Thanks to Microsoft for setting it all up, a good time was had by all.
Today is Slide 7 day. Slide (Students Learn Innovative Developer Expertise - or something - we picked the name because the domain name was available) is run by Microsoft the Academic team at Microsoft UK in Reading. They put on sessions about professional development and get a bunch of students to turn up. This year it was all about connected applications.
Our posse on the way into the Mother Ship....
I took a minibus full of folks from Hull to join the hundred or so others that had made their way from all over the country for the show.
And the show was good. There was a slight dip in quality after lunch, when I did my bit on Web Services, but the rest of the material was top notch. There were sessions on Web 2.0 (where we discussed the question of what Web 2.0 actually is), ASP, Windows Live and Orcas. And then a great talk at the end on Sliverlight.
People, you should find out more about Silverlight. You should also sign up for Popfly since this is mucho funo. I've been playing a bit with my Popfly account and it makes it dangerously easy to develop impressive applications.
My Audience (most of the students were next door, but we manage to make more noise than them...)
Mingling at the BBQ
At the end we had a BBQ and a great time was had by all. There will probably be a Slide 8, you should get your name down for it if there is...
Ed Dunhill, the Microsoft bod who made it all happen (Kudos Ed) is going to post all the slides and other material on his blog.
Then, after a five hour rumble up the motorway it was home in time for bed.
This has been bothering me. No, really. If the sun shines on a lump of red hot metal does it make the metal warmer?
Had great fun today doing a session about XNA for DevDays. The audience were wonderful, and I took some happy snaps:
on the right...
...in the middle...
...and on the left
Thanks for paying attention people, and I hope you use XNA to get to some interesting places.
Before my talk we had a session from Dave Mitchell of Microsoft. He was able to tell us that the XNA Creators Club memberships are going to be part of Microsoft Academic Alliance. This is the best news. Now we can put a bunch of machines in our labs for people to write for and it won't cost us extra on top of our AA subscription. That news alone was worth going to Amsterdam for. If you are a member of a university faculty you owe it to yourself (and your students) to follow this up and get your hands on one of the best bargains in education at the moment).
Dave at the start of his presentation
Earlier today I went to a presentation by Scott Guthrie about Silverlight. This is a fantastic technology that lets you make very impressive user experience. It lets you put .NET powered behaviour into web pages and also gives you the Windows Presentation Foundation to drive your user interfaces. Excellent.
Scot talking about multiple language support in Sliverlight.
I've had a really good time in Amsterdam. I went out for a meal last night and took even more pictures:
Standard Canal picture
Artistic cake
There are some more on my Flickr site.
This morning found me boarding a plane for Amsterdam. I'm giving a session on XNA development tomorrow. Rather cleverly I didn't check in any luggage, so no waiting at conveyor belts for me. Rather less cleverly I'd also put my highly explosive shampoo and deodorant in my carry on bag. I managed to avoid the cavity search, but now I'm going to have to learn the Dutch for "Lynx Effect". Not that I seem to need it......
These two lovelies were wandering round the show accompanied by a bloke with a camera and printer strapped to him who was taking photos and printing them out for free. Very nice. Although the reason I look so pleased is that I'm clutching a copy of the Microsoft Mobile Developers Handbook. I wrote Chapter 13, which is about mobile graphics. I was stood in the bookshop reading my own printed words when the girls turned up. I resisted the temptation to hold up the pages and shout "Look, I wrote this!", since I figured they might not be that impressed. But I settled for a picture.
DevDays is neat. It is based in Amsterdam at the conference centre there. I'll grab some pictures from inside the conference tomorrow. For today, here are some external shots.
Outside the Conference Centre
Authentic Dutch bike rider
There goes another chunk of my life. Because the Adobe updater kicked in during a print this means that it broke the print operation and locked the file in the spool queue of the printer, which meant that I had to uninstall the printer, reboot and then reinstall it again.
