After I got back from the Imagine Cup Accelerator event I just had time to wash some clothes, repack my suitcase, catch up with school and job before me and Hege jumped on the plane back to London and the Designertopia event. This is a new conference Microsoft EMEA is hosting for the first time, targeted at designer and developers. There where two simultaneous tracks, one "creative" and one "technical".

As you can imagine the core focus of the event was on the new tools for building great user experiences that Microsoft is shipping in the coming year. We got a chance to se some really cool demos showing what's possible with Expression Blend and Expression Media. I think one of the coolest sessions was Jon Harris "The Power of Expression Blend for UI design". He basically built an application in Blend in 45 minutes. I think this demo really showed how powerful this tool has become. The new Beta 2 release looks really solid and I can't wait to play some more with it!

The Expression Web Designer also looked really good. Hopefully I finally can get CSS layered layout right!

We where quite a nice gang of Norwegian people attending the conference, so we hade a nice get-together at the Hard Rock cafe Thursday evening.

Hopefully Microsoft will make this an annual event, since I really think it addresses a different audience than the one at events like TechEd and PDC.

Hege Have uploaded some pictures on her Flickr site, so be sure to check them out! You should allso check out Microsofts new "Design Center".

Day 11
A good day of solid coding. Messed with Microsoft Blend and the tool is looking really promising!

Day 12
On Wednesday we went to Cambridge and visited Microsoft Research. We got an introduction to what Microsoft is doing research on, and got a chance to learn more about projects like the True Skill system in Xbox Live, some new imaging technology, the Vista network map and more.

We also got a chance to hear the stories behind three successful businesses from the Cambridge area, among them the ARM processor, which you probably have running inside your MP3 player or cell phone.

In the afternoon Microsoft had arranged an student event for Cambridge students to come to the Microsoft research facility to learn more about Imagine Cup. The goal of the event was to encourage more students to take part in the Imagine Cup.

After the student event we visited one of the old collages that are part of Cambridge university. We had the dinner in the dining hall which looked exactly like what you'd expect from an old traditional English university.

Day 13
On Thursday we got the final bits and  pieces to fit together. The new demo turned out really nice! We also got some time with a professional presenter, who work with different companies to learn them how to get the message across. She was really got at what she did, and we got several useful tips on presenting!

Day 14
The big final day! We all got up early and traveled in to London for the final presentations at the BT Tower. I think there where about 90 people or so in conference room, consisting of people from Microsoft, BT and the press. Each team had 10 minutes to present what they had been working on during the two weeks. Even tough this wasn't a competition there where two awards being handed out. Best use of technology and most compelling business case. We where  aiming for the technology award with our cool demo using the latest and greatest of Microsoft technology such as WPF, WCF, Vista Media Center, Sidebar gadgets, Office 2007 and Windows Mobile 2005. So the fact that we won the "most compelling business case" award was quite a surprise! The price was a Philips digital photo frame with a 1GB memory card with pictures from the event. Really cool!

After the presentation we went up to the 34th floor for drinks, press interviews and some snacks. The tower is almost 160m high, so the view was just amazing!

Day 15
Traveled back to Norway. Because of snowy weather all over Norway we where really delayed, and it actually took 16 hours from we left the hotel to I was back home in my apartment!

Day 5
Wednesday was a solid day of coding. We got lots of stuff done, and the application is really starting to take shape. I'll promise we'll do a full web cast demo of the application before we leave Reading! On the evening we visited a really large GoKarting facility. The course was quite big, and they even had this bridge you had to drive under and under. We where randomly put together into 8 teams of 4 drivers and competed in a endurance championship. Two and a half hour of solid GoKarting, with pit-stops, driver changes and everything. It was AMAZING fun, probably one of the funniest things I've done in a LONG time. I was lucky to get on a team with three guys who where as competitive as me, so we won the competition, and I had the fastest lap of all! Just plain fun!

Day 6
Another day of just cranking out code. Tons of fun! Did the Office 2007 integration, which turns out to work really well. With Visual Studio Tools for Office 2nd edition you get support for ribbons and application level add-ins in all Office 2007 applications. We've implemented an application for healthcare professionals to connect to the MediWatch server and download data.

Day 7
Friday was the day of the Windows Vista release for developers in the UK. We got a chance to see an really amazing proof of concept application for the London underground, written by Microsoft and the London underground IT department. They built the application over three weeks at the Microsoft Technology Centre, and the end result was just amazing. The application let you view trains move in real time in a sweet WPF application. You could do all kinds of things like turning on and off tracks, looking at heat maps, breakdowns, crime ratings etc. for the different stations. They also had a 3D map of the underground giving you an impression on how the different stations are layered on different depths.

Sanjay Parthasarathy, Corporate Vice President, Developer & Platform Evangelism Group, was in Reading for the Vista launch, so he also took time to drop by the teams to see how they were doing.

Day 8
Saturday was quite laidback, and we hade a late breakfast and only stayed at the Microsoft Campus to five in the afternoon. We then went into Reading for an amazing meal at the Chilli resturant. We then went out on town, and Woo from the Microsoft Technology Centre where doing a good job making sure everyone had enough beer. We finished the night at the Walkabout disco, a large two floor disco. It turns out Reading have quite good nightlife, and people from smaller city around Reading come in to Reading in the weekends to party.

