On the 16th of August 2007, Microsoft held its annual student day in Auckland as part of its TechEd campaign. I attended this event as a student (duh) after registering some time back. It being a 10-5pm event implied that i had to miss a couple of lectures, but they were nothing really essential, and one of the lecturers told us to go for the MS event and skip his lecture too.
Registration started at 9am, and as such i met charles at uni, and also bumped into julia who was with a couple of friends too. The party was relatively large, with 10-12 ppl going, and I didnt know anyone of them - heck!
We took the city bus down to sky city and settled in, with registration + freebies! However the freebies we got were pretty sparse and disappointing. Nevertheless, its great to get free stuff!
We got the following goodies
- some flyers about employment in nz
- feedback form for lucky draw entry (cunning isnt it)
- Windows server 2008 beta 2
- VS 2008 Beta2
- Microsoft refill/foolscap + pen
All in a rather nicely made tote bag!
After that, it was waiting for the thing to start! Lined up was a series of talks by various microsoft employees, and i was particularly interested in the one about robotics (which was relatively disappointing too!).
Presenters included Ron Jacobs, Nigel Parker who came and talked to us in 2005, a Ryan Tarak who was quite disappointing, and Steve Riley <- the coolest guy ever!
I shall gloss over the talks by Ryan, mainly because they were nothing substantial and his main message to us was “microsoft has lots of tutorials and examples which you can check out yourself”. A failure at public speaking, and the worst presenter of the lot. But well he’s just a junior intern there, and to expect much out of him would be likened to expecting vista to work out of the box! (impossible)
Nigel’s talks were pretty fantastic, with him highlighting some pretty cool stuff about MS’s new lineup.
Silverlight and VS2008
It looks like MS is intending to encroach on Adobe’s turf, with software for normal web development - silverlight being MS’s alternative to flash, and VS2008 being its answer to dreamweaver.
New features in VS2008 include a debugger for javascript code, which was pretty damn fantastic. Furthermore, compliance checks can be performed from inside VS2008 - which checks your webcode against some data from W3c.
Silverlight was like flash, encompassing animation and other features, also it links seamlessly with VS2008, and using .net as the back-end for your animation becomes a real clinch as shown in the devjam.
Imagine Cup
There were a couple of guys from the university of waikato (they seem to be pretty good these days!) who made it to the finals of the Imagine cup this year doing a talk on their developed software.
It was a pretty cool application called Gary’s Lab, and was essentially a suite for simulating physics labs in a computer. They used the XNA engine and agiea physics engine to bring about a fairly realistic group of experiments.
The example they showed us involved flinging a box over a lake, something that vaguely reminds me of your typical HL2 puzzle. Only that you could get nice measurements and trajectories + calculations are involved in actually trying to clear the box. I do hope that it goes somewhere - NZ is in dire need of global recognition.
Final Thoughts
MS was running a teched07 network off the skycity network and it was unsecured, i should have brought my laptop for shameless leeching - sadly i didn’t! Reminder to self, bring laptop next year!
There was a prize draw conducted too, and Ron cunningly told us that we needed to fill in answers to questions in the ‘eval’ forms which would be given at the end of each section. Turned out that they didn’t care after all, very typically Microsoft. Needless to say, i didn’t win the draw, but the experience in itself was fairly satisfying as its my first time at such an event.
Note to self :
UOA compsci has quite a fair bit of hot girls - more than compsys
Microsoft stuff works at random