Imagine Cup 2008

The Imagine Cup finals has been held in Asia for 3 years straight, 2005 (Yokohama, Japan), 2006 (Delhi, India), 2007 (Seoul, Korea), but next year, the torch will be passed to Europe, but which part?

Well, the finals will be held in no other place than Paris, France, Europe’s most romantic city! Gentil! Frais! Impressionnant!

 

Without further ado, next year’s theme is:

“Imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment.”

Imagine a world, where technology is not foe, but friend to the environment. A world where technology could sustain and complement, but not conflict with the environment.

Though at first glance the theme looks pretty tricky, but I fully expect people to come out with all sorts of brilliant ideas, like those of this year, where you could find here. I’ve also took part in the local competition for the year 2007, and it has really been a great experience.

For more information on the rules of the competition, check them out here (though it isn’t updated yet, I think it will be about the same), and no, the Malaysian site isn’t up yet, I’ll update the links and more information when I get them.

The above poster has some details on the Malaysian Imagine Cup finals, which will be held around the first quarter of next year, the winner would get to win an all-expense trip to Paris, France, for the world-wide finals, along with quite some cash and prizes.

So for those who are interested, I’d say think “green”, and trust me, its worth the effort. Make sure you do your best in making the world a better place. Good luck!

PS: The poster is designed by me

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Update 01/08/2007:

Check out Microsoft’s efforts in going green, where they’re even using canola oil to fuel the trucks to build their green data centers. Note that I’ve also updated the poster’s details.

Silverlight 1.0 RC1 & loads of tools!

Sweet, Silverlight 1.0 RC1 has been released, as mentioned from Tim Sneath’s post in his blog. He also mentioned in his post that Silverlight 1.0 RC1, which code-behind is done using Javascript, is now much more feature complete and stable (2000+ bugs fixed!), where Silverlight 1.1 is released as an Alpha Refresh, so download them now and install them!

For those who are interested in developing on Silverlight, Tim Sneath also included links for some of the tools, which are:

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Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2

The newest Visual Studio, VS 2008, codenamed “Orcas”, comes with load of features, like multi-targeting support (backward compatibility), WPF & Silverlight editor, Javascript Intellisense, better CSS support, LINQ enabled, and many others.

For more information, refer to Scott Guthrie’s post on VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta 2 Released. For information on its support on ASP.NET AJAX, refer to his post on ASP.NET AJAX in .NET 3.5 and VS 2008.

There are also many other cool stuff about VS2008 you could check out Scott Guthries post here to find out more, I didn’t post them because I really didn’t want to spoil the fun, but hey, its seriously cool, so make sure you check it out.

Visual Studio Extensions for Silverlight

Its an add-on to Visual Studio 2008 to support for the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh, make sure you download it along with Visual Studio 2008.

Silverlight 1.0 SDK / Silverlight 1.1 SDK

I’m not sure but the SDK may include steps to help developers upgrade their “broken” Silverlight applications (due to them not supporting the RC1 Release), judging from what I got to know from this post.

ASP.NET Futures CTP

Includes controls that could be bundled together with the ASP.NET default controls in the futures, like the Media control, built with Silverlight, (I saw it demo’ed in this Mix’07 session - DEV05 – Developing ASP.NET AJAX Controls with Silverlight, check out the sessions here), new ASP.NET AJAX features, for more information go here.

Expression Blend August Preview

Make sure you download the Expression Blend 2 August Preview, though the only key add-in I noticed is its support for Visual Studio 2008 (I’m praying “Edit in Visual Studio” goes through the UAC, though I doubt it), but I think they’ve definitely included much more support for Silverlight.

Expression Media Encoder Template Updater

An update for Expression Media Encoder Preview, make sure you have Expression Media Encoder installed, else you could get it here.

Microsoft Expression Blend 2 August Preview could be downloaded here, for more information, you could also refer to the Blend section in the Microsoft Expression website.

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Wow, thats a LOT of tools, make sure you download them all and go crazy

Silverlight 3D Shapes, and Surface?

Ouch these Silverlight apps in the gallery are plain cool, yes they’re posted pretty long ago, but I just stumbled upon them and my was I amazed, check out these:

Folding Polyhedra

Shows how 3D shapes could be formed using 2D shapes, no idea how it was developed (the mathematical calculations involved must be CRAZY, it wrote there that it uses Direct-X maths) , its plain awesome!!!

Silverlight Surface

A sort of emulation of the Microsoft Surface table, done in Silverlight, where by just cdragging the edges or the center of the pictures that are shown in rectangles,  the pictures could be scaled, moved and rotated.

Silverlight Chess

Check out this post here in Channel 10, which is a chess game created by Silverlight, yeah big deal you may say, but one thing it highlights is the capability of managed code compared to script languages, managed code are much, much better when it comes down to processing and manageability and this is one of the key areas where Silverlight are doing well.

You try can match Javascript against .NET managed code? Who will win? Check out the chess app itself here! and see who will win, it shows you the calculations per second, you’ll definitely be astounded. There are also loads of Silverlight examples you could view or download at the Silverlight Gallery at Silverlight.net.

I’ve seen this chess application demo’d in one of the MIX’07 session’s video that could be downloaded here, its the Keynote 1 session.

It has also been demo’ed in the Microsoft Expression Studio Launch I attended, and one thing I can’t help noticing is that the application is renamed based on the presenter, where its show as Brian’s Chess app (it was Brian Goldfarb presenting the keynote) when I saw it, and when Scott Guthrie presented it in MIX’07, it was shown as Scott’s Chess App, neat “personalization” indeed.

