Microsoft Student Partners

Something useful to all students…  $10,000.

Microsoft is running a treasure hunt, where you download IE8, look out for clues on Twitter to find $10,000 on the Net.

We have posted often about Microsoft’s It’s Not Piracy offer for students, allowing us to get a completely full, legit copy of Office 2007 Ultimate for $75.00.

Making it an even better deal, when you purchase Office for $75 you go into the draw to win $5,000!

The competition ends June 30th, 2009 so get your copy of Office now to go into the draw!

Luke
Aussie MSP Lead
The University of Western Australia

Question: Do you know what IDE stands for?
Question: Do you know what languages Visual Studio can use?
Question: Do you like free pizza?

If you answered yes to the last question, then this event is for you!

The Curtin MSP’s will be demoing off Visual Studio – showcasing its ability as an IDE and why it has become industry standard.

So, even if you think you already know everything there is to know about Visual Studio and IDE’s, come along anyway – there will be heaps of giveaways and FREE PIZZA.

For more information, either click the poster (left) or visit http://curtinvs.eventbrite.com/

- Daniel
Curtin MSP

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last few months, or your still reeling from the fact that Tesltra has killed off its home ISDN plans (don’t laugh – I was still using ISDN until the beginning of this year), you probably would have noticed that Microsoft has been busy at work preparing the next generation of client, server and development software that they are so famous for.

As a quick recap, these are the betas\CTP’s that are making news:

• Windows 7 RC
• Server 2008 R2 RC (<- Site is up, and linked to form the Server 2008 home page, but no download likely until tomorrow)
• Exchange 2010 Beta
• Visual Studio 2010\.NET 4 CTP
• Windows Azure
• Live Mesh Beta
• Office 2010 (No beta\CTP available yet…)

So, the question you probably asking is "Why should I care? Why should I spend my time looking at this stuff when it isn’t even finished yet?". The answer to that is simple…

Consider: most of the people reading this blog are students interested in technology and, most likely, Microsoft technology. Most of the betas above are likely to be ready, deployed and industry standard by mid to late 2010. By which time you should have either graduated or be close to it. This means that you’re going to be looking for a job that involves the final versions of there products (on that note, open Microsoft Students to Business in a new tab and register after reading the rest of this blog). At the point where you are in the interview where your potential employer asks "How much do you know about Program X Version Y" how much better will it appear when you can honestly say that you have not only been using "Program X" but you have been running "Program X Version Y Beta" for the last few years and helped submit a number of bugs which were then fixed. Not only does it show that you have a few years experience with the program, but also the fact that you participated in a beta program indicates that you enjoy learning and experimenting and that you aren’t afraid to do some testing and go the extra mile.

Other than that, there is nothing more enjoyable then playing with (and breaking) pre-release software…

- Daniel
Curtin MSP

Something I found useful during my time at Microsoft was the Microsoft Outlook Thread Compressor which is basically like conversation view for Outlook. It was only internal when I was there, but has now been released to the web!

Channel10 is reporting:

An internally used tool at Microsoft called the Microsoft Outlook Thread Compressor has by finally made available to the general public by its creator, Ewan Dalton. The Thread Compressor (or “TC” for short) is an add-in for Outlook 2000/XP/2003/2007 which removes unnecessary emails from your inbox. The tool basically looks at the body of your email and removes those that have redundant data. This is most useful when you’re dealing with a long chain of emails and replies – such as those found in discussion lists. You see, in those cases, the person replying often leaves the body of the email to which they’re replying intact. Since each new email on the thread includes the entire conversation history, there’s no need to have every individual email saved. And by deleting the ones you don’t need, you can save a ton of space in your inbox and archives.

Since the tool was originally built back in 1999, it may look a little…uhhh…retro by modern standards, but don’t let the appearance fool you – this may easily be the most useful Outlook plugin you’ve installed in a long time.

Of course, anyone choosing to use the tool must do so at their own risk because – be warned! – it does delete email. That’s its purpose. For that reason alone, the legal department at Microsoft was hesitant about it being released to the public.

Note that Microsoft does not support the tool nor can they be held responsible for what it does.

That said, you can get the Microsoft Outlook Thread Compressor for free from here: http://threadcompressor.co.uk/default.aspx. You’ll find installation instructions and more information on that site, too.

Luke
Aussie MSP Lead
The University of Western Australia

If you are interested in a career in IT, then make sure you check out this free Live Meeting.

[ Are you graduating soon? And don’t know what to expect from your IT career? ]

We can help! 

The Microsoft Students to Business program together with Excom Education

Bring you the opportunity to clarify this and many questions you might have

Just join our Live Meeting session, this Thursday 23th of April at

12 pm Singapore, Malaysia and Philippines

11 am Indonesia

2 pm (EST) Australia

4 pm (NZST) New Zealand

To join just click on the link bellow

Join the meeting

AUDIO INFORMATION

Computer Audio

To use computer audio, you need speakers and a microphone, or a headset.

