The Microsoft Student Community at NTNU arranged an event at the Gløshaugen campous today. Close to 60 students showed up for what turned out to me a really fun, interesting and inspiring event.

My long time friend, colleague and partner in crime Gøran Hansen had invited Lars Bjørnar Listhaug from Abeo to come and talk about their experiences from rebuilding the Lindbak Retail system from the ground up. The project was an early adopter of .NET 2.0 and SQL 2005, and was one of the case studies for the VS2005 launch. The application must be best looking Windows Forms application I've ever seen. Imagine the coolest WPF stuff you've seen, but implemented in Windows Forms (no WPF at the time they started building the application).

The second presentation was by Gøran Hansen, who was a one-man coding army today! In about 45 minutes he went all over Vista showing off cool developer centric features. Some of the things he demoed (with live code) was connecting to the Vista Desktop Search Index using OleDB, the Windows RSS platform, Vista Sidebar Gadgets (including my Free SMS gadget) and some WPF samples. I think many of the students left with a really good impression of what Vista has to offer "under the hood". Great job by Gøran!

Between the sessions Abeo sponsored Pizza for hungry students, and it looked like people where really having a good time!

Gøran is doing his Vista show (really, it's not just a presentation) again at the Norwegian .NET User Group May 8th. If you have a chance you should really come to see some cool sides of Windows Vista!

I haven't blogged too much about my studies, but some of you might know that I'm graduating from the Norwegian University of Technology and Science with a bachelors degree in Informatics this summer. I think the coolest course I've taken through out the three years at the university is the "microcontroller system design" course. The course is all about embedded hardware and building software for devices. The course is really practical, so you get's lots of hands on assignments.

We're using the STK1000 development kit from the Trondheim based chip manufacture Atmel to learn microcontroller programming. This Friday Håvard Sørbø and Daugur Johanssonn and I delivered our third assignment in the course. It's a PONG clone running on the STK1000. The task was to install a custom Linux distribution on the device, write a kernel driver to handle buttons and lights, and to implement the PONG game. Håvard did the kernel driver for the LEDs and buttons and lights, Dagur did most of the game engine, while I did the graphics and some pair programming with Dagur on the actual game. The entire project is written in C. To make the game more fun we decided to base the theme of the game on Super Mario Brus on the NES.

  

I found this course really interesting since it's so far away from my everyday job as a .NET developer, working in such an high level of abstraction. On this course you get a chance to do really low level stuff, like writing C and assembly to the device, not depending on an operating system. You get to draw on the screen, one pixel at the time, and not depend on some pre-built graphics library. In all the course has been a great learning experience. I've included a YouTube video showing off the gameplay.

We've arrived in Reading, and have settled in at the fancy new "elements" hotel in the centre of Reading. We've spent the night catching up with old friends from the other teams over a nice dinner. The other teams attending the Imagine Cup Accelerator programs are Italy, Brazil, Germany, Croatia and China. So the teams are spread out all over the globe.

The agenda for tomorrow is information and briefings, and a tour at the Microsoft Innovation Centre here in Reading.

Now I'm going to hit the bathtub with a cold coke and a audio books on my iPod!

Game of Life is one of those simple, yet really fascinating mathematical ideas you sometime learn about. One of the assignments in the course "object oriented software development" is to first model the "Game of Life" and then implement it in Java.

The Game of Life was invented by Dr. John Conway, and is one of the simplest examples of what is sometimes called "emergent complexity" or "self-organizing systems." Life isn't a game in the traditional sense of the word. It's a grid filled with cells, either dead or alive. Some simple rules determines the state of a cell. The rules that rule the universe of "Life" are as follow:

• A dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell (birth).
• A live cell with two or three live neighbors stays alive (survival).
• In all other cases, a cell dies or remains dead (overcrowding or loneliness).

