Inspiration Tour

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12/17/2007

by Ed Dunhill, Academic Developer Evangelist

This year the academic team have been touring UK universities talking about Microsoft’s bleeding edge technology and relating it to career opportunities. Since October we have travelled in excess of six thousand miles, visited twenty three universities and spoken to over two thousand students.

Since we started planning the tour right back in July there have been many advancements in the technology we talk about and as the New Year approaches we can see many more on the horizon. This article highlights some of the key releases over the last six months and looks forward to what’s in the pipeline for the New Year.

Tech on Tour

The reason we go on the road and do this tour is to give you the opportunity to connect directly with us and to give you a point of contact within Microsoft.

Since we started planning the tour right back in July there have been many advancements in the technology we talk about and as the New Year approaches we can see many more on the horizon. The below sections highlight the key releases from the last six months and give an insight into some for the things we have in the pipeline for 2008.

Web Technology

This year has seen some major Web technology released by Microsoft most namely Silverlight. Since being released back in September Silverlight has caused a stir in the industry and has had much interest while we’ve been on tour. Silverlight offers the opportunity for developers and designers to work together to create rich Internet applications with an excellent end user experience.

Industry has adopted Silverlight at a rate of knots and several commercial sites built on the technology have gone live such as t5m.com, quicksilver.com and mlb.com with many more in the pipeline.

One of the key features of Silverlight is its cross browser, cross platform compatibility. When Silverlight 1.0 was released Linux support for major distributions (know as Moonlight) was announced in partnership with Novell.

Silverlight 2.0 (formally known as Silverlight 1.1) is on the horizon with an Alpha release available at Silverlight.net. The key highlight of version 2.0 is an implementation of .NET which will allow developers to harness the power of desktop applications from within the browser whilst at the same time retaining multi platform support.

Another key Microsoft Web technology (incidentally using Silverlight for the UI) is Popfly (popfly.ms). Popfly is a web based tool which allows users to leverage any major Web service with an API and build supplications using these services with no code. It is also fully extensible (so that users can add support for new Web services) and community driven so that available content is growing exponentially. Since the tour started Popfly has moved from private alpha into public beta so is now free for everyone to access at www.popfly.ms. I always demonstrate a sample application that can be built in less than sixty seconds which retrieves photos from Flickr.com and plots them on a Virtual Earth map depending on where they were taken. It’s really easy to get started as it has an intuitive UI and once complete your applications can easily be published on external websites, Facebook and even on the Vista Sidebar.

In 2008 look out for more new Popfly applications on my blog at https://blogs.msdn.com/edunhill and updates on the release of Silverlight 2.0.

Games Development

2007 saw the release of XNA (creators.xna.com), a .NET based games development platform for Windows Vista and XP and also (and in my view most excitingly) the Xbox 360. New XNA content has continually appeared since we started touring and as such we have been frequently updating the XNA session.

Over the last couple of weeks the eagle eyed amongst you may have spotted the beta of XNA Game Studio 2.0 and a cunning Xbox 360 dashboard update allowing users to execute games more easily. The key features XNA 2.0 brings to the table are support for all versions of Visual Studio and even cooler, support for multiplayer gaming over the LAN and the Internet between any combination of Xboxes and PCs. Not only that but said multiplayer functionality is ridiculously easy to implement. This is a huge step forward which opens up a raft of new gaming scenarios. The best news of all is that Game Studio 2.0 is now fully released and available for free download at: https://creators.xna.com/Education/GettingStarted.aspx. For information on the multiplayer functionality of v2 see my blog post at: https://blogs.msdn.com/edunhill/archive/2007/11/19/network-gaming-with-xna.aspx.

For those of you who want to take your games development to the next level you should consider entering the Games Development Competition of the Imagine Cup (imaginecup.co.uk). This competition gives you the opportunity to showcase your skills by creating a game using XNA and has amazing prizes for the winning teams including placements at UK games studios and a grand prize of $25,000. To find out more and enter visit www.imaginecup.co.uk.

Visual Studio 2008

Visual Studio 2008 was also released since we kicked of the tour; it includes a raft of new features including .NET 3.5, C# 3.0, VB9 and LINQ (Language Integrate Query). C# 3.0 and VB9 both include new language features and .NET 3.5 build on .NET3.0 whilst continuing to use version 2.0 of the CLR (Common Language Runtime). LINQ is perhaps the most anticipated feature of VS2008 and leverages some of the new language and .NET features; it offers a consistent means of querying data sources.

One of my colleagues; Daniel Moth has written an excellent blog post highlighting the key features of VS 2008 which can be found here.

Comments

Anonymous
December 17, 2007
PingBack from http://msdnrss.thecoderblogs.com/2007/12/17/inspiration-tour-2/
Anonymous
December 17, 2007
I recently wrote an article about the developments in technology since we have been running the Inspiration
Anonymous
December 17, 2007
I recently wrote an article about the developments in technology since we have been running the Inspiration

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