Microsoft Gulf Community Day X-Factor, Dubai

Microsoft held a Community Day X Factor on May 4th 2013 at Microsoft Gulf, Dubai. In the first session Eduardo Ortega, Technical Evangelist for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 from Microsoft Gulf talked about the MVP Program and shared his own experiences as an MVP for 4 years before joining Microsoft. In second session Natasha from Microsoft talked about the local developer communities that Microsoft is supporting.

In the second part of the day, an X-Factor challenge was organized where participants were given 15 minutes to talk about their projects, show their demos and impress the judges. The prize? a HTC 8x Windows Phone 8.

I was the first one to go, I showed few demos of upcoming Leap Motion controller, including
my own Windows store app with Bing Map integrating Leap Motion
.

Using Leap Motion with Bing Map in Windows store app

In the second session we had team of students from BITS-Pilani Dubai show their Musical Stairs project

The idea is to encourage people to use stairs by using music, so every time someone steps on a stair a different music is played from a computer. The demo includes some strings that trigger different music, a Arduino Micro controller connected to a laptop that recognizes input from the controller and plays music.

In the third session, Usama Wahab talked to audience about development with Sharepoint 2013, local developer communities and resources for getting started.

In the last session we had Malvika another student from BITS Pilani show us her little Robot that recognizes colors and it can also solve Sudoku puzzles. A very cool project and the winner of Microsoft X Factor challenge. Good work Malvika.

   

It was great to see some familiar faces and few new ones at the Community Day, looking forward to the next one.

 

Tools and tips for a developer

I watched Roy Osherove’s “Top 20 tools and tips that make me a better developer” talk that he gave at Oredev conference last year where he shared some tools that he uses on a daily basis at TypeMock.

What follows is a list of tools and tips that I noted, I do use some on a daily basis too and will look into others.

For Team Room

  • Remove tools and use Task Board
  • Two screens
  • Daily standups

Personal Development machine

How to use Amazon EC2 cloud in production?

Deployment Insight

Bonus

Silverlight 2 Beta 1 Control Samples

I was just going through the Silverlight website and found this demo that shows off all the Silverlight 2 controls in action along with Xaml code that is used to render the controls.pretty cool!

.NET Framework Library Source Code now available

Scott Gu recently made this interesting announcement

Graffiti CMS Beta 1 is "Out"

Today I received this email from Scott Watermasysk announcing the availability of their new Graffiti CMS. If you don’t know about it yet check out this post on Rob Howard’s blog.

Here’s Scott’s email.

Welcome to the Graffiti CMS Beta!

We are very excited to finally have the opportunity to share Graffiti CMS with you.
Before you get started, a couple of quick items:

  • If you have any comments/tips/suggestions please do not hesitate to contact us at graffiti-beta@telligent. This is going to be the primary support channel for the first beta and will be used to help flush out the documentation for the beta 2 and final release.
  • The Graffiti Beta will only function until March 1st 2008. After this time, Graffiti will display a message stating the beta has expired. We are currently planning beta 2 to be available in about 6 to 8 weeks, so there should be plenty of overlap.
  • Please consult http://docs.graffiticms.com/ for tips on how to setup Graffiti, create themes, and more. There are currently about 35 articles, but now that the beta has been released we plan on publishing much more.
  • Any gotchas which are found during the beta process will be covered at http://docs.graffiticms.com/kb/
  • To begin using Graffiti CMS, please download it from the link below and follow the instructions in the readme.htm file.
    Download:
    http://graffiticms.com/graffiti-beta1.zip

Thanks in advance for any feedback and/or suggestions. Again, please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions (big or small) at Graffiti-Beta@Telligent.com.

Thanks,

Scott scottw@telligent.com