I4G @ Microsoft … Dream It, Learn It, Live It

Last weekend was a busy one for me. I had to prepare for the Imagine cup local finals , because I led one of the top 6 teams in Sri Lanka this year. At the same day I had to leave the county as well..  
Now don’t ask what happened to the Imagine Cup, or Did you get the cup? . Life’s not fair folks ! Not at all.

Microsoft has initialized a new programme called “ Innovate for good” arround the globe recently. For the Asia Pacific region it was held on Singapore.
The purpose of this programme to get the help from youth to generate Ideas and help them to make a world better place. There were 100 youth from Asia pacific region gathered to this at 28^th and 29^th April 2012.

I was bit late because of my schedule and I was the last person arrived from overseas.(According to the Taxi Driver).

Day One

Day one was at the the Shangri La  Rasa Sentosa resort. It was conducted by Bernie Jones (MD,Impact Corporate Training ) , and there were inspirational story from Ponheary Ly,from Cambodia.She was awarded the CNN Heroes award by in June 2010.

 

 
                        Bernie is advising for our team

                                  My Team Mates (Employment) ,May from HongKong, Joseph from Taiwan , Harry from Indonesia.

 

 

Inspirational Story from Ponheary

                                             Outside View of the Resort


                    Harry & Wenjie is trying to make a Mind Map for our solution

 
        My Team mates (without Jay and Joseph) with Clair Deevy,Citizenship Lead , Microsoft APAC .

Day Two

Day two was held at the Microsoft Singapore office . It was a great experience to me. I met several Microsoft officials from there. We had a mentor from there, John Galligan (Regional Director , Microsoft APAC). Wonderful person to talk and I have learned lots of things from him.

MTC(Microsoft Technology Center) is refurbished few weeks ago and we are the first groups that got the experience of it.
I was there to experience how Data Center works and fortunately I got a chance to get inside of that room (18 Degrees cool in there…. ) 

 In there we made a solution for the visually impaired people and did a five minutes presentation on it.

There was a inspirational story from the Efren ,A teacher and a social worker in the Philippines . He was named CNN Hero of the year in 2009.

                                           Playing with Microsoft Surface 


                                                        Inside MTC


It was a short tour . Therefore I did not get a chance to look around … (May be the next time )

Anyway my special thanks goes to Mr. Wellington Perera (DPE Lead, Microsoft Sri Lanka) for the support he has given me all these years(This phrase is not enough to thank him… ) & Mrs. Janakie Karunarathne (Manager – Community Affairs , Microsoft Sri Lanka ) for nominating me  for this event as well.
Apart from that my special thanks goes to  Clair Deevy, (APAC Citizenship lead , Microsoft APAC) for organizing such events in APAC region . A very dynamic figure I have ever saw. Bernie Jones for his interesting training sessions and My team mates at the event .

P.S :- Oh Forgot to mention …. There’s one person I need to thank, A friend , A brother, A Mentor. Prabath Aiyya  for the Shuttle Service !!! .

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F.A.Q s of Microsoft Student Champs….

Hi there ! Microsoft Sri Lanka has initiated a student community called Microsoft Student Champs and I’ll tell what is this community and how it acts and so forth;

1.What is Microsoft Student Champs.?

MSC is a Student Based community which was initiated by Microsoft Sri Lanka .This  is like Microsoft Student Partner Program in Other countries.

2.Is it just a technical community?

Nope.It’s not .For the Survival of IT related graduates they need more than something which they normally don’t get from their Universities .This community will provide those things for them.

3. What are the other things?

Well,You can improve your presentation skills,How to face for an Interview(Improve your Soft Skills.).Sharing the knowledge with Other university people and Industry professionals.And there are so many things that you can get from this.For this MSC Organizing a Non-Tech meeting too.

4.Well . How  I can join to this community?

Any University Student can join to this community.This Month is especially for the new comers!.We called it Networking Month.

You can log in to the champs web or visit our Facebook Group for getting the latest Information on this community.

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Cool Tricks & Tips in VS 2010(Part I)

Hi there after a few weeks ! . Anyway Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 has some remarkable features which you can never ever find from another IDE exists in the World!!!

So enough talking ,Lets find what are the Cool Features in this excellent IDE.

 

Arrange and Dock Feature.

VS 2010 has enhanced its docking feature of it’s sub windows.

They are ,

• Tab-dock windows to the editing frame.

• Dock tool windows to the edge of a frame in the IDE.

• Float windows over or outside the IDE.

• Minimize tool windows along the edge of the IDE.

