Student Daze – Connecting Student Partners Worldwide

Once again, I’m writing this up on a plane on my way back home. The last two days (25-26 Sep 08) has been absolutely phenomenal at Student Daze 2008 – Microsoft Student Partners Summit 2008 v1.0. Why is it called Student “Daze” rather than Student “Days”? I’m not really sure, but I think it has something to do with so many people having jet lag.

Student Daze brings a selection of MSPs around the world into Microsoft’s Headquarters at Redmond, Washington in the USA. We are given the opportunity to connect and chat to other MSPs, find out what it’s like and what’s happening in the academic scene around the world.

We also get to meet some of the greatest people from Microsoft, like Joe Wilson (again!) and Scott Guthrie, plus a sneak preview into amazing new software that’s yet to be released. Sorry, but you folks out there will need to wait until the upcoming PDC to see it. Any leaks? Well, read on for more about Popfly, Mesh, XNA, Silverlight, cloud computing and more.

Let’s get into what actually happened after the break!

On Wednesday, Luke and I, two of Australia’s MSPs flew into Seattle from Sydney via San Francisco along with Andrew, the Academic Developer Evangelist for Australia. Luke had it even tougher though, he has to fly down to Sydney from Perth beforehand. So it makes about 16 hours worth of actual flying time for me, and 20 for Luke.

Day 1

We spent the first day mainly in Building 122. First up was a very big welcome by Leandro Doeyo, whom manages the MSP program worldwide.

Popfly

After the intro was a Popfly showcase by Sam Gazitt, Popfly’s product manager. I’ll blog more about Popfly in a later post.

Blogging at Microsoft

Frank Arrigo led a panel with Larry Hyrb (Major Nelson) , Jeff Sandquist, Warren Sukernek (Twittermaven!) and Lawrence Liu to discuss blogging at Microsoft and blogging in general. I seem to recall seeing something similar to this at TechEd 2007… but this time around, we also talked about what not to blog and what happens when things really goes against you.

Open Source Software

Somewhat unexpected was a talk by Karri Dunn, senior OSS dev lead, about what Microsoft does in the open source software community. OSS is not something that people normally relate to Microsoft, and so it’s quite interesting to discover that Microsoft plays a role in the OSS community.

Live Mesh

We’ve all seen live mesh before, right? At least at the Keynote of this year’s TechEd in Australia. But it is a whole different experience to have Jeff Hansen from Live Services Marketing and Jeremy Mazner, a Technical Evangelist with a hand in the Mesh, to talk to us about the Mesh idea with more technically aligned content.

Let’s talk more about Mesh a bit later.

XNA Game Studio (Actually Xbox LIVE)

When Dave Mitchell stepped into the room holding a –different– Xbox 360 i.e. dev kit, we knew we were going to see something different. What we saw included sneak preview of the next upgrade for Xbox 360, that would most likely be pushed out as a downloadable software upgrade when it is released.

The new Xbox 360 experience is like… imagine crossing a bit of Media Centre into the Xbox, and mixing in a bit of Flip 3D plus a little Aero, plus some freshness to the design. That’s what it looks like.

The other exciting thing about this new Xbox LIVE is your gamer avatar. It’s like how in MMORPGs, you choose a character and the personalise it to your own liking. What this does is, it gives you a digital persona that everyone recognises you as. So when your friends come online or have status updates, it’s not just a picture and text that comes up, it’s actually their character that pops up! Also expect to see this digital persona to be utilised in games released in the future.

Meanwhile, the Xbox.com site seems to be down. I wonder what could be happenning behind the scenes…

Company Store

For those who love Microsoft stuff, this would be a perfect place to shop. There were tons of Microsoft merchandise, including shirts, pens, mugs and other funky stuff to choose from. There’s also hardware and software at reduced prices!

Did you know that Vista Basic was selling for only USD$5 at the company store? It doesn’t get any more genuine than buying from Microsoft themselves. I dived into getting some Microsoft hardware – Bluetooth Mouse 5000, Xbox 360 controller, and the adaptor that allows you to use the 360 controller on the PC!

Meanwhile, Andrew’s pointed out that Microsoft even provided spelling check services everywhere:

Microsoft House of the Future

Located at the Microsoft Executive Briefing Centre was the House of the Future. Here designers dream of how living would be like the future, in about 10 years’ time. We were taken though the tour and were left both speechless and in awe of what the future might hold. I wish I could take photos of it, but they’ve explicitly asked us not to.