I got really fascinated by this simple "game", and after doing some reading on the subject it turns out you can implement a "turing machine" in Live, which basically means you can implement any computer program as a pattern inside the "Life" game. For instance there are examples where people have implemented programs that finds prime numbers using the simple rules of "Life".

If you're interested in learning more about "The Game of Life" I recommend checking up the site "Wonders of Math". The Wikipedia article on the subject also gives a nice introduction to the game. If you want to get the latest and greatest discoveries of new and interested patterns in "Life" the "Game of Life News" site is the place to be. If you want to learn how to implement a touring machine in "Life" check out this PDF document. If you just want to check out the "code", check out this gif image showing the touring machine pattern.

If you want to play with Game of Life your self you can either run my compiled version directly (JAR) or download a ZIP file containing both the compiled version and the Java code.

It's been quite some time since my last post… And it's the same old classic reason: I've been too darn busy to prioritize bogging. The fact that I haven't blogged in a while doesn't mean I haven't been playing with cool technology. This autumn I'm taking 6(!) courses at the university, in addition to working at Abeo.

The coolest course I'm taking is called "IT2105 Functional Programming", and it's just plain fun! The course is really small. I think we're about 25 (?) students in the class at the moment. The course is all about functional programming. To be more precise MIT Scheme programming, which is a LISP dialect. If you haven't seen LISP code, it's that old language with all those parentheses in it. This link will give you a quick Scheme search on Google Code Search.

The cool thing about the functional programming course is not the fact that I'm going to use Scheme for everything, but that trough the course I learn a new way of thinking that I can apply in my everyday work as a programmer. In C# 3.0 we'll be getting the infamous "lambda" expression allowing you to create new functions on the fly, and pass them as arguments to other functions. This is one of the key aspects of functional programming, and is also a key aspect in LINQ and C# 3.0.

Trough the course "IT1105 - Algorithms and data structures" I've gotten a good reason to get into Python, a language I'm liking more and more the more I program in it. With the 1.0 release of IronPython you can actually start to take advantage of the dynamic features of Python in your .NET applications. I actually have a personal project going on where I explore IronPython and adding scripting capabilities to your .NET application. I'll post more on this as the project proceeds.

Oh, and now over to those hands-on labs I mentioned in the title… A couple of weeks ago we (The Microsoft Student Community NTNU) did a three night introduction course on .NET and C#. The first part of the course was about C# and the .NET Framework in general, the second part was about Windows Forms and the third part was about ASP.NET. As a part of the course material I wrote three "hands-on labs":

• A simple Notepad application (Windows Forms)
• A simple RSS reader (Windows Forms)
• Expose and consume RSS (ASP.NET)

I've included both the PDF and the Word version of the hands-on labs in this download, so feel free to modify them if you want to use them for a user group meeting, a introduction course etc.

And to finish up this post I've included on of the funniest parodies I've seen in a LONG while. The master of music parodies, Wierd Al, have come up whit his own version of Chamilionares "Ridin Dirty"; White n Nerdy!

Just a quick post with some link to various press coverage during and after the Imagine Cup World finals. I've allso uploaded some new pictures to my Flickr page.

• Adressavisen: NTNU-bronse i India
• Adressavisen: NTNU-studenter i verdenstoppen
• Dagbladet: Nerde-bronse
• Computerworld: Cup-feber i India
• Computerworld: Tredjeplass for NTNU-studenter
• Fredrikstad blad: Til topps i Imagine Cup?
• Fredrikstad blad: Til "data-VM" i India
• Nordlys: Lakselv-studenter kan nå helt til tops
• Nordlys: Gjør suksess i India
• Nordlys: Lakselvgutter i verdenstoppen

 

This is the last night in India. What an amazing week! We've had so much stuff to do all the time that It feels like we've been her for way more than 9 days.

