You might ask: why is that and who is us?

“Us” is a selection of Microsoft Student Partners from all around the world (like approximately 40). And the reason for that coming together is the first Microsoft Student Partner Summit that has been organized by the leaders of the student partner program, Leandro Doeyo and Jennifer Perret.

Today is already the second day of the summit. Yesterday we had a selection of cool speaker from all Microsoft who gave us insides (and I speak about deep dives into the technology) on different technologies, such as

• Live Mesh: the new cool kid in the town
• OSS: the Microsoft Open Source effort. Yeah, you read right, Microsoft has open source software
• Popfly: and how to create cool games with Popfly.

• Silverlight: oh so much insides
• and tons of other topics.

The most interesting talk yesterday was the panel with bloggers from Microsoft, such as Major Nelson and Jeff Sandquist.

Another great event was the party that we had in the evening yesterday. Imagine the top floor of a skyscraper in Bellevue downtown with view over Seattle and Lake Washington. Tons of Xboxes and cool games, such as Halo 3 (4 on 4), Soul Calibur, Rockband 2 and Lego Batman. Food, drinks and music. It was GREAT! Today we are going to have another party again… let’s see where we end up today

1. One of the tool projects is build in C# - that’s super cool.
2. They seem to create some ActiveX shims for plugins. I wonder if that has been added to support the IE plugin model.
3. The website on debugging has a VB.NET code sample that is apparently used as a makro to enable some kind of debugging features for the Chrome source code.
4. Google reversed some of the IE structures to do importing of settings. There are even comments in the source code who say that specific structures have been reverse engineered.
5. Last but not least: the whole application is build in Visual Studio 2005 and compiles very fine there. Upgrading to Visual Studio 2008 is only a few clicks when opening the solution in Visual Studio 2008.

It seem that Google uses a lot of Microsoft (Visual Studio, VB.NET, C#) technologies to create the Chrome. Quite cool and funny.

What did you find while browsing through the Chrome source code?

So, what happenes after the first half of the internship? Is there something special that’s going on? Glad you asked. During the 6th week at Microsoft you get to do a so called “mid term review”. It is a review against the commitments that my manager and I agreed on when I started the internship. It’s basically a document that contains the commitments and the progress on them (which one are completed, which one are on the way, which one haven’t been started yet).

I had this review on Friday and it went great. My team is happy with what I’m doing and most of my commitments are on track. Some of them are slightly behind the schedule but I guess that’s normal if you do multiple projects and you have a lot of unknowns…

Next week I’m going to have a meeting with my recruiter where we go over the review document and speak about how I like working at Microsoft. She’s going to tell me what Microsoft could offer me, if the rest of the internship goes well too. What I know is that when an intern performs properly Microsoft is going to offer her/him a full time position. I hope that the full time position can be delayed for a while (and the offer doesn’t expire fast) because finishing with the studies is prioerity 1 now! But let’s find out next week.

My dad is also coming to Seattle on Wednesday. I’m going to show him around Seattle and get him a visitor pass to come and visit my office! It is going to be a lot of fun.

The application targets one specific problem: translation of applications. I don’t know how often you had to do that but I’m from a region where a lot of people speak German and Italian. We, therefore, know both languages and have the benefit of publishing software for both languages. But translating software (even that it has gotten better with the advent of Visual Studio .NET, 2005, 2008) is still a very tedious and error-prone task.

Babylon.NET focuses on .NET projects created in Visual Studio. It offers features that are tailored to support developers or translators during their tasks while translating projects hat have been created in Visual Studio and are managed with Visual Studio. Some of these features are:

• Directly reads Visual Studio project files to start a new translation project.
• Synchronizes changes in the Visual Studio project with the translation project at any time.
• Writes localized resource strings directly to the Visual Studio resource files.
• Keeps track of the translation status for every single resource string in every locale.
• Supports the reviewing process of the localization by keeping track of the quality status for every single recource string in every locale.
• Automatic verifier checks for common problems during localization such as inconsistent translations, string.Format placeholder errors or punctuation errors.
• Separate, restricted “Translator” editition can be given to every translator working on the project.
• Offers a modern, simple and intuitive user interface tailored to the localization process.

These are only some of the interesting features in Babylon.NET that you might find interesting when translating a piece of software. For more information please visit the website at redpin.eu. They have also a trial version for download.

There are a few things that should be considered when implementing the destruction process of a .NET class:

1. Make sure you have a destructor in the class: to ensure that unmanaged resources get cleaned up.
2. Try to follow a pattern that you can easily apply to all the various classes that need disposal.
3. Try to follow the guidelines for the .NET IDisposable interface.

