Lucas Moffitt

This is an opportunity you wouldn’t want to miss out on! Microsoft Australia have launched Protégé 2010, a competition where we want you to come up with a creative solution to market Office 2010.

The winning entry will be awarded with one month’s paid work experience at Microsoft where you will be mentored by leading executives and see your ideas brought to life!

For more information, check out www.microsoft.com.au/protege and tune in/subscribe to Protégé TV www.youtube.com/tvprotege for the weekly inside scoop on updates, giveaways and tips that you won’t get anywhere else!

If it was any more awesome you may just explode.

If you’re interested in more information about office 2010 head to: http://www.lucasmoffitt.com/?p=181

Lucas

A Real World Experience like No Other. As an intern or Fulltim’er at Microsoft, you’ll have real responsibility, real work, and real opportunities to jumpstart your career. (You’ll get paid, too!) It’s an experience you’ll never find in a classroom. You’ll be given manageable assignments that you can complete while you’re here, and your efforts will likely take shape in Microsoft products—or be used by Microsoft teams—long after you return to school. And imagine millions of customers, not to mention your classmates, seeing your work! Some interns even parlay their experience into a job offer.

An Opportunity to Shine. Our employees make a real difference. Not by filing paperwork or running errands, but by developing real products. Here, you’ll run your own projects and put your skills to work. This is why our internship program is one of the most successful in the industry. You’ll learn more in 12 weeks than you would in a whole school year. It’s the kind of work that gets noticed by millions of people all over the world. Kind of redefines the whole concept of internships, don’t you think?

“An internship allowed me to identify areas in which I needed to grow and helped to validate that I am working in the right field.”  – John, Software Development Lead, Windows Server Performance

Current Internship and Fulltime opportunities with Microsoft:

1) Software Design Engineer (SDE) Intern or Fulltime

Work at the Core of Every Product We Build
This internship is where the fun begins for code gurus like you. As a hands-on Software Design Engineer intern, you’ll learn how to make decisions about design and feature implementation, using your mastery of technical tools to help make a product vision a reality. If you would like to write code and design efficient data structures and algorithms to develop next-generation applications or operating systems, listen up. This internship shows you how SDEs bring products to life by working with Program Managers to ensure strong design and Software Design Engineers in Test to ensure quality through testing. Ultimately for the SDE, it’s your code that turns concepts into new technologies and services.

Qualifications:

• · Fluency in C/C++/C# and a passion for writing quality code using computer science fundamentals
• · Ability to derive creative and innovative solutions by thinking "outside the box"
• · Ability to solve complex problems, sometimes by testing and debugging code
• · Expertise in feature definition, design, and feasibility
• · Demonstrated skill in estimating development time
• · Be available to relocate to our corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington, U.S.A for a 12 week internship (Microsoft Corporation pays all costs associated with relocation)
• · Functional level English Language skills, written and spoken requirement

2) Software Design Engineer in Test (SDET) Intern or Fulltime

Discover Life on the Last Line of Defense
As an intern Software Design Engineer in Test (SDET), you’ll own it, break it, fix it, and own it again. You’ll ensure a product’s quality by making sure it performs as users expect it to. Part of the fun is how creative you can be devising ways to manipulate, crush, and sabotage software into submission—while creating innovative testing technologies along the way. Ultimately, as an SDET intern it’s your input that can help make the difference between joy and frustration for the customers. Since you’re keen on how things work, and making them work better, you’ll work hand in hand with the Program Managers and Software Design Engineers to design, develop, and maintain automation systems for use in development and testing cycles. Using the tools you create, you’ll help pour over source code for trouble spots, debugging and isolating problems, and executing creative tests to find new bugs while regression testing recent fixes.

Qualifications:

• · Fluency in C/C++/C#/VB.NET and experience designing and developing tool architecture
• · Ability to solve complex problems and write automation systems and device drivers
• · Ability to author test plans and cases, conduct security and stress tests, and debug at source level after identifying, investigating, and prioritizing bugs
• · Demonstrated skills in negotiation and conflict management
• · Demonstrated interest in customer advocacy derived from a holistic understanding of the product from the code level to delivery
• · Be available to relocate to our corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington, U.S.A for a 12 week internship (Microsoft Corporation pays all costs associated with relocation and helps with housing)
• · Functional level English Language skills, written and spoken requirement

Whatever position you choose, you’ll make a real impact in the dynamic world of product development at Microsoft. All intern positions are12 weeks and located in the United States at our corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. All fulltime positions are located in the United States.

Send Us Your Resume
Submitting a resume is the only way to get to the next stage of consideration, the interview. Our recruiting team travels to Australia regularly to meet bright and enthusiastic people like you, and we look forward to receiving your resume. Here are a few things to keep in mind when you are updating your resume to send to us:

• · Clearly state your graduation date, degree/major and the university are attending
• · Specify your technical skills (including programming languages and other development tools you know well), project details (both within university and at any jobs or internships you have held), and technologies you have used on those projects
• · Describe your role in the projects that you worked on, and what you personally achieved
• · Provide an active e-mail address, physical address, and current phone number where we can reach you

If interested, please send your resume by the 15^th of February

to: lisabar@microsoft.com

A recruiter will review it, and if interested will set up a phone interview as a first step. And, by the way, we have many positions available, so if there is someone else you think we should know about; please share this information with them.

If we invite you to interview, we will cover your travel expenses. If you receive an offer, we will cover costs for visa processing and provide help with relocation. Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer and supports workforce diversity.

This is a great book for begging SQL Server, not programming. There’s confusion in the text between some programming methods and their actual SQL application. If you’re looking for programming with SQL Yeah not so much. But if you’re looking to work with SQL server as a whole then this is pretty much the bees knees.

Mike takes great masses of information and compresses them down into manageable blocks, allowing even the silliest of the dullards can understand the core concepts.

I’ve read other SQL books and SQL server books, and the one thing lacking from them that was evident here was the organized approach in which the content is delivered. That includes everything like information about the actual tools you can use and even business intelligence and SQL server integration.

As always there’s an EBook version and a resource kit on the attached CD which made things a lot easier.

Only down side of the book proved that some of the scripts failed to work correctly. A quick skim through the resource cd and the previous chapters was more than enough to go back and ensure that the script was fixed.

Overall on the scale of helpfulness this is right up there with a 8. Its great for “newbs”!

So go now and get yourself a copy of this book from our friends at MS Press:

Click Here for the book!

Click Here for MS Press!

Lucas!

Yes, that’s right. Microsoft is STILL offering it’s Office 2007 ultimate for $75(AUD) to Uni, Tafe and some high school students.

The package includes:

Access 2007

• Outlook 2007
• Excel 2007  
• PowerPoint 2007
• Groove 2007
• Publisher 2007
• InfoPath 2007
• Word 2007
• OneNote 2007

It’s not bad considering if it was anyone but you the cost would be in the hundreds.

All you have to do is have a valid .edu.au address which you can check here

BUT WHY? you might ask.

Well besides from cost, ease of use, interoperability with other applications, business grade software. there is…

Referencing!

I firmly believe in students taking the transition from 2000 / 2003 if for no other reason than referencing…

Everyone hates it, everyone has to do it. and with the confusion and problems faced when using third party software packages why waste the time?

Word 2007 offers specific capabilities for creating a bank of references that can be used at any given time. this ensures that your assignment will always be ready on time.

Click here to see for yourself…