Wouter Devinck - Blog

Imagine Cup 2010 worldwide finals in Poland

2010-07-12T00:29:00.014+02:00

What an amazing week we had…

I’m just back from the Imagine Cup worldwide finals in Warsaw, Poland. Jan Potemans, our awesome Belgian ADE -the person at Microsoft Belgium who takes care of the relations with the academic world- took two teams to the finals of this huge technology contest. I led the Belgian Software Design team (Niels Derdaele, Jeroen Verhulst, Sebastiaan Polfliet and myself). The other Belgian team (Leslie Van Den Broeck, Jeroen Tavernier, Rob De Reycke, Jerry Verhoeven, their mentor and two other faculty members) took part in another competition, Game Development.

The Imagine Cup is the world’s premier technology contest for students. There are three main categories –software design, game development and embedded development- and some awards. Software design is the biggest category -68 countries were represented by a team in Warsaw- and the winning team in this category wins the Imagine Cup (I mean the actual cup) and USD 25 000. A total of about 325 000 students participated in the Imagine Cup 2010, about 400 of them made it to the worldwide finals. It was our honor to represent Belgium.

Most students stayed in the Novotel hotel, where Microsoft had installed a registration desk and replaced all Macs with PCs (yep, I noticed). Presentations in the first rounds took place in the Intercontinental hotel and the Palace of Culture and Science (pictured below), where all teams could showcase their projects too. On Wednesday the showcase moved to the opera building where the finalist presentations and the closing event were held.

The opening ceremony on Saturday evening took place on a stage in front of the Palace of Culture and Science. Jon Perera -GM of Microsoft Education- did most of the talking, together with Waldemar Pawlak -Polish Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy- and Jacek Murawski –GM of Microsoft Poland. Zakopower, a Polish folk music group, added some music to the opening. Video below, courtesy of Microsoft (yes, I have seen me too).

Sunday morning we had a few briefings by awesome people like Lisa Harper and Rob Miles (our captain). Something that was immediately clear during these briefings was that the event was very well organized. Picture courtesy of Niels Derdaele.

After these briefings we received a timetable that said we had to do our round one presentation at the Intercontinental at 4 pm. This was a huge relieve, because we had still some work to do on our presentation. A few days earlier we had had a coaching session at Microsoft Belgium, where general manager Phillip Vandervoort and director of DPE Luc Van de Velde had given us a ton of very useful feedback on our initial presentation. We had been working late at night to implement most of this feedback and were happy to have a few extra hours to practice the revamped presentation.

Then it was time to present. We checked in at the Palace of Culture and Science and were escorted to the Intercontinental hotel by a Polish MSP. While we were waiting and having a coffee in front of the presentation room, a girl came to us screaming that we had betrayed her. We looked at her a bit flabbergasted, wondering who she was and why she was looking more nervous than us. It turned out that she was another Polish MSP who was supposed to escort us to the room. But still, thank you, Kamila and all other Polish MSPs, for helping with the organization of this giant event, good job, well done. In the presentation room we had some time to set everything up with the assistance of the MSPs and crew and then the judges appeared. In round one we only had to present for seven people: four very kind judges; Kinga -an MSP who was keeping track of time; Jan -our ADE- and Caroline Phillips.

Our presentation went well; the judges were kind and asked good question, we gave good answers. Our project was a bit underwhelming and too basic to stand any chance in the competition, but we did a good job presenting it. After the presentation Kinga –one of those very kind MSPs- shot a video of our first reactions when leaving the room. The excitement of the moment made Sebastiaan unable to summarize the project he had just been demoing, made me talk already about going to the finals and left Jeroen unchanged (he was still talking about beer). That makes for one funny video, for your viewing pleasure (courtesy of Kinga Sysiak):

On Sunday evening we already knew we were out of the competition. All we know is that out of the 68 teams, we didn’t make it to the final twelve.

Monday, we decided to explore Warsaw. We did a little walk and found a war museum; they were closed but had an impressive collection of planes, helicopters and tanks in their “garden”. Just one of many pictures I took, so you get the idea.

Monday afternoon we had to be at our booth, because the press was visiting the showcase. Big names like Jon Perera and Kimberly Voltero visited our booth (that reminds me that if we are ever again at the Imagine Cup finals we need to practice a short demo for the showcase too, those first tries weren’t very good).

Monday night the other Belgian team -the gaming team- was selected top three. From then on it was up to them to defend the Belgian honor -something they’ve done great, but more on that later.

Tuesday was the culture day, when we visited the castle of Pultusk. A great pianist kicked off this day of relaxation with some music and some jokes. Then we were free to choose what activities to do: making cheese, pottery, wood sculpting, kayaking, traditional Polish dance… It was a great and sunny day. Although, on the way back to Warsaw we discovered what a Polish thunderstorm looks like: very wet…

Living picture with Daniel van Soest; Tom Verhoeff –the mentor of the Dutch team, in orange– and some people of Kenyan and Ugandan national TV.