One thing that would most likely come and influence the way we use technology is location awareness. Today we are seeing more and more devices that are aware of their current location, either via GPS or otherwise. Devices that know their own geographical position and able to talk to each other can bring so many wonders to the way we interact with computers and even our home. When we do something, say play a video, on the computer, being both location aware and context sensitive means that it can deliver a more more immersive experience by coordinating with connected display, audio and lighting devices.

There are so many more ideas coming from the House of the Future that would be enough to fill a book.

Dinner at Lincoln Square

At the end of the day, we had a pizza and Xbox party at the top level of Lincoln Square. This was conveniently situated just opposite to the hotel we stayed in, and was also conveniently the cafeteria of yet another Microsoft workplace.

Day 2

After the first day of excitement, it’s about time to get on with MSP business.

Welcome and Keynote

To start off the day, who can be more appropriate than Joe Wilson, Academic Boss of DPEs for the welcome. He kicked off with his vision of the MSP program, and where it fits into the big picture.

The Keynote was a major surprise and quite an honour for all of us. Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President (Quote JenP “There’s not too many of those”) spent an hour with us discussing any topic that we wanted. Yes – we decide what his presentation was going to be about. Some of them were quite predictable though: Silverlight, WPF, ASP.NET MVC, parallel computing, Velocity.

Feedback and Workshop

Jennifer Perret, MSP Program Manager, started off this session to find out how we think the MSP program is going, and what can be done to make it better. Then, through an exercise known as “Lightning round”, we dedicated some thinking time for several possible areas of improvement to the MSP program, complete with a feasible plan. This exercise was quite remarkable since it was more productive than I had predicted. It is also reassuring that the people running the MSP program is passionately wanting to expand and improve it.

Astoria 2 / SQL

With administrative matters done, it’s time for more mind food. We have Pablo Castro with us to talk about Astoria, a data services framework to enable web communication via standard HTTP methods called on a URI. Before this, I haven’t heard of Astoria; but I have read the book RESTful Web Services by Richardson and Ruby. So to me, this idea of standardised communication was not new. Correct me if I’m wrong, but is Astoria just an implementation of RESTful, resource-oriented communication architecture?

If it is, it’s quite natural to Microsoft, in building frameworks for other developers to use. Surely it must be in hot competition with Ruby on Rails and Django. It would be interesting to keep an eye on Astoria to see how it goes.

Cloud Computing

With the recent push for Software+Services, a hot topic these days is cloud computing – what it is, and what it can do for us. David Lemphers shares his insight. He strips down the cloud, and build it up bit by bit, from concrete to metal to electricity. Quite a nice overview, and introduces some of the differences between personal computing and cloud computing. For example, a computer’s address might actually span across a number of computers that does similar jobs.

Jobs at Microsoft

Towards the end, Carrie Read, an international technical recruiter spoke about employment opportunities with Microsoft. Yes – that’s Carrie again, she interviewed me for my internship! Afterwards, Andre Furtado delivered an inspiring video presentation about his experiences with Microsoft. As a self proclaimed “Imagine Cup Addict”, he has won the Imagine Cup 05 Japan and IC07 Korea in the software design category. He recounts his journey as a Microsoft Student Partner, as a competitor in the Imagine Cup, and also as a candidate for employment with Microsoft. He was hired in January this year.

Closing

After two jam-packed days of action Millo (Emanuelle Ognissanti), Marketing Manager, wraps up the Student Daze. But how can a closing be called a closing without a party? We relocated to Lucky Strike at Bellevue for some combined bowling and Rock Band 2 action. To have the giant screen at the end of the bowling lane hooked up to the Xbox 360 and playing Rock Band 2 is really something special.

MSP Student Daze, was the best MSP event ever. Many thanks to Leandro and Kameo for organising this, thanks to each and every speaker for coming by to talk with us, plus everyone involved in the Student Daze. This would not have been possible with your help.

More coverage on Student Daze:

• Student Daze Day Zero and One – Anrew Parsons
• Student Daze Twitter – Andrew Parsons
• Student Daze – a little taste of the world and another – Andrew Parsons
• Spending some time with great speakers from Microsoft – Christian Liensberger
• Microsoft Student Partner Summit v1.0 – Cornel Rat
• Microsoft Student Daze MSP Summit 2008 – Luke Kim
• Microsoft Star Award Trip to Seattle – Day 1, Day 2, 3 and 4 – Warren Rieutort-Louis
• MSP Event @ Microsoft Seattle Day 1 and Day 2 – Kris Athi