MSP Blogs
MSOZACADEMIC-
Meta
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
Fallen behind on your Windows 7 news? Or wondering where to go to hear the latest from key Windows Engineers and IT Professionals on their opinions and insights into the next version of Windows? Perhaps you have something to say to the guys building Windows 7?
Either way, take some time to check out http://talkingaboutwindows.com/ – here you’ll find videos portraying all aspects of the Windows 7 development and the Industry’s response to it. Not only this, but below each video is a comment section where, unlike watching the same video on YouTube, you are likely to get a response from Microsoft.
(As a side note, its also a pretty cool demonstration of the power of Silverlight)
- Daniel
Curtin MSP
While in Sydney at the Microsoft headquarters I had an opportunity to play with a Surface and after watching the Future Visions video this got me thinking about the future of computing, especially touch computing and how the surface plays a part in this.
At the moment multi-touch computing is struggling to take off because of the fact that outside the iPhone hardware is expensive, multi-touch development is young, casual developers can’t really afford the hardware and the application base does not yet exist because of this. It is a case of catch-22, people won’t use them as there is no support but people won’t support them till people are using them. This problem will be solved with time as the hardware price lowers to a more consumer/developer friendly price and as the number of applications slowly grows multi-touch devices such as the Surface and multi-touch tablet PC’s will become ubiquitous, we are at the beginning end what is surely to be an exponential growth.
After pondering on this I realised one ideal situation for the Surface would be a restaurant, your table could be a (larger version) of the Surface with icons on the side from which you could drag food and drink menus out from passing one to each diner on the table, you could then peruse this digital menu and drag items off of it for comparison or to pass an item to a companion as a suggestion or some such. Your meals and drinks could be ordered from the table itself where your order would then be sent to the kitchen or bar. Glasses in this theoretical restaurant could be RFID tagged and placed on a surface behind the bar where your drink order would appear attached to an empty glass, your drink would be placed into it and brought to your table. These glasses would also solve the problem of getting glasses mixed up as your table would label whose glass is whose and would (if you so desire) tell others what you are drinking to quell such curiosity.
With a Surface as your table this would be an ideal place to go to celebrate a birthday or a return from a holiday. While waiting for your meal you could plug in a USB drive into the table and browse holiday snaps of childhood photos across the table, play a game with friends or just scribble notes or doodles.
As everything is automated but for the food and drink preparation and delivery efficiency would be increased, potentially valuable ordering data is automatically saved and errors are reduced, the downside however would be that this technology is very expensive and this would be a very experimental venture but I do believe (and hope) some day it will be entirely common place if not even better then what I can imagine.
-Mitchell
Curtin MSP
As some of you may already have seen Microsoft Office Labs has released a 5 minute video of what they dream the year 2019 should be. I have to say that the video is very impressive with Hollywood level production values and some interesting concepts.
While it must be a nice job to be paid to dream and then spending a lot of money on putting that dream into an awesome video I feel that videos like this are important to show possible directions technology can or should take, to act as a goal to strive for, a beacon placed in the future to guide us.
While I do love the future they envision here, not everything will be so uniform as I do like my dark themes and others like red, blue or fluorescent pink styles, some like curvy designs while others like leather coated sharp designs with brushed aluminium.
For all this to happen screens will need to be developed that are incredibly cheap, flexible, low power (or wireless power) and sensor laden and tiny or remote computers with powerful graphics processing will need to be tied to them then every product will have to be coated with these screen, oh we will also need decent internet (and at this rate that isn’t likely to happen by 2019 unless people start picking up their act) and interfaces will have to become a lot easier to create (Microsoft is doing a good job working on this at this moment). Apparently in the future we will also either have people hired full time to clean fingerprints or we will remove the ability produce oil removed from the skin on our hands, even better though would be to have this magic surface absorb fingerprints for the purposes of power generation/scratch repair/some other awesome and magic purpose.