The last few days have been just amazing! Wednesday evening we got the message that we made it trough to the final six. Together with Denmark, Italy, Brazil, China and Japan we where going to compete in the final championship round in Dehli. We left from Agra 5 in the morning on Thursday and went straight to the convention centre where the final round was held. We where the first team presenting our solution. The final round was an open presentation where the other students competing in the Imagine Cup was invited to watch the final 6 presentations. I don't know the exact number, but I guess there where between 200 and 300 people watching the final presentations.

Once we where done presenting our solution we spend the entire day at the convention watching the other teams giving their software design presentations. After the software design presentations we got a chance to watch the contributions in user interface design and short film. Some of the Windows Presentation Foundation applications where just amazing. Even better than Microsoft's own showcases! The films where great too. Will post a link as soon as the short film contributions are available online.

All the winners where announced Friday during the "World festival", where Microsoft executives, the Indian minister of technology, gave some great speeches.

After seeing the other teams final presentations we didn't have to high expectations, but man it felt good when we where announced as number three in the software design category! The price was 10.000$, a nice trophy, and an invitation to spend 14 days in Reading (UK) at Microsoft/BT's expenses to develop the idea further.

After the winners where announced we had to lots of interviews, Indian newspapers, Japanese computer magazines, Indonesian TV and all kinds of other strange Asian media. We've also gotten some good press back in Norway, so when I get back to Trondheim I'll collect all the online articles and put up some links. For now I'll just link to the Dagbladet article titled "geek bronze".

Later Friday night Microsoft threw a great pool party, with great food and free drinks. Because of Dehli regulations they had to turn down the music quite early, so later that night we went into Dehli city to one of the most popular nightclubs in the city. That was an really interesting experience, will post more pictures later. Was back at the hotel room 4AM.

Today we've been relaxing at the hotel before visiting a "Bazar", which basically was like an "underground" station with tons of shops selling all kind of fake crap. "iPod shulffles" with display, Sony 4gb mp4 player and TONS of copied PS2, Xbox and computer games. The only thing they couldn't copy was the Sony PSP games, so the price was about the same as in Norway. After some heavy barging i managed to get Syphon Filter Dark Mirror for one third of the Norwegian price, so good deal.

Anyhow, we're leaving for Norway Sunday morning, but because of terror threats we need to be at the airport 5 hours in advance. Will post more pictures and links when I'm back home in Trondheim… Looking forward to that after a tough, but amazing, week!

 

 

Today is the fourth day of the Imagine Cup in India. We arrived one day earlier than most of the other contestant, so during Sunday more and more students where arriving. On Sunday night we had the welcome party, with opening speeches and videos, music and food. The "band" that played on the opening night was an Indian version of the Norwegian band "Ralph Mayers and The Jack Harren Band". I don't remember the name so I'll look it up later. The Norwegian team left early from the party to work on out application, and we weren't in bed until 04 AM.

 

Monday was the first day of the contest. We started out by doing a 7 minute lightning round which didn't count. This round was held just to get us warmed up. Later that day we had the first real round of the Imagine Cup, a 20 minute presentation and 10 minutes of questions. The presentation went excellent and all the demos worked perfectly. Later that day we (team Norway), Japan and UK where invited to do a press briefing talking about our projects and our experience as contestant at the Imagine Cup world finals.

 

Tuesday morning was spent in our team booth giving presentations to media, other teams and guests of the competition. There where quite allot of people interested in our project, so we where quite really busy. The 12 teams who made it to the next round where announced around lunch. I don't remember all the other teams who made it, but both Norway and Denmark made it to the next round. 41 teams are now down to one. We did our second round presentations Tuesday afternoon, which now was 35 minutes and 15 minutes of questions. The judges gave us great feedback, and actually said that they where blown away… So no our fingers are crossed, and hopefully we'll move on to the final 6 teams to present tomorrow Thursday.

 

Today, Wednesday, we've been relaxing and visiting and old mausoleum for some important Indian guy from the early 1600's. I don't remember his name, so I'll post a Wikipedia link later on. We spend the day divided into groups doing different kinds of work at the site. Some people where working in the garden, while others where filling cracks in the floor and walls, or  where swiping dust. Now we just had lunch before heading over to Taj Mahal, something I'm definitely are looking forward to.

