Lucas Moffitt

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.