On Thursday, we attended over eight hours of finalist presentations in the opera building. Three teams in gaming, six teams in embedded development and six teams in software design each did a 20 minute presentation, followed by a 15 minute Q&A. The quality of these projects was really, really high and a lot of the presentations where incredibly good. I’ve seen speakers who are a lot better than most keynote speakers on events like TechEd. I’ve seen presentations that could easily compete with those presented by top presenters like Al Gore and Steve Jobs. I was blown away by what these students managed to do in their spare time. I’ve seen projects and listened to stories that moved me deeply. For the first time I was truly convinced that students really can change the world and that technology really can help solve the world’s toughest problems.

On Thursday we had to spend a few more hours at the showcase, in the opera building this time. Quite some people stopped at our booth for a short demo of our project. Some of the judges came to say hi too, pictured below is the team with Sally from Argentina and Felienne from The Netherlands, two very kind judges. Picture courtesy of Sally Buberman.

Then it was time for the big award ceremony, the World Festival. First the award winners were announced; then the winners in gaming, embedded and software and finally Poland passed the flag to the USA. The Imagine Cup 2011 finals will be in New York. My team is hiring, if you think you can help, if you have a great idea, if you have a real talent (does not have to be technical, we need designers/artists too, male/female, Flemish/Walloon…) and want to go to New York and have the experience of a lifetime, let me know.

Before the flag was passed, we received a video message from Michelle Obama, the First Lady. And oh, Jon Perera announced that all 400 finalists are getting a Windows Phone 7 as soon as they are available, the crowd went nuts. The entire ceremony was streamed live and is still available here.

Message from Michelle Obama:

The winners

Software Design

1st Place: Skeek, Thailand
They film a lesson using a webcam, do facial detection and speech recognition and translate what is being said to sign language. The text is displayed in a speech bubble on the video and the signs are shown on a 3D model. Impressive!

2nd Place: TFZR Team, Serbia
An interface to control the PC with your brain: send text messages, use Facebook… This team told the story of how they enabled someone who had never been able to communicate before to use a PC to do just that, communicating. Wow

3rd Place: OneBeep, New Zealand
Developed a protocol to broadcast files (for example applications for OLPC) over AM radio. How is it possible no one has thought of that before?

Embedded Development

1st Place: SmarterME, Taiwan
They developed a meter that can detect what devices are switched on in your house. Why you ask? Well, this is what their software can tell you: “Device x has been on for y minutes, that costs USD z. You might want to replace it with device u, which costs USD v and it takes w days to return the investment”. Amazing.

2nd Place: MCPU, Russia
A robot, talking Russian, driving around and moving arms up and down. Supposed to teach children exercises and stories/songs. Not that enthusiastic about this one…

3rd Place: GERAS, France
An intelligent floor. The system automatically calls the emergency service if the (elderly) occupant falls on the floor and is unable to get up again. Good idea, but I see some deal-breaking issues with their solution.

Game Design

1st Place: By Implication, Philippines
Best presentation. Ever.

2nd Place: NomNom Productions, Belgium
Well done guys! And M’Boko.

3rd Place: Gears Studio, France
Maybe try to avoid the shooting next time? I liked the level editor.

At the same time of the Imagine Cup –the world cup for technology-, the football world cup was happening is South Africa. A video:

Oh, are you wondering what we’ve built? We’ve built a social network for partnerships. Learn more on www.biamori.be. Here are the slides of our presentation:

My pictures are available here and below.

I would like to end by thanking everybody who made this week so wonderful: Phillip Vandervoort, Luc Van de Velde, Jan Potemans, Lisa Harper, Jon Perera, Rob Miles, my team, the Polish MSPs, all other competitors and many, many others.

Keep changing the world!

Guest lecture at KAHO Sint-Lieven

2010-05-10T19:32:00.003+02:00

Today I was invited to do a guest lecture at KAHO Sint-Lieven, a school in Ghent.

My lecture consisted of two parts: the presentation I did at the Students to Business day and an overview of some real-world Silverlight applications and some demos.

For the slides and demos of the first part: please refer to this blogpost.

And here are the links to everything I showed during the second part:

Real-world apps

Siverlight Toolkit

Demos from the PDC

Techdays 2010: Wrap-up (part 3)

2010-04-04T18:49:00.002+02:00

Looking for part 1 or part 2? Or maybe just looking for my Silverlight demo?

Thursday April 1st, last day in this three day story.

First up, Scott Hanselman about .NET 4. Scott was not as good as on Wednesday, I guess the downside of a great speaker like this is that things that are funny the first time you hear them are already less funny the second time. By the third time you see him, you might even start hating him. His content was good, I learned a lot and in the end that’s what matters.

Bart De Smet talked about the CLR 4. There was some overlap between this session and previous sessions I had seen, but Bart was good as always and told about all those things just that little bit extra. There was a session about MVVM I wanted to see at the same time, remember me to check the video later.

During the lunch the same problem as Wednesday, not one, but two talks I wanted to see. Blogging tips by Scott Hanselman or WP7 development by Charlie Kindel. I chose Scott, but I should have chosen Charlie. Gimme that video!

After the lunch I joined a huge crowd to see Sara Ford giving some VS2010 tips. The talk was even delayed a few minutes because they could get everyone in the room in time. The tips were useful, but unfortunately Sara was very nervous. So Sara, no reason to be nervous, you did great!

Then Peli the Halleux tried to bore us to death with a session about Moles and Pex. No offence, the speaker was fine and his subject interesting, only I was really tired and I already knew most he talked about from TechEd.