Day 9
Sunday was a day off, and Wendy had arranged with train tickets for everyone so that we could get a chance to see London. Gøran, Hans Olav and I first visited the Madam Tussouds, which was lots of fun. It was way larger than I expected, and some of the wax figures where just amazingly real. Lots of picture to come! We then did some shopping in Oxford street, and spent some time at the London Apple store. It's probably the coolest store I've ever seen, so definitely going back there next week with Hege!

We finished the day with a round in the London eye, catching a great view over London, before having dinner at a stake house.

Day  10
Today we've spent most of the day working on our application. I finally figured out how to do background add-ins inside Vista Media Center, and how to load up a WPF browser application, so now everything is pretty much set. Things are coming together, and it looks like we'll have a brand new demo ready for BT tower Friday.

Today was also the meeting day for Microsoft Architect Council, and Team Norway was invited to give a presentation about our project and our Imagine Cup experience. The Architect Council consists of the most experienced software architects from all of Brittan, so that was lots of fun.

In the evening we had a gaming night, with 360 network gaming, pizza and beer. I did some video filming, but I left the cables at the campus, so I'll have to youtube the video later. We had 6 Xbox 360's available, and played some Gears Of War, Fifa, PES6 and Ghost Recon.
 

Day 2
Time fly's and we're already at the fourth day of the event. Sunday was the first day out at the Microsoft Campus and their Technology Centre/Innovation Centre. We spent most of the day in a conference room going trough the agenda for the two weeks. Tim Stevens from British Telecom did an awesome presentation of their Web21C SDK, which basically let's you use their infrastructure with a bunch of .NET one liners.

Making two phones ring is a simple as:
btCall.StartCall(caller, calle);

To send an SMS you just do:
btMessage.SendMessage(message, recipient);

You get the idea. Now if only more telecom companies where as agile as BT and made their services this approachable!  If you want to learn more about the SDK it's publically available in beta, so check out their site at http://sdk.bt.com. I'm really looking forwarding using their SDK in our project for SMS and positioning!

We also got some information about the infrastructure we have available over the two weeks. We basically get's two really powerful developers stations, with what ever operating system we want. Since we're doing some Media Center stuff we went with three Vista Ultimate machines and one 2003 server. Microsoft had pre-configured a Team Foundation Server, so each team got their own project portal to work on. Super sweet!

After the introductions and presentations at the campus we went for dinner at a local Indian restaurant, but I got a really bad headache and went to bed early.

Day 3
We started out Monday with a few presentations, first one was an opening talk by Kevin Nickles who talked about entrepreneurship and doing a startup. Dr Allyson Reed gave shared some of her experience from running start ups and had some really interesting stories to tell.  After the business related talks Carrie and Paul from Microsoft Consulting in Reading did an excellent talk on Windows Presentation Foundation and user experiences. Carrie is talking at Desingertopia, so I'm looking forward that. Carrie and Paul is going to be with us over the two weeks to help us out with anything related to user experience. Microsoft is really investing lots of time and effort into this event, and we have all the resources and people we need available to get the most out of these to weeks, and take our projects forwards. I don't know the exact number of people involved, but we have tech support, user interface experts, MBA's to help us with business stuff, developers from BT to help us with the SDK etc.

Day 4
Today have been the most productive day so far. We've spent the entire day (from 09.00 to 22:00) working on our application. We basically decided to work on the design and architecture from India, but re-write most of the code and use the latest and greatest in technology. By the end of the day we had most of the database, data logic and infrastructure up and running. We're using C# 3.0 and LINQ for all the data access stuff, so that saved us a ton of time. I spent most of the day in Photoshop and did both the new web UI, the smart phone UI and the Vista Sidebar gadgets. Gøran focused on the smart phone application, and the plug-in framework for health monitoring devices is coming together really nicely. We also have some really cool UI stuff for the smart phone up our sleeves, so watch out!

I've uploaded a few screenshots of what we're working on, and I've allso uploaded some pictures on my Flickr site.

Smart phone UI


Gadget docked to the sidebar


Gadget floating on the desktop

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!

The next chapter of our Imagine Cup experience starts tomorrow. We're (me, Gøran and Hans Olav) leaving for the Imagine Cup accelerator program in Reading, London tomorrow. I don't know exactly what to expect, but the agenda looks really interesting. Two full weeks of technical training, business training, new technology, and catching up with new and old friends. I really haven't had time to think much about the accelerator program, and all the sudden the day has arrived.

I didn't expect Imagine Cup to take me to all these places when entering our draft to the Norwegian competition all most a year ago. Nordic final in Oslo, world final in India, TechEd in Barcelona, and now the accelerator program in London.

I'll bring my camera, and post pictures and off course blog frequently trough out the event.

I'm back in Trondheim Saturday January 27., but only for a couple of days. I got an invitation to the new designer focused Microsoft conference Designertopia. The conference is all about design, user experience, AJAX, WPF, WPF-E, 3D and off course Microsoft's new tools to aid designers. Since my girl friend is studying design this is a perfect event for her, so we're both going. So I'll be leaving back to London January 31, and the conference is a two day event starting February 1.

And after Designertopia I'm flying directly to Oslo for the first MSDN Live event this winter. So as you probably the next three weeks is going to be busy and super exiting! I'll keep you posted!