Microsoft Student Film Festival

You can also download them direct from the link below:

The retail version of Microsoft’s Newest Suite is now available in Australia and as a student at an Australian University or TAFE you can grab the Professional Academic version of the Office 2010 for AUD 99.00 via Microsoft’s Its Not Cheating Program.

Following the great response to the Office 2010 beta with more than nine million beta users world-wide, Microsoft has continued to refine the dramatic overhaul that it began with the 2007 editions of the Office Suite to help users:

• Create great looking documents and presentations. With new video and photo editing features in PowerPoint 2010. Add extensive text effects and table formatting options in Word 2010. Reveal important trends in data with Sparklines in Excel 2010. OneNote 2010 makes everything you need simple to find, organise and share.
• Connect and work together more simply. Advanced e-mail management and calendaring capabilities in Outlook 2010. Work with others more efficiently using new co-authoring in Word 2010, PowerPoint 2010 and OneNote 2010.
• Get things done from anywhere. With Office 2010 and the Office Web Apps – the online companions to Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote, you have the freedom to view, edit, and share Office 2010 documents in the cloud with Windows Live SkyDrive.

One of my favorite improvements to Office 2010 is what Microsoft calls the Backstage view. You might remember Albert giving a demo on this if you attended our Cool Stuff & Cool Internships – Microsoft & AIESEC 2010 event. Offered as a replacement for the File menu, Backstage gives you a launching point to share documents, print out your work, set permissions, and other program specific options to get your project ready for distribution. You’ll find all of the usual document management features, like open and save, here as well, but you’ll also get a nice layout of templates for new documents, several different ways to share your work, and print settings and page layouts all in one place.

For a full overview on all of the new features and review by PCWorld, head here.

In addition to Office 2010, Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Upgrade is back again with the same low price of AUD 49.95 on Its Not Cheating Program. All eligible university and TAFE students, staff & faculty, with a valid email address are entitled to make a purchase from the offer website

More info and FAQs on the program and the offers can be found here.

For those of use that prefer our technical information printed on paper, Microsoft Press has a book that should hopefully get you started with the new APIs, creating rich Windows 7 enhanced applications in no time.

Introducing Windows 7 for Developers is that book. A collaborative effort between Yochay Kiriaty, Laurence Moroney, Sasha Goldshtein and Alon Fliess, this book looks at most of the cool new features in Windows 7, and how to use them in your own applications.

What it Covers

The book covers the major new features in Windows 7 like the Superbar and Multi-touch, as well as the how to implement the Ribbon that is included for all developers in the new OS. However the book does not cover the new DirectX APIs like Direct2D and DirectWrite, claiming that the APIs are simply too large to cover. Small overviews are provided of each technology so you have somewhere to start from.

The book covers developing for Windows 7 as both a native (C++) developer and a C#/.NET developer, however I noticed quite a large focus on the C++ side of things. The big strength of the book is in explaining the process for working with these new technologies, rather than the syntax. If you find the .NET explanation insufficient, there should be numerous resources online that provide the syntax and class definitions for working with the .NET Windows 7 libraries.

A very short overview is provided at the end for developer oriented features such as troubleshooting or profiling. I would have liked to have seen more detail on these topics, and some of the other “hidden” features of Windows 7 that make maintaining and developing applications easier.

Style

The book approaches each topic with an overview of the new feature, before diving into implementing some example applications that make use of the features. This hybrid theory/hands-on approach works quite well, however the authors expect the reader to know how to work with the other technologies used like WPF.

I found the examples to be simple, but effective. They get straight to the point and tell you what you need to know to get the specific task done. In the topic on multi-touch, they provide examples on what each type of touch should be used for, and throughout the book they provide small overviews of the API relating to that particular topic.

There are plenty of diagrams, tables and screenshots that demonstrate what is going on, and many of those will even provide a little hint on where you can go past the samples and play around with more advanced features.

Conclusion

For those who have a solid background in developing for Windows in general, either using MFC or WPF/WinFoms for .NET, you will find this book to be a good starting point for enhancing your applications with the new features in Windows 7. Topics are explained in detail before they work on implementation, and through this you can gain an understanding of how the features should be used in your application. This is especially important with multi-touch, where there are standard gestures that you should not alter – although you certainly can go your own route, and the book will explain how to do that as well.

Weighing in at 395 pages (including Index), this book is not a hefty tome like many other programming books. The abundance of lists, figures and code samples means that you won’t be reading giant blocks of text all of the time, which makes the reading experience much nicer. This is certainly an introductory book for a very specific topic, and if you are interested in working with these technologies, I would highly recommend using this book as a starting point.

MS Press Australia sells this book through its online store for $69.95 AUD.