This is all doable by some point in the future but 2019 seems way too soon, I am wondering if they chose such a difficult goal so that we shall try and pursue it, and even if we only get half way to this goal we have still covered a lot of ground. Then again in 10 years we went from 1.44mb 3.5″ floppy disks to 16gb in the size of your pinky nail. we went from some people having analogue mobiles with 2 colour screens to everyone having full colour graphical phones with calendars, games, web browsing and media playback being standard so who knows where we will be in another 10 years.
below is the HD version of the full length video.
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
I blogged recently about an awesome initiative Microsoft has to bring Outlook / Exchange features to students.
Microsoft has now announced some great new features for this service, and is renaming it Outlook Live.
Some major new features are:
- Multiple browser support (IE, Firefox, Safari)
- Instant Messaging within Outlook Live
- Threaded conversations in Conversation View
All the Microsoft Student Partners in Australia are currently on Outlook Live so you should be hearing a lot more about it in the near future.
Checkout the official press release at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/feb09/02-1220MLiveEduPR.mspx
Checkout awesome video demo at http://edge.technet.com/Media/Introducing-Outlook-Live/
Luke
WA MSP
Some of the Aussie Interns have made a video about their internship.
It had to happen sooner or later. The Microsoft Student Partners Program Worldwide now has an official blog on MSDN Blogs.
Head over to http://blogs.msdn.com/mspprogram/ to bookmark and subscribe to the RSS feed.
Luke
UWA MSP
As we are gearing up for the new academic year here in Australia, I would like to remind everyone that the It’s Not Cheating Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate for $75.00 deal is still on.
Here’s how it works:
If you are a university or TAFE student, or staff member, you can use your institution E-mail address to get Microsoft Office 2007 completely legal for $75.00 outright or as a $25/year subscription.
You purchase online, and can download the software instantly or have it sent to you by mail.
Either way, you are up and running quickly, easily and cost effectively, ready to go for the new year.
Click on the banner to get your copy now!
Luke
UWA MSP
In case you missed it, recently I was accepted into a Microsoft Internship for 3 months.
We left Perth, Australia on the 23rd of Nov, travelled for around 30 hours and finally got to our apartment in Redmond late on still, the 23rd!
I started New Employee Orientation (NEO) the next morning at 8am which ran day 1 and till noon day 2 when we received our ID cards.
I got one of the Microsoft Prius Shuttles over to my building and met my Manager and Peer Mentor.
So now I’ve just finished my first day on the job here at the Microsoft HQ in Redmond, WA and it was great.
I am in the Server and Tools business division, working on developer tools for Visual Studio Team System.
After having some good talks with my mentor and manager I was introduced to the rest of the people in my team. I set up my machine and added it to the domain. Attended a SCRUM meeting which was primarily focused on quality control of our product. Discussed and decided on the project I will be working on during my internship and wrote up a small “about me” document for the rest of the team.
And true to the Microsoft free drink thing, I went ahead and drank 3 chocolate milks for the afternoon 
So first impressions? The team is awesome, and my manager and mentor are really fun and relaxed who definitely seem to know their stuff. My project looks pretty difficult, but really interesting.
I’ve got high expectations for the rest of the internship.
If you have any questions about Microsoft Internships for Australian students, please leave a comment.
Luke
UWA MSP
In 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
What it is?
The Student Daze MSP Summit 08 is the first of what will be an annual event to bring together the top MSPs at the Microsoft HQ in Remond, WA. MSPs from each of the 13 regions meet for 2 intense days to help shape the MSP program for the year to come. Up to 4 MSPs from each region are flown to Redmond to make a group of around 50 MSPs.
Background
Note: This post relates to Microsoft Internships for the Software Desgin Engineer (SDE) and the Software Design Engineer in Test (SDET) positions. It is also aimed at Australian students but might also be helpful to anyone applying for a job at Microsoft.
Microsoft offers US winter (AU summer) internships to Australian students currently completing university each year for the 3 months Dec – Feb. The internships are opportunities to work with a real Microsoft development team in Redmond. They are paid positions, including flights to the States. The process generally begins around the middle of the year, with offers going out around September. For this year, 2008, the offers have just been made.
Preparation
Preparation is the key to getting an offer. You proceed through a variety of interviews on varying technical content. Here is how I prepared.