• Display windows on different monitors.

• Tile windows in the editing frame.

• Reset window placement to the default layout.

 

The following diagram shows the guide diamonds that appear when you drag a tool window or document window toward the center of the IDE. The diamond on the right edge only appears when you drag a tool window toward the edge of the IDE.

 

To dock tool windows and document windows

1. Click the tool window or document window you want to dock.

2. Drag the window toward the middle of the IDE.

   A guide diamond appears. The four arrows of the diamond point toward the four sides of the editing pane. If the window is a tool window, an additional four arrows point to the four edges of the IDE.

3. When the window you are dragging reaches the location where you want to dock it, move the pointer over the corresponding portion of the guide diamond. The designated area is shaded.

4. To dock the window in the position indicated, release the mouse button.

 

Zoom

You can zoom in or out in any code or text editing window by pressing and holding the CTRL key and moving the scroll wheel on the mouse. The zoom feature does not work in other windows.

Box Selection

New VS 2010 has added the following new features to the IDE.(Previous versions of VS also had the Box Selection ,you could select a rectangular region of text by holding down the Alt key while selecting a region with the mouse. You could then copy or delete the selected text)

• Text insertion: Type into a box selection to insert the new text on every selected line.

• Paste: Paste the contents of one box selection into another.

• Zero-length boxes: Make a vertical selection zero characters wide to create a multi-line insertion point for new or copied text.

Architecture Explorer

A cool addition in VS2010 is the Architecture Explorer (Click View->Architecture Explorer).This will provide visual interfaces for navigate through your solutions.

 

References:- Microsoft Developers Network,amazedsaint’s .net journal.

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Windows Phone 7 Programming-Ebook

Hi there Microsoft press has announced Giving an ebook about Programming Windows Phone 7 and this was written by Petzold(you know him right ? Programming windows ….etc ;) )And this Excerpt Edition has only 6 chapters but 11 to go!

Here are the contents of this Book,

Part I   The Basics

Chapter 1   Hello, Windows Phone 7

Chapter 2   Getting Oriented

Chapter 3   An Introduction to Touch

Chapter 4   Bitmaps, Also Known as Textures

Chapter 5   Sensors and Services

Chapter 6   Issues in Application Architecture

 

Part II   Silverlight

Chapter 7   XAML Power and Limitations

Chapter 8   Elements and Properties

Part III   XNA

Chapter 20   Principles of Movement

Chapter 21   Textures and Sprites

Chapter 22   Touch and Play

You Can download this from here.

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Imagine Cup 2011 Just Started!!

The Worlds premier IT Competition application calling is started.(But Imaginecup.lk is not yet updated ;) ).Anyway this is the best platform for each and every university student to show their colors regarding to their IT Knowledge.

This year Imaginecup official site has updated like no other before.Next year finals will be held on USA,and last year registrants can easily migrate their accounts to the new system .

Last year all the First places are won by Asians.You can follow about the last year highlights through this link.

And finally all the Sri Lankan University People..Go Get It!!!

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Functional Programming , Functions in to Fun F#

Hello Every one this is my first technical blog post.So in that case i would like to introduce a new computer programming language called F#,The newest Language of .NET Family.


What is F#?
F# is a Strongly Typed that uses Type inference ,As a result programmer need not to declare the data types when it in compile time they will deduced by the compiler.It is a Object Oriented Language.Created by Microsoft Research.(As Usual :D)

Origin of F#
Created by Don Syme –Leader of the team that incubated the language in Microsoft Research.
and also F# which has been developed in a partnership between Microsoft Research and the Microsoft Developer Division.

                                                                                                       Don Syme

What F# Do?
Basically it is designed for Functional Programming tasks which means any one can use this language to solve problems and also use the large collection of .NET libraries.
The language enables explorative programming, with the flexibility to translate requirements into code easily. That ability makes F# particularly valuable for the technical, algorithmic, parallel, and data-rich fields, with applications ranging from financial-market analysis to machine learning and from scientific usage to game development.
The Visual Studio release includes important new features of F#:

• A simple, succinct functional syntax.
• A rich .NET object-oriented programming model.
• Integrated parallel and asynchronous programming features.
• Units of measure.
• F# Interactive.

The core syntax of F# follows in the tradition of ML programming languages, in particular, OCaml, and the language also incorporates key ideas from such languages as C#, Haskell, and Python. F# continues a long tradition of research and development by starting with the design of core ML and building atop it.
That’s all for today but i hope to continue this article from Code comparison of F# and C#
See you at the next post!

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