sites would be good. Perhaps for events such as server maintenance.
Any thoughts? Please comment!
Luke
MSP (UWA)
What better way to start a first post but with the news that Microsoft is releasing some source code (albeit under an Academic license)?
Singularity is a Microsoft Research project involving the creation of a new Operating System based on an abstract instruction set and type safe languages (i.e. it’s based on .NET). The OS uses a concept of SIPs (Software-Isolated Processes) to load and control processes which are limited into their own address space. Due to the managed nature of the running code, programs can be verified by the OS at install time, runtime or during any other controlled interaction.
The source code download weighs in at 61MB (it’s a zip file with all of the sources and build scripts) – small enough to warrant a quick look. Check it out – you never know, your next OS course may just happen to be based on Singularity!
Natively these two products don’t work together very easily, but MySQL has since released a set of standard .NET data access objects including a MySqlConnection, MySqlCommand, MySqlDataAdapter and MySqlDataReader. These are just a few of many types and classes included in the MySql.Data namespace and here I will show you how easy it is to create code that you can quickly switch between Microsoft SQL Server 2005 (or above) and MySQL using our generic System.Data.Common classes.
Goto to our forum to post more questions here.
If you have been thinking of entering into the Imagine Cup then get registered now! The date of submission for Software Design is fast approaching, so you really need to get registered and start building awesome software solutions! If you need help getting a team together, please Contact Us.
Visit www.imaginecup.com today!
For those who know a bit about my ASP .NET development, they know I am an avid fan of the AJAX Control Toolkit.
The AJAX Control Toolkit is the fastest way to produce awesome AJAX styled website in ASP .NET. It’s as simple as drag and drop the control on the webform, wire it up in properties and you have AJAX functionality.
If you haven’t already checked it out I suggest you have a look asap.
The team have released a new version, which adds two new controls ListSearch and Slideshow and numerous bug fixes.
You can get the update from http://www.codeplex.com/AtlasControlToolkit/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=1425
Luke
MSP (UWA)