Telephone Conferencing

Choose one of the following:

· Start the Office Live Meeting client, and then in the Voice & Video pane, click Join Conference.  The conferencing service will call you at the number you specify. (Recommended)

· Dial the conferencing service directly, and enter the participant code shown below:
Australia: 1800202713

Malaysia: +12034808000

New Zealand: 0800448997

Philippines: +6328608611

Singapore +6568888008

Indonesia: +8134574
Participant Code:                        2758513

FIRST-TIME USERS

To save time before the meeting, check your system to make sure it is ready to use Office Live Meeting.

TROUBLESHOOTING

Unable to join the meeting?  Follow these steps:

            1.         Copy this address and paste into your web browser:

https://www112.livemeeting.com/cc/_XML/microsoft/join

            2.         Copy and paste the required information:

                        Meeting ID: 29JJ8P

                        Entry Code: S~[x38<&F

                        Location: https://www112.livemeeting.com/cc/_XML/microsoft

If you still cannot enter the meeting, contact support.

NOTICE

Office Live Meeting can be used to record meetings. By participating in this meeting, you agree that your communications may be monitored or recorded at any time during the meeting.

By attending to this conference you will qualify for a chance to receive a complimentary copy of Microsoft Office Professional 2007. (1 participant will be randomly selected*)

Want to know more about S2B? register today!

Any questions please contact s2bapac@microsoft.com

One of the benefits of being a Microsoft Student Partner is that we get access to free Microsoft Certification Exam Vouchers for ourselves and to give away. Additionally Microsoft announced recently free technical exam vouchers for students through the DreamSpark program.

I thought I might as well work on my MCPD as .NET is one of my primary tools I use to write software.

I got myself a copy of Microsoft .NET Framework – Application Developer Foundation which is part of the self-paced training kit for the MCTS Exam 70-536.

At 794 pages this book is pretty huge. I was kind of overwhelmed at first. However when I started self-studying I found each chapter is broken down into bite-sized lessons. Each lesson is generally specified for about 40 mins, but I found I could read the lesson, and do the included exercise in about half that time. This was great for me, where often I’d only have 20-30 mins here and there to spend on this, and I could easily start a lesson knowing I could finish it off in the time I had free between other stuff I was doing.

The book itself has 16 chapters (listed below) on the fundamentals of the Microsoft .NET Framework. Although it says it expects the reader to have some experience, I found it explained well enough for even newer developers to understand.

Every lesson is followed by both a summary and a small multi-choice lesson review, which is great as we know the key to learning is repetition. Additionally each chapter also gives a summary and a review, along with case scenarios and suggested practices.

Like most Microsoft Press books, this book also comes with a companion CD. This includes practice tests and exam questions from each chapter. One thing I found on the CD was an included PDF of the entire book! This was great for downloading to my phone and notebook and being able to read a lesson when I had a spare 10 mins.

A couple of things I found useful were:

• The small lesson sizes
• “Real World” examples and best practices
• The integration of lessons and exam objectives
• Mini labs

Microsoft also provides resources for universities to teach Microsoft Certification through the IT Academy program. This would allow you to learn through some structured program at your university.

For the rest of us, the self-study training kits are a more cost-effective approach than a third party institution, which for me as a student is not really a feasible choice. But the book provided everything I need to pass the exam.

You can get a copy of this book at www.mspress.com.au.

I also have a copy of Microsoft .NET Framework – Application Developer Foundation to give away to a UWA Student, along with a second-shot exam voucher. To enter, please leave any comment below, and I will randomly draw a winner within the next week. Please use your @student.uwa.edu.au E-mail address in the comment.

Luke
Aussie MSP Lead
The University of Western Australia

UWA Microsoft Student Partners have teamed up with the UWA CSSC to run a monthly Xbox 360 games night.

The CSSC E-mail out is copied below:

Hello to all the club members out there!

There are times when getting together with your fellow intellectuals
and enjoy some mindless FPS action.

With that in mind the CSSC has grouped up with our UWA Microsoft
student partners and organised what is planned to be the first in a
monthly Halo Tournament.

So here’s what you need to know:

When : Tuesday the 31st of March, 6pm – 9pm 

Where : 1.24 seminar room (the seminar room outside administration on
the first floor…of csse)

What else? : the Halo tournament will run like this, there will teams
of two (either find a friend or be randomly assigned) with a round
robin style set up. No sign up is required, and we will be doing a
pizza run at some point.

It’d be great to see you all there, so get ready for killing some
aliens.

Luke
Aussie MSP Lead
The University of Western Australia

The Microsoft DreamSpark program provides students access to an awesome list of free Microsoft software and has just got better. Students now have access to free Microsoft Technology Specialist Exam vouchers to be used at Prometric test centers.