Now, who do I send that bill to?
As I get older, I realise that time is becoming more precious to me. The number of hours left to me is not so huge that I can just squander them on wasted effort. Or have them taken from me.
Adobe Reader has just stolen half an hour of my time. All I wanted to do was read a document and then print it. Without being asked it went on line, found some updates, downloaded 30 MBytes of stuff, spent fifteen minutes installing this, rebooted my machine and then spent another five minutes rattling the disk drive.
Net loss to me, half an hour of my time.
Now, the Adobe reader is a program that lets me read documents. That's all. It does not control a heart-lung machine, fly a plane or operate a nuclear reactor. What can be so wrong with it that it requires 30 MBytes (more space than the original Windows 95 installer) to sort out? I know that the program is free, and so I probably can't complain. But this kind of behaviour means that I would be unlikely to pay for it anyway.
And now I've wasted another ten minutes moaning about the 30 minutes I lost. Bah.
I think I'm turning into some kind of media person. Or something. If you get hold of a copy of this month's Windows Vista magazine you will find a picture of me and my photo frame. The frame, an Imate Momento, is actually proving very useful. It uses WIFI to link to the shared photographs and displays them without any faffing about with memory cards and the like.
Confetti
Went to a wedding today. We went to the service and then the reception and then came home. Everything was great, even the weather. Number one wife was going out to the evening party, whilst I stayed at home and nursed the jetlag. Before she went out again I thought I'd print off a few of the photos I'd taken. Bad plan. The process went like this.
Travel is nice, but being home is better. Even with jetlag that makes you fall asleep in the middle of a sent
I spent a big chunk of today telling folks all about the .NET Micro Framework. We had a stand near the Visual Studio booths, so I had the pleasant duty of telling lots of people who had C# and Visual Studio 2005 experience they are now fully qualified embedded developers too. Embedded development is the fiddly business of putting code onto tiny processors.
One example application we have is a C# controlled massage char (which proved very popular as the day wore on) but we also have Micro Framework controlled RSS display sign and also a Z-Wave network interface device that was developed in weeks rather than months thanks to the fact that the company was able to use C#, VS 2005 and all the powerful emulation and debugging support that comes with it.
Once folks cottoned onto the idea they were well keen. Quite a few had experienced the horrors of writing embedded code and really relished the thought of controlling hardware with software again. Particularly as there are no new skills to learn (I'm starting to sound a bit like a salesman now, but what the hey, I like the stuff).
Then it was back to the hotel. I had a quick shower, lay down on the bed for a minute and then woke up four hours later. I love jetlag....
Another satisfied customer
What it is all about
One of my favourite ever jokes was on an old Monty Python record. As I remember it went "And now for a massage from the Swedish prime minister". Followed the sound of heavy slapping. Wonderful stuff.
We haven't got the Swedish prime minister available, but we are giving out free massages at our stand in the TLC Blue area at TechEd 2007. We have a couple of .NET Micro Framework controlled massage chairs which are just the thing to ease away the strains of the day. And you can find out all about how you could be an embedded developer but just not know it yet....
I wandered out to register at the conference. I mutter about my air-con in the room (I call it "Old Faithful" now) but I'm darned glad that it is there, because when you leave the hotel it is like stepping inside a hair dryer. This is not a cooling breeze, it is the output from a blast furnace.
Branded Lamp Post
My hotel
This probably symbolizes something
Why we are here
Guess what it is, and win a prize
My universe for the next few days....
Apparently it is going to be even hotter for the rest of the week. Oh goody.
The .NET masters students got to present their projects to us today. We made them all stand up in their teams and talk about what they have been doing for the last few weeks.
I was very impressed by the way that they all got into the spirit of the occasion; I think there were some who managed to surprise themselves with how well they did. I made some notes during the talk, which I'll pass on to the whole wide world (or at least both my readers....) They don't reflect any particular person, just my general impression.