Looking at the samples you will see that Microsoft usually implements a method that can be called form both, the destructor and the IDisposable’s Dispose method. I usually follow that and create a second (and private; could also be protected) Dispose method that takes an argument saying it was called from the destructor or the IDisposable’s Dispose.

In that overloaded Dispose method I make sure that during a call from the destructor no managed class gets touched at all. That’s important because during garbage collection managed class instances get destroyed in a random order. It’s not guaranteed that any of the managed instances that you hold inside your class (as class fields) is still alive during a destructor call. This is one of the most important things to keep in mind when implementing the IDisposable interface.

I pointed out “managed classes” because pointers to native code are still alive (the GC ignores them). You need to manually clean them up inside of the overloaded Dispose method.

My code snippet for an implementation looks like this:

If you have any comments feel free to post them here or go over to the website where the video was published to leave a comment.

What did happen? It seems as if Erik came somehow to notice about my post and found it interesting. In the evening he wrote me an email where he said that I’m going to be more lucky if I walk by today at 11:30am. I did that and we (him, a few members of his team and I) went out for lunch.

It was cool because I had the chance to speak with the person behind Volta, LINQ and many other interesting projects. His team is also very cool and we had fun discussing some of the stuff that goes on inside and outside of Microsoft.

It’s nice to meet the people behind the technologies at Microsoft. I love it

Looking back to the appartment.

That’s where the cars park in front of my appartment.

Heading direction main street.

Looking down to the main street that I need to cross.

If you are interested in the full series of me walking to my office you can download it from here.

I have been a co-host of Dan Fernandez of this week’s episode of “This week on Channel 9″. It is a show that airs each week and shows what happened in the geek world in the last week. Shooting the show was a big fun because Dan is really enjoying what he does and made a lot of jokes…

It would be cool if they invited me again for another episode. Let’s hope that is going to happen

The best pictures that I took are the following:

The full series of photos is found here.

The goal of instant radiosity is to take the radiosity approach and bring it into real-time. That’s a tough problem because radiosity is usually an procedure that takes quite long to complete and output decent images. But it has been shown that you can use different kinds of caching techniques and abbreviations (make light rays only reflect once, etc.) to achieve the goal without that the user might notice a significant difference.

We did not only cover Instant Radiosity in our paper but rather extended it to a lot of other topics that have to do with global illumination in real time scenes, such as Ambient Occlusion, Lightmaps, Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, Precomputed Radiance Transfer and Raytracing.

The abstract of our paper is the following:

We give an overview of Instant Radiosity, an approach for global illumination which has recently become suitable for real-time rendering of complex scenes on PCs exploiting current 3D hardware. We give an introduction to global illumination, present other approaches for the solution of this problem and dig deeper into Instant Radiosity including recent extensions and optimizations. We also provide some of our own ideas for practical implementations.

Interested in knowing more about this topic? Click here to download the paper.

The first week at Microsoft you have the so called NEO (New Employee Orientation). This is some kind of introduction to the company and goes on for two days. In fact it is registration (as you know it from Microsoft events), then a few presentations that introduce the company, a really funny legal speech and then get hand out of the blue badges. All food was included.

After the first day at NEO I called my manager to tell him that I had arrived at Microsoft and when I should report in. He was rather relaxed and told me that I could come by after the second day at NEO or the day after. Since I was keen about my office and the team I went by already after the second day of NEO.

So far I have to admit that I like the team and the office. The people at Microsoft are really helping me out with all my (probably questions) that I have. It’s more like a big family…

I had a few meetings where we spoke about features and stuff that I’m going to help them implement and I had also to write a few one pagers. One pagers are called design documents that give a general overview of what features are going to achieve.

Moe, my manager, also told me to write a short sample that uses the Microsoft Sync Framework because he wants that I get used to the APIs before I start to create features and stuff that is based upon that; that makes absolutely sense to me and I’m right now trying to figure out what exactly I’m going to develop.

Next weeks is going to be cool again because we are going more into the details of the different things that I’m going to build and we are going to have a lot more to prototype and test before we get everything going! I’m really looking forward to that!

So what’s that all about?
Liam gave a great introduction to the Sync Framework in our official blog:

Imagine being able to build a solution that seamlessly exchanges contact information between Outlook, a database contact management application, your mobile device and your service based contact management system. Or how about a mobile device that connects with other devices to exchange pictures and videos. How about being able to take data from any of your enterprise databases, file or enterprise systems and make it available offline for users to modify and sync back up to the enterprise. All of these capabilities are possible with the Sync Framework and best of all, it is free on Windows platforms and licensable on non-Windows platforms!