After that I decided to take a break in the speakers’ room and start writing this series of blog posts. That's where Arlindo introduced Jeroen and I to Julie. That’s all I’m going to write about that… ever

John R. Durant closed the conference with a few words about developing on top of Office 2010. Good presentation, but I would have liked to see some more code (e.g. the code of the “backstage” example)

This was the last post in this series about the Techdays, I hope you enjoyed it!

Techdays 2010: Wrap-up (part 2)

2010-04-04T18:17:00.001+02:00

Find part 1 of this post, about the Students to Business day here.

Now something about the actual Techdays. Wednesday and Thursday, while the other students were back at school, we attended the Techdays. This year’s Techdays where really, really good. Look at the list of speakers: Anders Hejlsberg, Scott Hanselman, Sara Ford, Rafal Lukawiecki, Charlie Kindel, our own Bart De Smet, …

Anders Hejlsberg kicked off the developer part of the conference with a keynote about trends in (and the future of) programming languages. He talked about things like dynamic and functional programming. The video is already available on Channel 9 and I’ve embedded it below. Definitely worth an hour of your time!

After the keynote I’ve seen Katrien De Graeve and Gill Cleeren’s session about Silverlight 4 and WPF 4. First Gill talked about Silverlight. I liked the fact that he talked about some more business oriented functionalities in SL4 (e.g. printing) too. I would have liked to see Katrien talk a bit longer about WPF 4.

During the lunch I had to choose between two sessions I liked to see. Something about XNA by a former Imagine Cup winner, Timothy Vanherberghen and something about the Surface application in Belgian TV show “De Kinderpuzzel”. I chose to see the Surface application, although in the end I didn’t get to see it. The speaker, Boris Rogge, showed some of the code and ran out of time. It was interesting to hear the story behind the application though. Too bad I couldn’t see Timothy’s talk, but I’ll certainly watch the video. They should hang the person who has invented lunch sessions, during the lunch break, just let me, you know … eat!

Then I went to Giorgio Sardo’s session about HTML5 and IE9. He didn’t show anything really shocking, check out the platform preview and you’re back up to date. One thing I really liked was Giorgio’s opinion about the Acid 3 test. I agree that this test is mostly a marketing thing and that its relevance as a tool to test whether a browser is standard-compliant is very low. The number of test-cases in Acid 3 is low and the things that are being tested are very often rather unrealistic scenarios. What I did not like was that he kept on talking about improving the performance of IE by making it render pages faster. I don’t care you make my page render ten milliseconds faster, I only care a little that you can make a bunch of browser logo’s spin at over 60 frames per second (by the way, he demoed that Chrome only runs the animation at 3 FPS, but apparently the current version of Opera can do the trick just as fast as the preview of IE9, take a look at the screenshot or try it yourself).

What I do care about, is how fast a browser feels. When I fire up Chrome or Opera or even good old Firefox, I can immediately start typing and the browser will immediately be responsive, making suggestions about where I might want to go. When I fire up Internet Explorer I often find myself waiting for the browser to load that start page I don’t really need to see and while not being able to type or while not (yet) getting any suggestions. I’m talking about seconds, not milliseconds. I’m talking about a long and deep sigh, not about the blink of an eye.

Next was the session called “A day in the life of a Silverlight/WPF integrator” by Laurant Bugnion. If you don’t have a clue what an integrator is, neither did I. Apparently an integrator is someone who takes a design from a designer (Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, …) and turns it into XAML using Expression Blend, Expression Design, a calculator and some rulers. Laurant showed some great features in Blend I didn’t know about (did you know there’s a tool to copy a gradient from anywhere on the screen?). Having that said, I’m not entirely sure whether I like the role of “integrator”. They had designers who used to work with Adobe tools, they started to develop things in Silverlight and WPF and because they didn’t want the designers to learn how to use Blend (a tool built for designers…) they created an entirely new role, the role of integrator. These “integrators” then had to learn the basic features of the Adobe tools and how to use the Microsoft tools only to create a scenario where the designer still can’t control the final result of his design and the integrators spend their days measuring and translating bitmaps into XAML. This doesn’t sound very efficient to me. I like to design (I’m not saying I’m good at it), I like to write code, but I’m afraid I would really hate to “integrate”.

Scott Hanselman then tried to teach us some “ASP.NET MVC 2 ninja blank belt tips”. Good tips, great speaker. Loved it. Giorgio Sardo took the last session slot with a talk about Windows Phone 7 ~~Series~~ (why you can drop that last word). This was (correct me if I’m wrong) the first public WP7 demo in Belgium. It’s pretty hard not to like that.

Then I had Chinese food with Jeroen. (many people told me not write about the food, so I really had to write that…)

~~Part three coming soon …~~ Move on to part 3

Techdays 2010: Wrap-up (part 1)

2010-04-01T23:25:00.002+02:00

This week I’ve been attending two Microsoft events in Antwerp: the Students to Business day on Tuesday and the Techdays on Wednesday and Thursday. At the Students to Business day I was a speaker (if you are looking for my demos: over here).

Let’s start with the Students to Business day. I was very much involved in this event so please forgive me if I’m a bit biased, feel free to comment or mail me if you have any feedback on this event and/or on my talk.

