Lucas Moffitt

look at your laptop, and now back to mine. Now back at your laptop, and now back to mine. Sadly, it isn’t mine, but if you stop using ladies apple computers and switch to Windows 7, it could act like it’s mine. Look down, back up, where are you? You’re on the internets downloading free software from dreamspark.com. What’s in your hand, back at me. I have a copy of that Office 2007 you love from itsnotcheating.com.au. Look at it again, the disks are now downloads of Windows 7.  Anything is possible when laptop runs Windows 7 and not apple. I’m on a boat,

Lucas.

Everyone likes something that is simple. But people often get confused as to what’s simple and what’s hard, often without even looking at it.

Laurence Moroney takes the seemingly difficult and turns it into Lego blocks that even the most confused developers can understand.

“Introducing Microsoft Silverlight 3” makes it easy.

With his help and this book you can:

• Create your first simple sites
• Build applications that run out of the browser
• Use XAML to render, scale, and animate graphics on-screen
• Work with Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio
• Explore core and advanced controls—and build your own
• Exploit new graphics support—3-D effects, H.264 video, GPU acceleration
• Experiment with media, ink, DeepZoom, and Photosynth
• Access data services to build connected applications
• Dynamically add content using Ruby and Python
• Manage Silverlight applications from ASP.NET–based servers
• Learn how to deliver DRM-protected video content

This book is best aimed at those who are new to Silverlight and are interested in learning about what it is and how it works, those if you who are seasoned professionals most probably wont take anything away from it.

I personally think sketchflow is the greatest invention since sliced bread. But that may just be me.

Regardless of that it’s a great way to get into Silverlight 3 and the cool new features of Expression Studio (Available to Students for free by the way @ Dreamspark)

Lucas

Visit – http://www.mspress.com.au today

Hey Guys

Great turn out at the BIT orientation and the lunch BBQ. Sorry if we weren’t able to speak to all of you, you all had so many questions

If you didn’t get a handout (We ran out sorry Thought 500 would have been enough!) here’s a copy you can have all to yourself!

I know several of you were going to email me with specific questions please feel free Lucas.Moffitt [@] student-partners.com.au

Make sure you checkout the facebook group

Keep checking this site for the freebies and information on our next events.

Photo’s to come soon!

Lucas.

Hey Guys!

First up let me thank everyone for coming out today, at last count we had 48 attendees which is awesome for a first event!

Gratz to all those people that won prizes and those of you who took some information away from the event today.

Like to take a second to thank the people that were involved in setting today up as well as my helpers on the day.

• Uni Staff: Brian, Christine and Jenny
• Friends and Family: Elise and Josh, my girlfriend Natasha and my little brother Jason.
• As well as all the guys at MS, Karo and Andy.

If you guys have other feedback or question about the event feel free to post them here and I’ll reply as soon as humanly possible. I’ll put up pictures and other stuff on here and my facebook I’ll launch another post in a second for those who are interested in attending the XBOX event in Sydney, please keep in mind i can only take 1 female and 1 male. as well as having to provide your own accommodation / transport after / before the event.

Thanks again guys.

Lucas.

That’s right, the first of many to come MSP events will be held on Monday the 19th of October in the ICT Building, Room 3 – 34. From 1pm till 2pm!

I’ll be going over how you guys as students can access all the free stuff, and also talk about some upcoming goodies from Microsoft, as well as hand out some prizes and Microsoft swag. The list of topics includes:

• Dreamspark
• It’s not cheating
• Imagine Cup
• MSDN Academic Alliance
• Windows 7 Launch
• Windows Mobile 6.5 Launch
• The MSP Program
• Xbox 360
• Student Training and Development

The prize list is as follows

1 lucky winner will take home the Microsoft Wireless notebook presenter mouse 8000

Another winner will take home a free copy of Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate

and the last major prize being a Microsoft Mobile Mouse 6000

There will be other things such as stickers, windows 7 mouse mats etc for attendance (but they’re at a limited number!)

You can download a copy of the handout below if you so wish!

You can also register on facbook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?invites&eid=174892697072 but it’s not compulsory.

Hope to see you all there!

Lucas.

Edit: Emails sent to B.IT and B.Education students, Will be posted on University Newsletter tomorrow!

Edit: Prize List!

tldnr: First MSP event – Monday 19th of October, in room ICT 3-34

I was having a good think the other day about what i can actually put here, to be honest I’m not so good with the whole blogging thing and i was trying to think up decent content as I have no desire to post shit here. Anyway, moving along working on an assignment the last few days and as usual uploading it all to my office workspace. Office What? No seriously What?

Office Workspace:

Think of it this way. A thumb drive for all your uni work on the interwebs, secure in your own little section. A place for all your word documents, PowerPoint’s, Excel etc, anything you work on your desktop you can now work on within your internets!

