Blog List

  Back in April I sat the 2 WPF Beta Exams: 70-518 Pro: Designing and Developing Windows Applications Using Microsoft .Net Framework 4.0 and 70-511 TS: Microsoft .Net Framework 4, Windows Application Development. The Beta Exams are free to sit, but there’s no books or practise exams to use to help you study and you have to wait a few months before you find out if you passed.  So end of June I finally heard back that I’d passed both exams. I still find these exams focus on memory type content rather than process which is a real shame as I don’t remember the function signatures as intellisense makes me lazy and do I really need to fill my head with stuff I don’t need to remember.

Yesterday Bronwen and I introduced 500 Brisbane schoolgirls to the Microsoft Surface and taught them some geography via a simple game using Bing Maps, you can read about the event and their reactions here. In this post I’d like to share some more technical information about the application itself.



The game is a simple find the location as a fast as you can geography challenge. It is effective with a large group as the they can combine their knowledge and help each other to find the location. The locations themselves are famous landmarks represented by real life replica pencil sharpeners, we have stuck a Surface tag on the underneath of each so the table can see them. To win the game you zoom into the location as close as you can, around the physical object a circle appears with your time and indicates red if your not even in view or green when it is. When you when the Circle is yellow and the time stops. I think we need to launch some serious fireworks and add some sound in the next version.



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Yesterday was Brisbane’s annual Technology Takes You Anywhere (TTYA) event at Brisbane North Institute of Tafe. The event brought together 500 schools girls aged between 8 and 15 to participate in workshops, lectures and hands on activities. The event is aimed at increasing girls' interest in technology and their confidence with using it.

 



Soul Solutions, in our third year of supporting the event, provided an opportunity for the girls to experience a Natural User Interface (NUI) via a Microsoft Surface table. Building on our successful geography games from previous years we created a new Surface game to locate famous landmarks around the world. Some of the girls attending for their third year in a row recalled our previous efforts navigating the globe on a projector with an xbox controller or flying around by shifting their weight on a wii fit controller.



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The Brisbane Girl Geek Dinners started in August 2008. In that time we've had some fun dinners and some great guest speakers.

Over the last few dinners we’ve noticed there a lot of people registering for the dinners but a dropout rate of over 70% at the dinner itself.  While the events are “free” we feel quite embarrassed asking for a large area at a restaurant only to have many empty tables on the night that could have gone to other paying patrons. This also sends warning bells that we’re doing something wrong.

It’s time to re-evaluate whether these events are wanted or needed by the community. We need your input on how to make the dinners worthwhile and successful.

This dinner is a call out for those that see value in these dinners. If you want them to continue we need your help us make them better.  If nobody is interested in helping us plan and improve the dinners we feel it would be better to shut them down as they take up time that we could devote to other things.

So we’re going back to where it all started at the Caravanserai Restaurant.

The Plan

A brainstorming session where you bring along your ideas and suggestions for venues, speakers, formats, activities, sponsorship and how you can help us make these dinners more worthwhile for you.

What if I can't make it but want to help?

If you can't make it but still want to help, please get in contact by email: bronwen@soulsolutions.com.au

Who pays for dinner?

This dinner is not sponsored so you pay for your own food and drink.

Where + When

Date: Tuesday 10th August

Time: 7:00pm

Where: Caravanserai Turkish Restaurant, West End

Today was a massive day of travel. Brisbane to Singapore to Frankfurt to Warsaw. Previously when I’ve flown this far I’ve had at least an overnight stopover. This time it was just a few hrs at each airport. I must say that while the long lot of plane trips is painful I really think it’s better just to get it over and done with. At some point you’re just so sore and uncomfortable you’re almost numb.

I found Frankfurt airport quite confusing. Firstly I wasn’t sure if I had to collect my bag here as I didn’t have a boarding pass. So after watching all the bags on the carousel was told that I just needed a boarding pass. This sounded easier than it was. Wandered around in circles for awhile looking for LOT check-in until someone was really helpful and pointed towards the Lufthansa counter.