This day for students started with a keynote by Phillip Vandervoort, Eva Van Laere, Yves Kerwyn, Kimberly Voltero and Luc Van de Velde. Phillip and Luc are experienced speakers and they did well, but of course most students were waiting for some technical content. Eva and Yves did a chaotic presentation of some new features in Office 2010. Unfortunately a lot went wrong during those demos. In my opinion the best part of the keynote was Kimberly’s part: The Power of Students.

After the keynote, the real fun started. First up: Bart Wullems about .Net 4 and VS2010. Good presenter, good content, I liked it and I learned some new things. After the lunch it was my turn. “Five things you’ll love about Silverlight” Right before my talk I was standing next to the stage, looking into the room full of students and, you know, freaking out… But once my slides appeared I just started and everything went well. The feedback I got so far was pretty positive so I’m really glad I accepted the invitation to do a talk. If you’ve got any feedback, please let me know! After my talk Bart De Smet, a young Belgian who currently works for Microsoft in Redmond talked about how Microsoft uses TFS to manage and test large software projects. I liked it, the audience liked it and I’m pretty sure Bart liked it too. Sumit Mehrotra closed the day with a talk about Azure.

After the students to Business day we were invited by Microsoft to go to the Sportpaleis to watch Starwars in concert. I’m not exactly a Starwars fan, but still an impressive show!

Wednesday and Thursday we attended the Techdays. ~~I’ll post about the Techdays later.~~ Go to part 2

Presentation on Students to Business day 2010

2010-03-30T17:50:00.000+02:00

Just a few hours ago I did a presentation "Five things you'll love about Silverlight" on the Microsoft Students to Business day 2010 in Antwerp. All went well and I promised to publish my demos on this blog, so here you go:

A zip with the demo source code

A running demo

The slides (without the video, Powerpoint 2010 only)

Plugg 2010

2010-03-11T23:28:00.000+01:00

Today I have attended Plugg 2010, a one-day conference in Brussels about web and mobile startups in Europe. I'm not going to write an in-depth report of this conference, but I would like to share some thoughts.

First and foremost, although I'm a computer science student who isn't currently involved in a startup, these sessions where very interesting and inspirational for me too. I really, really liked the short (20 minute) presentations this morning, most of them where very good. I especially liked Astrid Sandoval's talk about Issuu.

There was also a startup contest, the 20 finalists of this contest each did a 2 minute presentation. Both the audience and a professional jury where voting. To note: summarizing your whole idea in 2 minutes can be quite hard and some finalists did a very well, but others failed to make clear what their startups are doing. The 3 best startups then each did a 10 minute presentation. Raz*War won the audience award and Fits.me won the contest.

After the startup rally there where some more keynotes. I enjoyed the sessions about mobile applications and how to make money with them. The presentation of Opera Software Chairman Jon S. von Tetzchner was very insightful too (e.g. how does Opera make money with a free browser).

The venue for this event was the Begacom Sufhouse. Nice hall and conference room, but we suspect that Belgacom uses the big hall either as a storage space for weapons of mass destruction or to build aircrafts. The pictures should clarify why we think that. Either way, not the best location for people who are afraid of heights.

All pictures and videos of the conference are available online.

I attended Plugg 2010 as a guest of the organisation, special thanks to Zeus for making this possible!

Building a conference website and registration system

2010-03-01T20:25:00.000+01:00

Over the past few weeks, I've been working on the website and registration system for the Students to Business Day 2010.

On a related note: registrations have opened, you can now register for this free event on www.s2b2010.be. I'm doing a one-hour session called "Five things you'll love about Silverlight", on the developers track.

The registration system also includes a portal for schools to verify which of their students have already registered. Administrators get some basic statistics about the participants and a list of names, email-addresses and phone numbers. The styled list is nice, but not very handy in some situations. For that reason, there's an export to Excel function too.

Pictures:

You don't have Silverlight on your computer, that's why the images below might not load as fast and smooth as possible. Click here to get Silverlight.

The Gu in Belgium

2009-12-07T16:43:00.000+01:00

Last Friday afternoon, I went to Brussels to see Scott Guthrie (a.k.a. “The Gu”) in action.

Let’s quote Wikipedia:

Scott Guthrie (born 1975) is a vice president in the Microsoft Developer Division. He runs the development teams that build ASP.NET, Common Language Runtime (CLR), Silverlight, Windows Forms, WPF, IIS 7.5, Commerce Server, .NET Compact Framework, Visual Web Developer and Visual Studio Tools for WPF. He is best known for his work on ASP.NET, which he and colleague Mark Anders developed while at Microsoft.

Scott talked about 3 major topics: ASP.NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010, Silverlight 4 and ASP.NET MVC 2.0. I found it rather remarkable that even after four hours he didn’t bore me at all. Great speaker! (and of course: interesting topics).

Scott Guthrie is known to wear a red shirt when doing a presentation, so every attendee got a red shirt. That of course resulted in some nice pictures.

Luckily, Scott did a lot of demos. During his Silverlight talk he showed a few of the applications that were first shown at the PDC, including the photo booth application and a Silverlight 4, out-of-browser, Facebook client.