Do check out the chess app though! Its neat!

Windows Vista on Silverlight

 I found this Slovenian promotional website for Windows Vista, which is a full screen browser application done using Silverlight, from this post here.

Man it looks just an online version of Windows Vista, the awesome thing is that there is actually a 3D like animation done with Silverlight, as far as I know Silverlight only supports 2D animations, so this might just be a ”fake” 3D effect, but its neat indeed. 

Though if you look closer, it does highlight some of the downsides of Silverlight, I won’t mention them now, but do check it out and tell me what you think

IE7 Pro, a must have add-on for IE

If you’re an IE user, get IE7 Pro, an add-on to the IE7, which includes loads of features like

The feature set included with this add-on is rich – offering Tabbed Browsing Management, Spell Check, Inline Search, Super Drag & Drop, Crash Recovery, Proxy Switcher, Mouse Gesture, Tab History Browser, Web Accelerator, User Agent Switcher, Webpage Capturer, AD Blocker, Flash Block, a Greasemonkey-like User Scripts platform, User Plug-ins and more.

(Taken from IE7 Pro: the essential IE7 Add-On)

One of the best features of IE7 Pro is its session restoring feature. Like when IE crashes, it will restore all the pages and stuff you’re browsing when IE is restarted. Pretty cool feature that isn’t included in both IE7 and Safari, not sure about Firefox and Opera though

Also check out this post for more information. And for those IE7 users out there, download it here.

Windows Seven, some information

After Vista, the next Windows client, codenamed “Vienna”, will be the 7th version of Windows shipped by Microsoft, which has more recently been renamed to Windows Seven or Windows 7, targeted to release after 2 or 2 and a half years after Windows Vista, which is year 2009 or 2010.

For more information on Windows Seven, the next version of Windows, check out these:

• Paul Thurrott’s FAQ on Windows Seven
• ZDNet’s All About Microsoft post
• Wikepedia

Based on the these sources, Windows Seven will not a major release, like Vista, but will be somewhat like an update of Vista, with the following version, a major release, released 2 years after.

Some features that are mentioned would be the inclusion of the Ribbon user interface of Office 2007, better mobile connectivity capabilities, “Intelisense” typing features (something like auto-complete, maybe based upon Windows Powershell).

One thing I noticed is that not all the information in these sources are consistent, where Paul Thurrott’s FAQ states that Windows Seven will ship in only 64-bit, as part of Microsoft’s x64 migration schedule, but in the more recent post on ZDNet, it mentioned that it will be released in both 32-bit and 64-bit.

On which one is correct, I have no idea, but since Windows Server 2008 (codenamed Longhorn), will be the last Windows Server to have support for both 32-bit and 64-bit, it its quite possible that Windows Seven will be 64-bit only, but according to this, Microsoft themselves have no decided yet.

Definitely looking forward to more news on Windows Seven!

AIR and WPF

Well, even with the hype surrounding Silverlight and WPF nowadays, this doesn’t mean it will be edging Adobe out of the graphics and animations market anytime soon, because when it comes down go graphics and animation, Adobe is at the top, they have the best graphics design tools (Photoshop), and have the widest used animation plug-in, Flash, a solid programming model in Flex, and now, AIR which stands for the Adobe Integrated Runtime, to allow web designers and developers that are used to their tools to be able to create desktop applications with the stuff they’re used to, e.g: HTML, CSS, Javascript, Flash, and Flex.

I belive most of you know what WPF is already, but for those of you who don’t know, WPF stands for the Windows Presentation Foundation, and its the graphical platform of .NET 3.0, one of its greatest strengths is that it facilitates the collaboration between developer and designer, allowing seamless integration of coding and design. The GUI is declared using XAML (pronounced as ‘Zammel’), which is a markup language just like XML, and its used to define the whole interface, animaitons, 3D objects, its the presentation layer, which is separated from the code-behind, which could be done using C# or VB.NET

After my “brief” introduction I believe you should have now have a clearer idea on what both technologies are (that is, if you don’t know it already ).

Family.Show 2.0

Just found out from this post at Channel 10 that Vertigo have released Family Show 2.0, which is an application that revolves around….dead people! AWESOME!  Check it out here.

Family Show show is developed using WPF, and could be installed via Click-Once, pretty quick download. It shows off many cool features that could be done using WPF. Family.Show not a full product, but mainly a project done by Vertigo to test out the powers of WPF, where they claim to have included almost every trick in the WPF book!

And the greatest of all is, they’ve shared the source code in Code Plex, so for those of you who are interested in learning WPF, download them here now!

Check out how the team at Vertigo developed Family.Show using WPF, and the lessons they learnt from this video at Channel 9.

Vertigo has also created various other WPF and Silverlight stuff, do check them out in their Vertigo Labs page, they’re pretty cool!

Silverlight "Jelly" Diagrams

Wowsers, check out these Silverlight created diagrams, they’re bouncy, they’re interactive, they’re coool, they’re just like Jelly!!!! I found them at this post at Joe Stegman’s blog. Its created by Richard Zadorozny, a Program Manager Intern on the Windows team.

Another great thing is that you could get the souce code here. Extremely useful source for those who want to create RIA applications that have diagram viewing functions. (Absolutely what I need for my Final Year Project!)