For more links to good presentation content and some very funny videos you can go here.
Went out to see a real, live, play tonight. Dial M for Murder, made famous by the Hitchcock film staring Ray Milan and Grace Kelly. We had "that bloke from Taggart" and "one of the girls from Steps" instead of those two, but the play was great nonetheless. Faye Tozer as the heroine (can you say that now - or does everyone have to be a hero?) was just right, and the role of the evil husband was excellently taken by James MacPherson. Everyone else played their part very well too, although I was initially a bit taken aback by the detective with the comedy brummie accent (unless of course he actually comes from Birmingham, in which case I apologise).
I love going to live theatre, even if someone on the front row treated us to a first class display of freestyle coughing (even going as far as the "triple whoop with a double gurgle finish" which I don't think has been heard since we had smog) for most of the first half.
I was pleased to see that the theatre was pretty full, and gave the players a well deserved round of applause at the end. The show is in Hull for the rest of the week and is on tour around the country.
Bank Holiday : like a normal day, but with much worse weather.
We had all kinds of plans for today. We were going to drive out into the country, walk round some rocks and eat scotch eggs in the car. And maybe even drink coffee from a flask whilst sitting on a piece of cloth on the grass.
As if.
After practicing on Sunday with a horrid display of freezing wind and rain the weather gave us a full on "Bank Holiday Experience" today with a pretty much perfect display of nastiness, even down to the hint of sunshine around teatime, when it was too late to go anywhere.
We stayed at home instead. We turned the robot vacuum loose in the bedroom and it ate my headphones. Not good. After spending a few minutes untangling the wire from the wheels I managed to get the robot back on the road (although I gave it a stern telling off) but the headphones looked to be a write off, with part of the earpiece missing.
So we went out and got a replacement set. At which point of course, the earpiece turned up and the original phones were found to be working fine. Wah.
I love bank holidays.
I've found the best cafe in the world. It is in York station and the coffee is good, but everything there is annotated in a most amusing way.
Message coated sugars
I know that all the slogans and clever artwork were actually concocted by a bunch of soul-less advertising executives for a franchise owned by an uncaring global corporation working out of an anonynous office somewhere in Slough, but I still think they are neat.
Indeed it is, but we got one anyway
York station looking good.
I've just about finished marking now. All the first year exam papers have been passed on to Mike (I'll bet he was pleased to see them) and now I can get on with the rest of my life.
The key turned in the lock and the door opened slowly. The print foreman flicked the light switch and high above them the fluorescent tubes clicked and popped into life. In front of them stood the printing press, seeming to jump around on its base as the lights around it flickered and got brighter. The smell of fresh paper, ink and machine oil filled the air. The foreman walked purposely around to the control panel and pushed the gold disk into the slot at the top.
The courier stood speechless in the doorway, catching his breath and watching the room come alive in front of him. He had been traveling since dawn the previous day to bring the precious data that was now being prepared for its final journey onto paper.
The control panel lit up, sections turning green as the pages were loaded into the memory of the vast machine. In the background the foreman could hear the print rollers and cooling fans coming up to speed. Finally the "Print Ready" light came on.
He glanced down at the lever that set the number of copies required. "Rob wrote some of this" he said to himself, as he pulled the lever all the way to the right hand end of it's travel before jabbing the Start button. The printing continued long into the night, vast trucks appearing out of the darkness to load up with copies for distribution to the furthest corners of the world....
Or,to put it another way, our book went to print this week. You should be able to find it in all good bookshops (and probably a few dodgy ones) by the end of June.
You can buy it at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.
I've found a way to survive marking. It goes like this.
Seems to work a treat.
Only got to level 3 so far, but great fun
If you've got a PSP you ought to get this game. Recommended by number one son (there is no higher recommendation, believe me) it is worth getting just for the frantic Japanese music and the look of the thing. I picked it up for ten quid last weekend. You should too (except for the last weekend bit - which would require a time machine).
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