The other odd thing here was none of our credit cards worked at the restaurant which was quite disturbing. Luckily the ATM happily spat out some cash and returned my card. Fortunately my credit card and atm card have both successfully worked in Poland.

Tomorrow I have some free time before the meetings and opening ceremony so I’m hoping to go for a bit of a wander and take some photos.

I have been very fortunate this year to be to be involved with Imagine Cup as one of many round judges for Game Design and have been selected as one of the finalist judges for Software Design. After we built our Game Design mashup for Remix we thought that it would be cool to have all the finalists in a Bing Maps App.

I’m pleased to say that the Imagine Cup Map App went live this morning.

After seeing some very cool entries in the Game Design rounds I’m really looking forward to going to Poland and seeing what the Software Design teams have come up with!

If you want to find out more about the Game Design section read Andrew Parson’s post here.

If you want to see what the students have been building then check out the People’s Choice awards where all of the Software Design finalists have a video about their solutions.

 

After our talk at Remix in Melbourne yesterday, I thought I’d post about how to create the Imagine Cup Game Design Round 2 competitor Mash-Up.  Before I created the application I created my own database and table with all the Round 2 contestants and geo-coded their country locations. Since the six finalists have been announced I thought I’d expand it a bit and show those in a different colour. We’ve deployed the final copy to http://imaginecup.soulsolutions.com.au/



I created a Silverlight Application Called Imagine Cup. Then I created a simple Linq to SQL class to get my team table and created a service method call GetTeams

[OperationContract] public ListTeam> GetTeams() { var db = new DataClassesDataContext(); return db.Teams.Where(a => a.Latitude != null).ToList(); } In the ImagineCup Project we add a reference to the following:

Microsoft.Map.MapControl Microsoft.Map.MapControl.Common In the MainPage.xaml we add the mapcontrol namespace:

xmlns:m="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Maps.MapControl;assembly=Microsoft.Maps.MapControl" and add the map control to the grid:

m:Map...

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We’re fortunate enough to be presenting at this year’s Remix in Melbourne. This year it’s a 2 day event with lots of great speakers so should be an awesome event.  The abstract for our talk this year is:

Mash in and Mash up with Bing Maps Silverlight

Explore the latest in Silverlight innovation with Bing Maps, birdseye, streetside, WorldWide telescope and Photosynth. Learn how to mash up you data into the seamless spatial canvas and discover how Twitter, Flickr, foursquare and more are mashed into Bing.

The agenda, session details and speaker info is up on the Remix site and early Bird pricing is still on so head over and register here and grab your ticket for just $195!

Technorati Tags: Remix,Bing Maps,Photosynth,Twitter,Foursquare.

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The MultiScaleImage control in Silverlight 4 can now optionally be hardware accelerated. This means those massive images or, in my case, maps of the world can be smoothly rendered by using your compatible video card to do the heavy lifting. So what difference does it make? Let’s take a look, my example went from 40-80% cpu usage to 5-10%!



Take a spin of the hardware accelerated version here. Mouse wheel to zoom. If you right click you can even install out of browser.

What steps do we have to take to make this happen? First we have to enable the cachemode on the MSI control itself:

Then for the browser app we add a param to the plugin:

For “Out-Of-Browser” it is in the advanced options in the silverlight project:

 

Download the full source here.

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I was fortunate enough to be invited by Catherine to be part of the first Australian DigiGirlz event, held at the Microsoft Office in Sydney, on 24th March.

DigiGirlz events have been held in multiple locations worldwide and a specifically designed to provide high school girls with a better understanding of what a career in technology is all about.

The morning started with 120 girls arriving at the office and opening their gift bag containing a few items including a copy of Tech girls as chic! (not just geek!)   and a Bingo card that was a great ice breaker for the girls to talk to not only Microsoft staff but students and teachers from other schools.

I ran the Photosynth/Deep Zoom lab for the day. The girls really just “got it” straight away and seemed quite content browsing through the synths...

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