I’m happy I have finally seen how to use ASP.NET MVC too. For some reason I had never before seen a real demo of how to get started with it. I’m a fan!

Scott also said that there will be some kind of big announcement about windows mobile and Silverlight for mobile early next year.

The best hosting offer you've ever seen

2009-11-26T20:59:00.000+01:00

Hostbasket just started, in cooperation with Microsoft, with a unique hosting offer for schools and students. It is by far the best offer I have ever seen.

Windows Server 2008 and IIS7
ASP.NET & PHP5 support
500 MB storage
20 MB storage on SQL Server 2008
20 mailboxes
10 GB monthly traffic
1 free .be domain name
Price: 1,21 euros for one year (!!)

They also offer a virtual server, more details on their website.

Presentation about TechEd 2009 at Ghent University

2009-11-19T21:43:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, Jeroen and I did a two-hour presentation about TechEd at Ghent University. The audience was rather small, but they were very interested and asked a lot of good questions. We first did a little intro and then a big Q&A. Everybody got a list of sessions we attended and they where allowed to ask questions about those sessions. This was a risky format, but it worked pretty good.

Click "read more" for the slides of the introduction.

MSP at TechEd Europe 2009

2009-11-16T00:07:00.000+01:00

Disclaimer: this blog post went out of control; it has become a list of events, a brain dump. Stop reading and watch the pictures as soon as you get bored.

Last week, I have attended Microsoft TechEd Europe 2009 in Berlin. I was there together with two other Belgian MSPs, Jeroen and Kurt and with Jan, the Academic Program Manager at Microsoft Belgium. It was yet another awesome experience to be there. We have met a lot of people (other MSPs, other attendees, speakers, sponsors, technology experts, …) and attended a lot of interesting sessions.

The great thing about a conference like TechEd is that you get the invaluable opportunity to meet the people behind the products. Speakers allow you to ask questions, to talk in between sessions and to participate in panel discussions.
We arrived in Berlin on Monday and had only time to attend the keynote. That keynote -to be honest- could have been better. It wasn’t a total disaster, but it looked that way because so many people left in the middle of it. It is being said that the developer general session (right before the keynote) was a lot better, but unfortunately we didn’t make it to the Messe in time for that session.

Monday night we were fortunate enough to be able to attend a historic event: the celebrations of the 20th birthday of the fall of the Berlin Wall. We arrived at the Brandenburg Gate only minutes before the fireworks started.

Tuesday, we started the day with a session about innovation by David Chappell, and then took some time to explore the sponsor hall. After lunch (serving a warm meal to over 7200 attendees without making them wait for too long is a big feat by itself, in my opinion) I went to a session about widgets in Windows Mobile 6.5 by Anand Iyer. After that session I expressed my disappointment with Marketplace to the speaker and he was very understanding and advised me to meet the Windows Mobile team on Thursday. Later that afternoon we had a few sessions for student partners only. Talks by Caroline Phillips, Leandro Doeyo, Holly Peterson, Jennifer Perret and Andrei Terekhov where followed by a presentation about creating games for the Zune using XNA by (the amazing, the awesome; …) Rob Miles (pictures on his blog). This MSP meeting ended with a panel discussion (with an impressive panel: David Chappell, Rob Miles, Don Syme, Giorgio Sardo and Rafal Luckawiecki) and a group photo.

Tuesday night was the opening reception, where we had some German beers and talked with Hans Verbeeck from Microsoft Belgium and the people from U2U. Hans tweeted a picture.

Wednesday was another day full of sessions. We started with the daily scrum by Stephen Forte, which was a bad idea because two of us had already seen this session in Antwerp last year. Still, an interesting topic and a good speaker! After that I went to a session about Marketplace for mobile by Daniel Bouie (Product Manager Marketplace). Unfortunately, this was a marketing talk and all problems with Marketplace where denied. It got me a bit angry and sort of nervous. But again, a big thumbs up for the speaker for taking the time to listen to our feedback after the session. Wednesday afternoon I learned some things about Silverlight 3 (by Tim Heuer) and learned how to use Windows 7 features in .Net (the new taskbar, crash recovery, …) (by Kate Gregory). Two very good sessions!

Wednesday night we joined all MSPs to nightclub Franz. We first had a HUGE burger and some beers, and then did a tour of some underground constructions. After the tour we returned to Franz for some more beer and then left to catch the last metro.

Thursday, we started with a session called “Cybercrime: Defence against the Dark Arts!” by Andy Malone. Scary, but very interesting! After the cybercrime session, Jeroen joined me to meet the Windows Mobile team. It was an interesting panel discussion. It somehow even was a bit reassuring; it could very well be that Windows Mobile and Marketplace for mobile will improve enough in the future to be able to compete again with other platforms. (note: the above is only an impression, the they didn’t comment on questions about future products). The first question for the panel was about the issue that bugs me the most: the region and language problem with Marketplace. But apparently Daniel Bouie had prepared his answer to that one, he sort of “killed” the question and moved on, but I’m glad he at least admitted that there is an issue. I’m very curious what they will change about Marketplace and how fast they will change it, people have been giving feedback about this problem for months now.