- Subscribe to Channel 8 and do a search on the archives for internships, interns, jobs and interviews. Channel 8 is a MSDN blog with a huge amount of quality content for students. Update: They now have a Careers section which is awesome!
- Subscribe to the Microsoft Jobs Blog. Also read through the archives. This blog has a huge numbers of tips, reader questions, sample interview questions and other content to help you get your offer.
- Study all the content at MIS Laboratory. This page has a good number of links to content that help, especially with behavioral interview style questions. It goes through the STAR technique and other techniques on how to answer questions such as “How do you move mount Fuji?”
- Become a fan to the Microsoft Careers Facebook Page and ask questions to the HR teams and checkout information posted there.
- Google/Bing for interview questions. I spent a huge amount of time just putting in queries that relate to questions. You can learn a lot from the experiences of others, and often people will have put up solutions to the problems they received.
- Practice solving problems. Actually do them. I went back over my previous labs from units at university that I knew would help me, such as writing simple string functions. Also, I competed in the ACM Programming Competition which was excellent preparation for writing code to interesting problems.
- Practice interview questions. Actually do them. You can find lists of interview questions online. Youtube has a lot of interview videos. But you need to focus on the doing and not just the reading.
- I found some very helpful practice is to re-write basically library functions. One way to do this is look at the basic C functions such as strstr, strtok, etc and re-write their functionality in another language, such as C# or Java. Look at basic string manipulation, number calculation functions, etc. Translating the functionality heaps you understand it, and is especially helpful if you choose to use another language in the interview.
- Apply for other Internships. As I personally have not a lot of time, I only applied for one other. A Google Internship position in Sydney. Not only does this force you to prepare, but it also help introduce you to some of the processes that these companies use.
- Ask for help. Try to find someone who has already been through the process (successful or not). You can normally find someone by asking your local Microsoft Student Partner.
- Learn about the products and determine what you’d like to work on. Generally interviewers want to see specific interest rather than, “I’m happy to do anything.” It shows you are focused and know what you want. So research the products.
- Read the book. How to move Mount Fuji.
- Brush up on your maths. Particularly discrete maths and basic binary maths.
Some more help preparation links (thanks Google )
- http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-google.html
- http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/five-essential-phone-screen-questions
- http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/what-you-need-to-know
Process
Getting an internship offer is a multi-stage process. Here is how it worked this year. It may change, but it will probably follow a similar format.
1. Respond to the advertisement for the internship when it comes out around mid year. It is normally posted on http://blogs.msdn.com/msozacademic/ and we’ll most likely post it on here too.
2. You will generally start off by sending your Resume by E-mail to the Australian recruiters in Redmond.
3. First lot of questions come through by E-mail. You basically fill out all the questions and send them back. The questions primarily relate to your current studies and previous experience in computing.
4. The next stage is a phone interview. It was done by HR recruiters from Kelly Services. It went around 30 mins long and tests you on very basic knowledge and problem solving skills. Some sample questions are:
- What is a stack/queue? How do you test a stack/queue?
- Explain the differences in memory management between C#/Java with C/C++.
- Explain the differences between Language A and Language B.
- The 3 light switch problem
- Problem solving a slow elevator in a tall building (process question)
5. If you pass the phone interview stage the next step was to attend technical interviews at the Microsoft office in Melbourne (Freshwater Place). Melbourne was the place for everyone I personally know (even Sydney guys) this time around, however some people have been interviewed in Sydney as well in the past. For us Perth guys, Microsoft flew us, all expenses paid to Melbourne for the interviews, and put us up in a nice hotel for the night. The technical interview stage comprised of 3x 30 min interviews. Two were technical, and one was HR. For each of the technical interviews you had to solve a particular problem in whatever language you wanted.
Result
The recruiting team did an awesome job, and had our results out to us within a week. It’s either a good E-mail or a not so good one.
Other Tips and Hints
- The interviewers are not trying to trick you. So just step through the problem and approach it using the processes you have learnt.
- Believe in yourself. It’s not just about smarts. Some smarter people missed out while others have got in.
- Prepare as if it is a real full-time, permanent job. That is, do your very best.
Luke
MSP at UWA, Ex-Microsoft Intern