Now you may think, So what? Well let me break it down.

• No Backups:

It keeps version information about each document so after you make changes, it makes another copy

• Can’t Loose them

I’ve gone through most probably over two dozen usb drives since starting uni. Can’t loose something that’s on the internet!

The best part of all is group work. I hate group work, working with the undesirables of the course, the ones who do minimal work or even just the fact you have to rely on other people to get your mark. All of that makes me a sad panda. But by using Office Workspaces you can share folders and documents with groups, allowing you to cut back on the group meetings by doing it online. It also allows for sharing work online that’s fully documented with who did what and when. Meaning you can smack the bludgers before it gets out of hand.

As an IT teaching student this also has phenomenal aspects for teaching by minimizing paper, allowing students to collaborate on ideas, getting content to students that are home sick etc. For me the list is truly endless.

Taking this free service out into the real world can be beneficial for all.

• Event Planning / Management
• Study Groups
• Meeting Planners / Logs
• Household Information (i.e. Shared house, jobs etc contact information)
• Job searching
• Sports Team management
• Travel Plans

That’s just a small list of what you can achieve with it.

It’s free to sign up you just use the same windows live login to create your account (The same one you used to register for Dreamspark!)

Click HERE to get started!

tldnr: Office on the internet! Do your work online @ OfficeWorkspaces

Lucas

Over the past few days I’ve noticed a DRAMATIC increase in visits and bandwidth usage, perhaps it’s time i start looking for a new host to meet demand, but anyways welcome!

This is the place to keep an eye on for future events at the uni, software and book give aways, other information on different products and just random bits and pieces from my life and current projects.

Over the next week or so i hope to be in a position to start handing out some love to Students so make sure you keep checking back every now and again, and passing this page onto your friends.

You can sign up on this page, my RSS, my twitter, my facebook or add me on msn (LucasMoffitt@Gmail.com)

See you guys soon!

Lucas.

tldnr: Welcome! Keep checking back for free stuff!

Microsoft Dreamspark is one of those things that isn’t that well known about in Australia, and that’s about to change.

Microsoft Dreamspark offers the latest of development technologies to students, for free.

Yeah, no Joke. Free.

Take a look.

So, What’s the catch? well other than having to be a student, there’s nothing. All you have to do is validate your student email address with Dreamspark, and then use your live profile (Your msn email) to link them together.

Once that’s done take a look at what’s on show.

Visual Studio 2008 – Professional Edition

• SQL Server 2008 – Developer
• XNA Game Studio 3.1
• CCR and DSS Toolkit 2008 (R2)
• Robotics Developer Studio 2008 (R2)
• Windows Server 2008 – Standard
• Expression Studio 3
• Windows Server 2003
• Visual Studio 2005 – Professional Edition
• Visual Studio 2005 – Express Edition
• SQL Server – Express
• Virtual PC

There are some major drawcards right there.

Server, Visual Studio, the WHOLE expression suite, that’s awesome for pretty much any student.

Go take a look now and get some free stuff!

Lucas.

I don’t know…

Well i didn’t, but i do now!

Today my TEMPer USB thermometer arrived. I was quite disappointed to find out the state of the User Interface….

I need this thermometer to put in my server in the back room. (because i hate cords, and computer boxes everywhere i had to place it in a cabinet (I’ll do more posts on the modification of the cabinet later) )

Anyway I needed something more flexible, something that can update to twitter and / or send me a text message if it starts getting to hot in the upcoming warmer months. (sorry for the quality of the picture, the lighting is somewhat terrible )

I started out downloading the Temper.Communications.dll from the manufacturers website and dropped it into Red Gates .Net Reflector which you can download freely from here. The process was simple and within seconds i was able to see all i needed to create my own application for it.

So i cracked open Visual Studio 2008 (Thanks to Dreamspark) and did this up in VB.

Imports System
Imports TEMPer.Communication.Temperinterface

Public Class ServerTemp

    Dim AvailableComPorts$() = TEMPer.Communication.TEMPerInterface.FindDevices()
    Dim TEMPerInterface As New TEMPer.Communication.TEMPerInterface(AvailableComPorts$(0))

To read the temperature is simple…

Me.Text = TEMPerInterface.ReadTEMP

Or to find the port information

Me.Text = TEMPerInterface.PortName

After that it was as simple or as complex as you want to make it. All i wanted mine to do was send an SMS to my phone when the temperature surpassed a set ambient limit. (I decided on 40degees).

Thanks to my friends at SMSGlobal it was as simple as borrowing their API to send an SMS to my phone to warn me when the temperature started to rise.

I think it works well…

Lucas.