After lunch, I attended yet another Windows Mobile session. This one was all about gesture support in 6.5 (by Marcus Perryman). The thing is that I have been implementing a lot of the things he talked about during the summer. The upside about my implementation is that it works in 5.0 to 6.5 and theirs is only available as a part of 6.5. The downside is that the gesture engine and the physics engine in 6.5 are probably performing a lot better than my own implementations. I guess I will be switching my existing applications to their engines over time.

After that, I had seen enough Windows Mobile, so I joined Jeroen to a session about visual effects by Jeff Prosise, which turned out to be a rather impressive series of Silverlight demos. After that, even Jan joined the two of us to “Windows Embedded: ‘Demos Only’” by Olivier Bloch. Some of the demos failed, but still an interesting session. After that, we went to the sponsor hall for the community drinks (yep, more beer…). We had some sushi, talked a bit, where baffled by a magician and then I dragged Jeroen and Kurt to Louisa, a Swedish MSP who was doing video interviews with all MSPs (I had already done mine). Then, we went for a walk in Berlin to celebrate our last night in this beautiful city.

Friday was our last day in Berlin. We attended a chaotic, but still interesting session “Living Our Connected Lives” by those two funny Dutchmen Tony Krijnen and Daniel van Soest. I don’t blame them for the chaos; someone broke in to their hotel room the night before their session and stole some of the devices they were planning to show off. They showed (amongst other things) a desktop phone with a touch screen that allows you to see whether to person you’re about to call is available. They also “read” a few emails that people in the audience where asked to send them using their mobile phones (in French and in German) by calling the Exchange 2010 server. They demoed how you can navigate your emails with voice control and how a multilingual electronic voice can read your emails. They even showed how to send an email to all attendees of a meeting by literally telling the server “I’ll be late … 20 minutes”.

After that we had lunch and leaved to the airport, that was it, TechEd 2009. Yet another awesome experience.

Note: Jeroen and I will be doing a presentation about TechEd at Ghent University on Wednesday 18 november. More info on http://zeus.ugent.be/2009/11/15/teched-2009/

Mobile Vikings App for Windows Mobile v2.0

2009-10-11T11:40:00.003+02:00

I have just launched version 2.0 of my Mobile Vikings application through the following minisite:

http://www.wouterdevinck.net/mv

Version 2.0 supports all Mobile Vikings API functions: balance, call history and top-up history and it is available in English, Dutch and French (and so is the website).

I'm releasing this application through its own website instead of through Marketplace for Mobile (which was the original plan and the reason that I've been waiting until today to release this) because of a variety of reasons including, but not limited to, the lack of support for Windows Mobile 6.0 and 6.1 in the current version of Marketplace. One day, this application might end up on Marketplace, but right now I'm not sure whether that's gonna be anytime soon.

Have fun!

Om deze banner te kunnen bekijken, moet je Adobe Flash player installeren.

Mobile Vikings App for Windows Mobile

2009-08-07T19:42:00.003+02:00

Om deze banner te kunnen bekijken, moet je Adobe Flash player installeren.

Update 11/10/09: version 2.0 in now available on this minisite!

I’m a big fan of Mobile Vikings, a relatively new mobile operator in Belgium. Actually, it’s a virtual operator; they use the network of BASE, but have their own pricing and policies. Mobile Vikings is a very innovative MVNO, they want to make mobile internet available to a broader public. Per top-up of €15 they provide you with 1000 free text messages (valid for a month) and one month of free internet (fair use: 1GB). It is by far the best deal you’ll get in Belgium if you want mobile internet.

But great pricing isn’t the only awesome innovation. They also have a great website, where you can consult your balance and call history (very detailed) and they are constantly releasing new features. A recent release is their API, which allows developers to write applications that interact with their services. Currently available on the API are: checking your balance (including number of free SMS’s left and amount of free data left), top-up history and call history. They have also built an iPhone application that implements all of the API functions so far.

There is, as far as I am aware, no application available for Windows Mobile users. But hey, that’s why there is an API, so that third party developers can build app’s for their favorite platforms! To solve my own immediate need, I have built a little app that implements the most important function of the API: checking your balance. I’m working on a much bigger project for Windows Mobile, so I couldn’t spend too much time on this right now, but when I have some more time I will implement the call history feature as well (~~yeah, I know, when will that be…~~).

~~Without further ado, to make your mobile experience even more awesome: click here to download the installer or scan this tag with your phone.~~
Update 11/10/09: version 2.0 in now available on this minisite!

This application is totally free. Enjoy!

Community Day 2009

2009-06-23T17:18:00.000+02:00

Cool video compilations of the Techdays

2009-03-26T19:30:00.000+01:00

Microsoft has uploaded two short video compilations of the Students to Business day and the Techdays to Chopsticks.

Students to Business day

Techdays

More videos on MSDN Chopsticks and Technet Chopsticks.

Techdays 2009 – day 2

2009-03-14T22:12:00.000+01:00

A little note about the second Techday, last Thursday.

I started this day with “The Daily Scrum”. I had no idea what scrum was but I had heard at TechEd that this had been an interesting session over there so I gave it a try. Those two guys, Stephen Forte and Joel Seminuik, where pretty funny. They tried something difficult: having an interactive session with a Belgian audience. Also notable: Stephen made a lot of his slides “on the fly”. Often funny, but distracting when Joel was talking at the same time. Anyway, I have learned what scrum and “the daily scrum” are, something I probably wouldn’t have learnt at school.