Book Details

Title: Introducing Windows 7 for Developers
Author: Yochay Kiriaty, Laurence Moroney, Sasha Goldshtein, Alon Fliess
ISBN: 978-0-7356-2682-9

Buy from Microsoft Press Australia (AU $65.95)

There are some pretty cool things here, not only do you get online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote for free, but you can also collaborate on the documents. I can see a bunch of friends collaborating on a OneNote notebook during  a lecture, or working on a report using multiple machines, all at the same time – and no need for anyone to collate at the end.

These apps are available for free, and to access them, you just need to visit http://skydrive.live.com and login with your Windows Live ID. (You already have one if you use Hotmail and/or Messenger)

Or alternatively you can visit http://office.live.com and get the same experience. Skydrive binds all of these services together, and still keeps the 25GB of space that you can use to store not only documents, but any other file you want.

From there you can create a new document and share it, or upload an existing document you have already started working on.

There is no need for any special plugin, and it should work in all of the major browsers.

Thanks to all who came for Cool Stuff and Internships! 

Just a little momento for all the students we caught from the Office 2010 promotions (and I know some of these people are UTS kiddies. =P):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt_pv_8VAzg

And remember, keep an eye out here for events and MS promotions @ UTS!

Albert heading out… and crammng for exams.

How would you like to work in and experience a different culture?

AIESEC, the worlds largest student organisation is looking for interns to work in some of the world’s exotic locations, like Turkey, Malaysia or China.

Come along and learn how you can learn a new language, experience a different culture, and even change a community. At the same time we will show you how the modern Microsoft is different from the Microsoft you know.

Experience the cool offerings available from a modern Microsoft, and learn how you can contribute to developing countries and see the world!

When is it?

2:30 PM – 3:30 PM
Thursday 20th May 2010

Where is it?

CB02.04.11
University of Technology Sydney

The event is open to all students, and there will be a bar tab, free food, and lots of tech on display with demos and competitions – including the chance to win an XBOX 360!

Free food, a bar tab, tech and plenty of chances to win stuff, if you’re free, there’s no reason not to go!

The event is free, however registration is required due to limited capacity (~200 people), however plenty of spots still remain, so head to http://tweetvite.com/event/win7unitweetup and register.

Short URL for twitter is http://bit.ly/win7unitwtup

Where:

Hermann’s Bar
University of Sydney
Cnr City Rd & Butlin Ave

When:

7pm Tuesday 4th May

Finally you can use the RTM version of Visual Studio 2010 (get it from DreamSpark) to try the XNA 4.0 CTP and make games and apps for Windows Phone 7, ready for when the devices like the Dell Lightning release later this year.

So if you’re interested, even if you just want to see what is coming in XNA 4.0 and don’t care about the mobile space, check out the refresh here.

This one is for the developers out there. I’m that if you are a keen C#, VB or C++ developer, you have been trying out the betas and release candidate for Visual Studio 2010. Well great news, Visual Studio 2010 has been released and is ready for you to start developing on.

Now remember, before you start wondering about the price, or look towards those torrent sites, you can get it for free as a student through MSDNAA or www.dreamspark.com

No excuses!

VS2010 features some awesome new additions like true multi-monitor support, editor zooming using the powerful new WPF code editor, C# 4.0 and C++0x if either of those take your fancy. Microsoft has really added features to bring Visual Studio 2010 into the future.

One feature that is really amazing is the ability to box select in the editor. Forget normal text selection, this allows you to draw a box around code, and only edit that part. Say you want to change a bunch of public variables into private variables, just box select all of the public identifiers and type private, done!

C# 4.0 alone has tons of new features, including integration with the dynamic runtime (easy scripting), and all of the Windows 7 features integrated into the .NET library. (Touch, Jumplists etc)

If you aren’t a fan of angle brackets, there are plenty of new features in Visual Basic 2010 as well, including implicit line continuation (goodbye underscore!), auto-implemented properties, and collection initialisers.

If you want a full overview of all of the new features, then head here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386063(v=VS.100).aspx

Scott Hanselman has a great overview of the key new features here:

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/VisualStudio2010Released.aspx

Don’t forget that you can get all of these features for free through DreamSpark:

https://www.dreamspark.com/Products/Product.aspx?ProductId=25

Something special for all of those developers who want to take advantage of the new touch input features in Windows 7 and .NET 4.0. The Microsoft Surface blog has announced the availability of the Microsoft Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch beta. This is a set of Controls, APIs, templates and Docs that were previously only available to Surface developers, and now they can be used by anyone developing touch enabled applications for Windows 7.

More details at the surface blog here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/surface/archive/2010/04/12/launch-microsoft-surface-toolkit-for-windows-touch-beta.aspx

and a direct link to the toolkit download:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=801907a7-b2dd-4e63-9ff3-8a2e63932a74

Happy coding!