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


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