More info:

Second session was “ASP.NET MVC” by Scot Galloway. During the lunch, we had a power outage. The entire building went dark for several minutes. Because all systems had to be restarted, the afternoon sessions were delayed 15 minutes. After the lunch I went to “Live coding Silverlight and WPF” by Laurent Bugnion. He should have called this session: “An introduction to XAML”. After this, I saw Scot Galloway again for “ASP.NET 4.0 What is coming?”

Then, it was time for my daily IT pro session. Tom Decaluwé talked about UAC in this session. At first I liked it, but after a while it started boring me. Probably because I do care about UAC, but not about how to use Group Policies to configure it.

I ended this last Techday of 2009 with a session of Ingo Rammer about Windows Azure. Without doubt the best sessions I’ve seen that day. I already knew a lot about Azure, because I’m working on a big project in it, but still I learned some things and Ingo certainly masters the art of presenting.

Looking forward to see all of you again, next year at the Techdays and at the Students to Business day!

Techdays 2009 – day 1

2009-03-11T23:31:00.000+01:00

Today, I have attended the first day of the Techdays at Metropolis Antwerp.

The Techdays aren’t as straight-forward as the Students to Business day we had yesterday. This conference is organized by Microsoft for both IT professionals and developers. In every session slot you can choose between three IT pro sessions and three developer sessions. In this blog post I will only talk about the sessions I have attended during this first day.

In general, the Techdays are bigger than the Students to Business day. It’s a two-day conference with twice as much participants, a bigger exhibition, more sessions (and simultaneous sessions), … The Techdays are of course more expensive than the Students to Business day (400€ opposed to the free day for students). I was there for free, as a Microsoft Student Partner, but I strongly believe this conference is worthwhile for other students as well, they can get a 75% discount (so that’s 100€ instead of 400€).

There were two keynotes (at the same time): one for IT pros and one for developers. Although the keynote for developers was the same as yesterday, I chose to go and see that one. It was a lot better than yesterday. I suppose I wasn’t the only one who noticed the technical difficulties, as most of those were solved today. All microphones were working, the cameras were placed better and the orange and red lighting was a lot better than the bright blue lights yesterday. The content was more or less the same, except that today Hans Verbeeck spent some more time talking about Surface and showing applications on the Surface. Gregory Renard’s demo application for the Surface again had some difficulties to get started, but Hans dealt with that while Gregory was explaining his code. It still wasn’t a super good Surface demo, but it was better and they couldn’t have changed a lot more than that in a day. Peter Himschoot must have made some offerings to the demo gods last night, because luckily his demo worked fine today. Katrien De Graeve had obviously practiced a bit on the HP Touchsmart and the video and lighting were better as well.

A little personal note about the keynote: at the Students to Business day we had a very critical audience, there is a lot of criticism about Microsoft in academic environments. Too much went wrong during that keynote and today the speakers have proven that it could have been better. That’s kind of a pity.

After the keynote I went to “The future of C#” by Bart De Smet, a Belgian who is now working for Microsoft in Redmond. His sessions are often very difficult. This one, however, wasn’t that hard to understand and it was one of the best sessions I’ve seen today!

After the lunch, I went to “VB 2008 Tips and Tricks”, an interesting session where I learned some things I’ll certainly use in my projects. After that I saw Dirk Primbs’ presentation about performance in WPF. That session was less good than his talk about creating a 3D game in 60 minutes at the Students to Business day, but I learned some things over there as well.
After that, I joined Jeroen to an IT pro session about privacy by Kai Axford. It was a welcome break between all those developer sessions.

The last session I saw on this first Techday was called “Windows 7 for developers”. It was a bit boring, but yeah, it was the last session of a long day and I already knew most of it because I’ve attended two sessions about Windows 7 at TechEd.

Overall, another very interesting but exhausting day! Tomorrow I will probably only write a short update on the second day of the Techdays 2009.

Students to Business day 2009

2009-03-11T22:06:00.000+01:00

The Students to Business day yesterday was a great success. Over 800 students attended this day full of sessions at Metropolis Antwerp. Apart from some technical problems, the entire day was well-organized and Microsoft managed to deliver good content.
The keynote was all about Microsoft’s newest technologies, including WPF, Silverlight and Surface. The Surface demo, however, was a bit disappointing. They could have shown more of the power of this wonderful device, instead of just porting a WPF application and adding tag functionality to it.

In the next session Kai Axford talked about how recruitment works at Microsoft. I heard some people saying he probably was exaggerating and I guess that’s kind of true.

During the lunch break, students had the opportunity to meet the Business partners in the big hall downstairs. Over there they could inform about internships and vacancies at those companies. Of course, there was free lunch provided over there as well.

After the lunch break, Katrien De Graeve did a session about WPF and Silverlight. I have only seen a part of that because I was working together with Jeroen and Kurt, the two other MSPs, on our session. The part I’ve seen of Katrien’s session was very good. Again: thumbs down for the technicians, we believed she was still trying to say something when they already started the music at the end of this session.