This is a limited offer and the voucher must be redeemed before June 30th 2009, so get in quick.

Additionally Microsoft has added several free e-books for download, along with access to the IT Academy program.

Learn more at www.dreamspark.com

Luke
Aussie MSP Lead
The University of Western Australia

We students love free stuff. Scott Guthrie is announcing the free PDF download for the tutorial section of their newest book on ASP .MVC.

More information on his blog.

Luke
Aussie MSP Lead
The University of Western Australia

Paul over at Deakin MSP has done an awesome post on free stuff from Microsoft.

Check it out.

Luke
Aussie MSP Lead
The University of Western Australia

Microsoft loves students. And they want students to have the best access to software and technology. For Microsoft software there is two main ways to do this.

1. DreamSpark – any university student has access to this, technology wise or otherwise
2. MSDN-AA – each university specifically signs up for this. Generally this is available only for Computing & Engineering students. The university can sign up for MSDN-AA on its own or to IT Academy with includes MSDN-AA.

The good news is both Curtin and UWA both have signed up for MSDN-AA.

MSDN-AA primarily works by allowing students to borrow DVDs of the software and installing it on their machine. For Curtin students you can get the media from ComSSA, and UWA students should ask at the CSSE reception desk.

ELMS for MSDN-AA is an addon for MSDN-AA which allows the students to download the software online, not just install off pre-burned media. UWA has signed up for this and if you are a Computer Science student you should have received an invite for you to register. Once you have registered you can download the software at http://msdn70.e-academy.com/au_37792

For more information, please contact ComSAA at comssa@lists.curtin.edu.au for Curtin students or go to http://web.csse.uwa.edu.au/school_and_systems_information/school_systems_information/downloads for UWA students.

A couple of students noted why bother if they can just pirate the software? I would say just for the easy of use. No worrying about keygens or serials, updates all work and any genuine advantage addons just work.

Luke
Aussie MSP Lead
The University of Western Australia

The OfficeLabs team have released an add-on for OneNote which allows you to browse and organise your content using a canvas, rather than just plain tabs.

If you haven’t checked it out already, OneNote is an awesome Microsoft Office program that allows you to take notes quickly and efficiently without having to worry about the constraints of a word processor.

It’s include in the It’s Not Piracy version of Office Ultimate.

Check out Canvas for OneNote and get even more value from OneNote.

Luke
Aussie MSP Lead
The University of Western Australia

Check it out!

On Thursday and Friday last week, MSPs from all over Australia gathered at Microsoft’s Australian HQ for the Aussie MSP Summit 2009.

We were treated to two awesome days of presentations, workshops, gaming, food, prizes and plenty of free stuff.

Day 1 kicked off with some intros to awesome programs available to students such as DreamSpark, Imagine Cup, Students 2 Business, Microsoft Student Partners, MSDN-AA, Student Tech Clubs, Channel8 and more. Microsoft provided lunch with a chance to checkout some cool technologies in the cafeteria. The afternoon continued with presentations from Microsoft staff on Microsoft programs such as It’s Not Piracy, Microsoft Learning, MSPress, IT Academy, Imagine Cup and technologies such as Windows Live and Windows Mobile.

After a big first day, we all jumped into the bus and headed to the Great Northern Hotel for dinner and drinks.

Around 9pm we made it back to Microsoft Australia and went straight to the Xbox room. We were lucky to be able to play Halo Wars before its release along with other great games. Gears of War 2, Call of Duty and Forza seemed popular!

At the end of the night the MSPs were shocked to hear they would all be given Xbox 360s along with 4 games and an extra controller! Microsoft has gone out of their way to ensure when MSPs share their love of technology with the community, they can actually share it!

After a quick refresh on the previous days content, Day 2 started with a presentation from GP on where MSPs fit into the big picture at Microsoft. Michael Kordahi followed with an awesome presentation on the future of technology. Andrew Coates demonstrated Live Meeting and Nick Hodge presented on Microsoft’s Open Source program. Lunch was provided by the guys from Atomic Magazine who asked us to give away their magazines at our events… awesome for students all-round!

But one of the highlights for me, was each MSP getting up to present a 5 minute demo on stuff they are passionate about.

Of course there were prizes throughout the event, for the best questions and the most involvement from MSPs.

After  2 full days, MSPs headed back to their homes, Xbox under one arm, and various other loot under the other and heads full of ideas on how they can share their passion, excitement and love of technology with their fellow students.

In fact, some already have, such as Sean’s O-Week Presentation along with his post on new stuff added to DreamSpark.

All Aussie MSPs are fired up and equipped, so join us for an awesome 2009!

Luke
Aussie MSP Lead
The University of Western Australia