Just a few examples of companies that are already using the Sync Framework include:

• SmugMug who has added support for the Sync Framework to enable developers to build rich offline applications that can allow photos to be easily shared on friends and families local computers.
• InterScape have embedded Sync Framework into their Customer Relationship & Management (CRM) solution to enable sales people to synchronize enterprise files and data for offline access.
• Fujitsu Siemens will embed the SyncToy file synchronization solution (powered by Sync Framework) on their STORAGEBIRD external drives to enable seamless file synchronization between devices and computers.

More on the Microsoft Sync Framework can be found here: http://www.msdn.com/sync

Before announcing the two winners I want to thank you all for participating in this competition. We had 17 screencasts in total, which is really awesome and more than I expected. Please don’t delete them to allow other people to watch them and learn from them. I want also to thank the judges for doing a great job during the judging process.

Aaaaaaaaand the two winners are (in arbitrary order)…

• Udo Winkenjohann: How to build a website with ASP.NET.
  http://udo.winkenjohann.de/index.php?click=800
• Lloyd Humphreys: This is a quarter hour video in which you?ll learn exactly how to create a quick and easy music played in C# using Expression Blend to style your own controls and use clever controls to present some information about the song playing.
  http://lloydhumphreys.com/blog/?p=307

We decided to award these two screencasts because the presentations were done very well. Also, despite of the content being more for beginners, they were able to deliver it in a way that even professional people enjoyed watching the screencast without getting bored or fast forwarding parts of it. The highlighting of important features was also done very well.

A few days back I got my flight route: I’m going to check-in in Innsbruck. Then Tyrolian Airlines is flying me to Frankfurt. In Frankfurt I need to wait for a few hours and then Lufthansa directly (and that’s awesome) flies me to Seattle.

Yesterday I got also my housing. I got an apartment (I’m going to life with somebody else doing an internship) that’s exactly 2 km away from my work. 2 km aren’t that far and I’m considering taking a bike instead of a car and renting a car only when really required.

On the 26th I got invited to the company picnic. It’s a three day event and the only thing that I really know about is that we are going to be picked up in front of building 9. One of my PM collegues in our team, Moe, invited me as guest, since you can only take part of it when you are an employee and I’m none until the 28th.

Ah, yes… last but not least: My team is located in building 35. Anyone wanting to come by and drink a cup of coffee?

I’m allowed to give them to people in the community and therefore thought to create a small competition where you can win them as grand prizes.

How to win?
Create one or more screencasts and post them as comments (a link to them and a short description) of this post. The submitted screencast should be around 15-20 minutes (it can also be longer) and cover one or more Microsoft technologies. The language of the screencast needs to be English (because that’s the language that all the judges understand).

The idea is not to advertise one of the technologies but rather to create a screencast that allows people to learn something about that technology. Examples would be: “How to create a game in XNA”, “How to use Visual Studio 2008″, “How to build a website in ASP.NET”, “How to create and style a control in Expression Blend”, or even “How to start with Visual C++”.

You can use tools like Camtasia, Community Clips or even Microsoft Media Encoder to record the screencast and upload it to YouTube or any other platform that you want. I’m mentioning YouTube because they offer the new High Quality videos. Please make sure that the screencast is of a decent quality (also after being uploaded to the web): it’s no fun to watch them if you can barely see what it’s going on!

For examples on how the final screencast could look like check out my screencast section.

Who is allowed to participate?
Everybody around the world who is a human being (and doesn’t work for Microsoft because they obviously already have the subscription) can participate at the competition.

When does the competition take place?
It starts on the 1st of July 2008 and goes until the 31st of July 2008. Entries submitted within that period are taken into consideration; entries submitted outside this period are not taken into consideration!

How is the winner selected?
After the competition is over the judges (Alex Duggleby, Sven Groot and me) are going to watch the different screencasts and they are going to choose the two winners. The two people who created the best screencasts (speaking of how well they are done and how valuable they are for people who want to learn the technology that is shown in the screencast) are going to be selected as winners. The two winners get a notification and will receive the prizes.

Attention: please make sure to post your real e-mail address and name so that I can contact you if you win the prize. Please include also the country in which you life.

Submitting screencasts means that you agree with the terms and conditions mentioned in this post.