 

Gøran have posted som pictures on his Flickr site. Check them out over at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/22075141@N00/sets/72057594128196432/

This week I'll be attending the Imagine Cup world finals in India. We flew from Oslo early Friday morning, and arrived in Dehli late Friday night. After a short stop for some food and refreshments in Dehli we jumped in the buss and drew for four hours to Agra. The drive was _really_ interesting. Even tough we where driving in the middle of the night there were people walking along the road everywhere. People sleeping on the roof of their truck or buss. Crowds of cows walking in the middle of the street. A gang of monkeys looking at us from the rooftops of buildings that looked like the where going to collapse any moment. Jan Kristian took lots of pictures which he will upload to his Flickr site soon.

We arrived at the Jaypee Palace hotel early Saturday morning. After almost 24 hours of travelling. We've spent the first day in India relaxing in the sun, bathing, talking to the hotel monkey, and doing some preparations for the contest.

Later tonight we're going to check out the Hotell Spa and perhaps get a massage or something.

Had my final exam this term last Friday. The operating system exam wasn't all that hard, lots of questions, but non of them where that detailed.

Now I have a super exciting summer ahead of me. In mid of June we're spending a long weekend in Bygdstad where our family has a summer house. The first weekend of July we're going to the Roskilde festival in Denmark. That will definitely be a blast. Lots of great bands this year. Looking bands I'm looking forward to the most is "The Streets", "Tool" and "Sigur Rós".

Around 14-15 July I'm going home to Lakselv for a couple of weeks. Haven't been home since Christmas so really looking forward to that. I'll spend most of the time home relaxing and fly fishing for salmon.

On August 04. me and my team mates (and Frode from Microsoft Norway) is heading for India and the world finals of Imagine Cup. We're staying there to August 13., so that's going to be awesome!

Between the various vacations I've planned out I'll be in Trondheim working on some software at the St. Olav hospital. I also have a few summer projects planned out, like a blog update. I'll be posting more about that later on.

Wish everyone a great summer, and for those of you who haven't finished all the exams yet: good luck!

The Norwegian online edition of the Norwegian magazine “Teknisk Ukeblad” has published an article about the Nordic Imagine Cup finals. The printed version of the magazine comes out 40 issues a week, with a print of 90.000 copies. You can check out the article over at http://www.tu.no/nyheter/ikt/article53247.ece.

The last couple of days have been super busy. After the Microsoft days in Stavanger I went straight to Oslo to compete with Team NTNU in the Nordic finals of Imagine Cup. After a nice dinner at Aker Brygge we went straight to the hotel room to finish the prototype. We had some issues, and weren’t finished with the scenarios we wanted to implement until 07 in the morning!

Guess what, we actually won the finals! We competed against a Finish and a Danish team, who both had nice projects to show off. The first price was a brand new Qtek Smartphone and a trip to the world finals in India in beginning of August!

 

For those of you waiting for the slides from Bergen and Stavanger, I’ll have them ready after Microsoft days in Trondheim Monday.

Have to run, barely time for a quick shower before heading out on town for some celebrating!

In the mean time, check out Jan Kristians “live” coverage of the Nordic finals on his Flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/j-k/sets/72057594125728297/

 

Just got the word from Microsoft Norway, our team is going to represent Norway in the Nordic finals of Imagine Cup 2006. I don’t want to talk that much about the idea yet… Don’t want to give the Swedes or Danish teams and competitive advantage. The finals is held in Oslo 05.mai, and hopefully we’ll do good enough to reach the world final in India in august. Last years Nordic finals were lots of fun, and the after party was great!
Imagine Cup is an annual competition for students held by Microsoft. The category our team is competing in is software design. You can read more about Imagine Cup over at TheSpoke.