Next, there was a panel discussion with some guys who have been working in IT for a while. The discussion was moderated by Caroline Phillips, the Academic Lead at Microsoft for Western Europe. This discussion was more like a long interview, Caroline asked good questions, but all six panel members more or less repeated what the previous one had said and then tried to add something. Needless to say that this was a bit boring. Conclusion: good concept, but it might need some tweaking.

Then, it was our turn. This must have been one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done. Eight hundred students sitting in front of you, that’s a lot! I wasn’t that nervous and I think all went well, but I’m very eager to see the video of this session. It certainly was a great experience. Luckily, I wasn’t alone on stage. Jan Potemans, the mastermind of this event started our session by walking the audience trough some initiatives Microsoft has for students: DreamSpark, MSDNAA, … Then Jeroen Verhulst (MSP) talked about Student Partners, I talked about TechEd and Kurt (MSP) added something about our initiatives. Kenny Deriemaeker (second place ImagineCup 2008 Game Development) concluded our session with a brief overview of the ImagineCup.

Last, but certainly not least, Dirk Primbs explained to the students how it’s possible to create a 3D game in one hour. We have only seen the last part of this presentation, because we were backstage after our talk, but I it was a great session as well as a nice ending to an exciting day.

I have taken some pictures. Of course I don’t have any pictures of my own speech, but I’m sure that those will follow through other channels. The entire day was filmed and will be put online too.

Students to Business day and Techdays 2009

2009-03-03T14:41:00.000+01:00

I'm a little late to announce this, but next week Microsoft organizes two events you should not miss! Both events take place at Metropolis Antwerp, Belgium.

First is the Students to Business day. It’s the first time this day is organized in Belgium so this is very exciting! I will be doing a short talk about the MSP program, together with two other MSP’s. That’s March the 10th. More info on: http://www.microsoft.be/studentstobusiness (btw: this day is free!)

Next, there are the Techdays. March 11-12. Students can get a discount (100€ instead of 400€). I will be there too. More info: http://www.microsoft.com/belux/techdays/

The story of the Windows 7 Beta Fish

2009-01-13T22:27:00.000+01:00

Last Friday, Microsoft has released a public beta of the next version of Windows. There has already been blogged a lot about Windows 7 and I don’t have enough time to write a complete review (I’m in the middle of some weeks of exams, you see). However, today I noticed something that I would like to share.

Tim Sneath blogged a hint about the secret of the fish that is on Windows 7 beta’s desktop in his list of 30 secrets about Windows 7. The fish turned out to be a Siamese fighting fish , better known as “betta”. That subtle joke, however, is not the only thing! Wild bettas are quite boring fish, they are brown and can have some shades. The blue and red colored ones are “created” by selectively breeding them, just like a lot of other fresh-water fish that are popular in aquariums. It is being said that the fact that we see a beautiful colored fish on the Windows 7 desktop refers to the fact that we have arrived at the beta stage. Previous milestones (e.g. the 6801 M3 build that was distributed at the PDC) would then be the wild betta fish.

I hope that this wallpaper makes it to the release versions! I really like subtle jokes and little stories like this!

The public beta is available here (and on MSDN and TechNet, for subscribers). There was a limit of 2.5 million units, but that limit has been removed for the next two weeks.

Have fun!

PicasaLight on Codeplex

2008-11-28T22:38:00.000+01:00

I have made the source code of PicasaLight, the project that I have announced yesterday, available on Codeplex.

The project page: http://www.codeplex.com/PicasaLight

On that page I will add some more details about how PicasaLight works ASAP.

PicasaLight - A Silverlight implementation

2008-11-27T11:59:00.000+01:00

Last March or April, when Silverlight 2 beta 1 had just been released, I had an idea. Why not building a Silverlight application for this website that automatically fetches my photos from Picasa Webalbums and displays them on this site? I started building it and encountered many problems, but some things worked, so I kept trying. Before this project was finished, beta 2 was released. Of course, everything stopped working. I restarted building it, but bugs crept in and I never got it the way I wanted it to be. In October, Silverlight 2 RTW was released, and everything stopped working again.

Today, however, I decided to get it working. It took me over 6 hours, but I have succeeded. PicasaLight, as I like to call it, is now up and running: http://www.wouterdevinck.net/photos/

If you are wondering how I have accomplished this: keep an eye on this blog. Tomorrow I will post more details, and maybe even some source code…

Update (28 nov): Version 1.1 is online, there is now an animation when a big photo is loading and I have added a next and a previous button.

Live Framework: create applications for mesh

2008-11-19T22:04:00.000+01:00

At TechEd, I was one of the happy few who got their hands on a token for Windows Azure, or at least for the mesh part of it (see screenshot). If you want to learn more about writing applications for Live Mesh, you should read Katrien’s blog. If you hurry you might even get a token too. If you’ve already got a token: here is the place to redeem it.

Presentation about TechEd at Ghent University

2008-11-18T23:18:00.000+01:00

This afternoon I have done a presentation on TechEd and on Windows 7 at Ghent University. I am very pleased with the fact that almost 40 people showed up, because I didn’t expect that many people would delay lunch to see Windows 7 in action.

The slides of this presentation are available here (or click here to download them):

The clip that is supposed to be on the second slide is available on YouTube as well: