Recently I started looking for jobs, because my master thesis will come to an end and I am too dynamic to loose time after graduation searching for the perfect job.

Since I am a certified ASP .Net 3.5 professional, I started looking in this direction – but almost anyone associated ASP with SharePoint. Since I didn’t had any clue about SharePoint, I enjoyed very much the opportunity to take part in a technical workshop on this theme.

So on a very beautiful day of 8^th of March (yes, on the Woman’s day), I woke up and traveled to Köln, where the workshop was held. At 10 AM the workshop, presented by Šenaj Lelic, maguro DataAssist GmbH and seconded by Peter Kirchner, Program Manager ISV for Developer Platform & Strategy Group.

The workshop was focused on different features, starting with a technical overview of SharePoint 2010 which prepared the audience including the presentation of new features in SharePoint 2010 which were interesting for us, developers.

Then the talk was focused on visual features like ribbons, client object model, Silverlight, Workflow. Then, because everything is now related to the Cloud, the next point in line was the overview of the way in which SharePoint 2010 can collaborate in the cloud with Office 365 and the new platform for SharePoint solutions.

Digging deeper into the subject, we were presented also some development tricks and then Mr. Lelic discussed about Visual Studio 2010, Sandboxed Solutions, Developer Dashboard, Office Integration and Development, how to use Visio to enhance SharePoint.

The last part of the workshop was done buy Mr. Kirchner and was composed from a introduction to the business side of Sharepoint: a quick 1-2-3: SharePoint presentation to your clients which I found very instructive, being the distillation of the entire workshop, followed by a small presentation from the sales person’s view about knowledge development: what should you know to inform and when?

It was a really cool event, a gradually insertion into the subject, presenting both the advanced features (from the developer point of view) but also a nice sales perspective on the product, allowing us, the devs, to have a perspective on the value and business opportunities that SharePoint 2010 has.

I also have to mention the quality time in lunch break that we had with XBOX 360 with Kinect:

Post from: Radu Poenaru's Weblog

SharePoint 2010 – a technical overview for software developer

As part of the Microsoft Student Partners  I was invited to take part yet again from a Social Media Reporting team. This time is the CeBIT, a huge conference about consumer electronics. We arrived yesterday, on 2nd of March, to prepare ourselves for the challenge.

In the morning we just scouted the area, looking for interesting places to blog, tweet and make movies about. If you haven’t been to CeBIT, you should understand that it is really HUGE – there are around 30 big display areas in which you can be lost without a map.

There were a lot of nice prizes there :

And people involved in the document copy are really dedicated:

Turkey is the partner country this year:

Canon and Oce had an even nicer prize:

There were a lot of interested people who got tired after a day of walking:

:

Consumer technology doesn’t refer only to computers, here are some samples of massage tables:

Fujitsu had a very big presence with both hardware and software products:

At Dell stand, there were both Dell Venue Pro and Streak presented side by side:

IBM had the most impressive stand (in my oppinion):

And of course, a little Apple in a sea of Microsoft products:

First day looked good – let’s see what will come next!

Cheers from CeBIT 2011!

Post from: Radu Poenaru's Weblog

My first day at CeBIT

I am a certified SQL 2005 Technology Specialist. While this means a lot from a professional point of view, the new technologies come toward us, developers, too fast sometimes. It is quite a while since SQL 2008 was launched, and now SQL 2008 R2 brings its novelties. One good developer must keep up to date with its skills, otherwise the quality and quantity of his or hers work will suffer. New technologies means usually more productive developers – and I wish to stay on the wave instead under it.

When the invitation to this workshop came into my e-mail I knew that I must go. Since for us, Microsoft Student Partners, were some places reserved, I couldn’t resist and I enrolled for this – the event was booked for 7 February.

For me, it had an additional bonus: this talk was completely given in German, so I looked forward also for my language skills improvement.

It proved to be a very good idea – Not only that I got the update of my knowledge on SQL 2005 to 2008, but I learned a lot on SQL Azure, the new version of it.

We started at 10 am with a overview of SQL Server 2008 R2 and learned what is in it for me as power user / developer of Microsoft SQL Server. Then the presentation moved into the direction of efficiency both in dev time and fast running operations, evaluation of the technical potential of new version of SQL 2008 and then a little bit of marketing to our customers – learning about cost-benefit ratio and of course how can they can save money, time, server capacity by using the improvements in this new release.

The next point in the workshop was about Project Gemini, a new feature in SQL Server 2008 R2, which enable Excel users to use real Self-Service Business Intelligence. Users who are more confortable to use Excel are now able to import directly data from different sources, create relations and then they can share and evaluate interactive pivot tables and charts – and this is possible even when using huge data sets. There are also a lot of improvements in other areas like Reporting Services, Master Data Services.

Another technology that I found very interesting was Stream Insight, which enables users to create streams of event data. This data can be acquired from different sources such as RFID, sensors and web logs across different businesses in manufacturing, financial services and utilities.

We continued on the soft skills side – understanding the customer and his expectations in the context of the new introduced features – how to create the best solution for a given business based on SQL Server 2008 R2. That included a small talk about how to draw the architecture from the customer’s point of view and set the right expectations of the customer.´

Then we dived lightly (after all, most of us were developers, but to add to my skills a little experience in consultancy is not bad) in to the know-how required to architect a solution based on the needs and particularities the partner and also a some hints for leaders on what expertise should build your developers.

I left with a big bag of new knowledge and my only regret was that it was just one day event!

Post from: Radu Poenaru's Weblog

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 – a business overview for software developer

In my latest Windows Phone 7 workshop that I presented in UniBonn, I promised that we will have a contents. By now two people created and submitted their applications. What makes me happy even more than their interest is the fact that they used techniques not presented in the workshop – location services, WP7 sensors, persistence in IsolatedStorage database as alternative to IsolatedStorage file.

While reading the code, I realized that would have been better to have a two day workshop in which to also present and demo other features of the Windows Phone 7 like geolocation and its mocking, shakes, tile updates, push notifications being only few of the examples. But fortunately there is still time, so I will plan this for my future workshops.

  Here they are in their submission order:

1. TrashPlanner by Simon Guido

Description (by app author): It's a trash planner for the city of Bonn. I personally miss almost every day of garbage collection at home.

The App will help people by location their position using GPS (simulated, if the code detects to be run in the emulator). With the GPS-Position it will do a reverse geolocation lookup, to give the user the choice of the street names around his location. The list of street names calls the Google-Maps API to get an image of the street position. Further one can select which kind of dustbins has to be listed (i don't want to see things, that i do not use).

On selection of a street the Webpage of City of Bonn is queried, and parsed using some regular expressions, to list all collection dates, that match my street, my selected dustbins – and of course are not in the past.

Of course all settings will be saved for the next start, so that the positioning has not to be done again.

Video:

Screenshots:

Sources can be found here. Note: the creator of the application has the copyright and the full responsibility for the files included in the archive.

2. “Do This Now” by Loredana Ene

Description (by app author): The main purpose of the application was to familiarize with the development environment. The initial idea was to implement more functionality, but from lack of time and experience some were are not completed – they are marked in the interface with a green "< not implemented>" sign.

I want to mention that:
1. The idea of the application is not new, there exists applications with a similar idea.
2. The SilverlightPhoneDatabase project used for persistence was downloaded from the Codeplex site – http://winphone7db.codeplex.com/.

Video: no video available

Screenshots:

Sources can be found here. Note: the creator of the application has he full responsibility for the files included in the archive.

Thank you for your efforts!

Because there are only two contestants, I will change a little bit the rules by allowing to all participants that were present in the workshop to vote for one of the two applications. The vote would consist in 1 to 5 points for each application, where 5 is the best.

Post from: Radu Poenaru's Weblog

Applications for Windows Phone 7 Contest

Back to the Student Technology Conference 2010 – second day – again I had a full schedule: attending web development session and after lunch the company startup coaching event. After a nice over-night sleep, I was full of energy to continue attending the presentations! You can read about the first day here.

First I went to the Axel Schulz’s presentation about Cloud computing, where he presented us the options that we have when using the Cloud system – Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS), Platform as a Service (PAAS) and Software as a Service (SAAS)

Next was Wolfgang Gallo’s presentation – “Web development”, which was a thoroughly nice overview of what web development was at its start and how it evolved – from editing with Notepad static HTML pages to ASP, AJAX, ASP .Net, MVC, WebMatrix and Razor syntax. Was an amazing history lesson!

After a delicious lunch and conversation, I joined the Coaching track, where Dr. Richard Geibel presented us the steps to create a powerful Business plan, allowing our application to get the full attention of the possible investors. We all had also the possibility to schedule a meeting with Dr.Geibel to ask particular questions, Was indeed a good thing, because I found out htat there are quite a few associations in Germany who have as a goal the help of young entrepreneurs. One of them is NUK – they have a 6 month- plan to put you in business!

After this, sadly, we had to head home – a very nice event was ended. I learnt a lot of new stuff, connected with my fellow Microsoft Student Partners and enjoyed a high quality event!

Post from: Radu Poenaru's Weblog

Imagine Cup STC 2010 day 2

Microsoft Student Partners organized this weekend a very cool event, meant to make easier for the students to enroll to Imagine Cup 2011 and have also good results at it. The agenda was pretty condensed, having 3 tracks in 2 days. The tracks were wisely organized, allowing each one of us to focus on its own area of interest.

But don’t imagine that all was about technology. It really was more than this – we got coaching also for improving presentation skills and creating a business plan – Microsoft offers not only BizSpark project for startups, but also coaching so this startups would turn into a success!

So in a beautiful yet snowy winter morning me and two or my MSP colleagues left Bonn in Frankfurt direction. After two hours and some stops for unfreezing our car’s windshield (the owner forgot to put in some anti-freezing liquid such that the sprinklers didn’t work because of the frozen water along the tubes) we arrived in the beautiful Castle Hoechst.

There the organization of event was perfect: we were surrounded by breakfast. Coffee, tea, cakes, fruits – everything one needs to start a good day.

At 11 the conference started with the Keynote of Dr. Lars Lippert, Academic and Start-Up Team Lead, and Henrike Röse, Academic Event Manager, which presented us some of the key facts about the competition:

We had afterwards a small lunch break in which I also enjoyed the XBox 360 with Kinect. Everybody enjoyed it so it was quite a large queue for using it.

Later on, I had followed the Track 1 by attending Alexander Galkin’s “Introduction in the .Net platform and the .Net 4.0 framework” where he presented a lot of interesting facts about LINQ, PowerShell and .net in general. Additionally, there were presented tools that improve the usability of Visual Studio 2010, like ReSharper and Refactor and some addins that help you in your daily work.

Next workshop was “Tools session: TFS, VS, Live Services uvm.” presented by Tom Wendel, Development Evangelist in Microsoft Germany, focusing on tools that complete the already used Visual Studio environment, like communication and collaboration over Skype, office Communicator / Live, TeamViewer, Problem steps recorder, uploading files to FTP using Filezilla, debugging with Sysinternals and many more.

Then a small relaxing coffee break allowed us to fill our batteries for another set of presentations and hands-on demos. This time XNA with Tom Wendel,  where I’ve learnt some tricks in games development.

Afterwards, we were invited to dinner and relaxation. It was already 18 o’clock and I was tired but full of information. I had nice conversation and a gourmet meal. Here is an example of the nice dishes that were served:

And of course, afterwards we played with XBOX 360 and Kinect again:

Post from: Radu Poenaru's Weblog

Imagine Cup STC 2010

After presenting my latest WP7 workshop, I have quite a few nice impressions: all students were eager to learn, to discover, lots of questions were asked. We created a nice Twitter application based on the default Panorama template, learning about XAML and its advantages, how to use Blend to enhance the user visual experience, how to help our designer colleagues by creating mocked data such that while we develop they design on real data, how to use MVVM – in one word, a real startup in Windows Phone 7 developer career.

And, as usual, we didn’t finish at 16 as proposed because the enthusiasm of the participants. Eager to know, eager to learn- how can we possible fix a deadline?

The thing that spiced up our workshop was the nice contest that me as representative of Microsoft Student Partners and our Microsoft leaders setup for our colleagues: the chance of winning a Microsoft Certification Voucher!

Underneath are some pictures from the event:

Post from: Radu Poenaru's Weblog

Follow-up of Windows Phone 7 workshop

I love teaching, but more than this I enjoy motivating people to do their best. This is why the yesterday's workshop will have a very nice continuation, more practical and challenging than the workshop itself:

We’ll have a CONTEST!

It will allow all participants in the workshop to develop the Windows Phone 7 application of their dreams and compete for a Microsoft Certification voucher, which fully covers the exam fees. The prize will allow to the lucky winner to get certified in a Microsoft technology. helping him or her to have a better start in its career after finishing studies. You can read here about the importance of having certifications.

If you want to go further, you can register for free on the Marketplace and start selling your application – following this simple 5 steps.

*Note* : this contest is available only to the people enrolled in my Workshop.

Contest stages and rules:

1. Learning: In the workshop you’ve learnt about Windows Phone 7 (WP7 from now on) and related technologies (on Friday 26^th)
2. Development: During the next week you can freely work on your own idea of a WP7 application (until Sunday 5^th 23:59) – two weekends to develop your ideas. Be wild and creative! (between 27^th of November and 5^th of December 23:59 )

   Note: We can set a day on that week to meet and discuss the problems you faced in your application.

3. Submission: All application submitted until Sunday, 5^th of December 23:59 to my e-mail (radu.poenaru@studentpartners.de) will participate in the contest. The deliverables are the archived sources of your application and a movie with the application running to demo the features (optional, but highly recommended in case that the code would not compile on other’s computers) – for capturing the emulator screen you can use Expression Studio 4 – Expression Encoder 4 Screen Capture, which is free of charge for students on MSDNAA.
4. Evaluation: In the next 2 days (6^th and 7^th of December) I will post the code and the movies online, such that all the contest participants who submitted apps will have access to them. Only they can vote – only once per OTHER’s application, giving from 1 to 5 stars/points. The votes will be sent by mail to me: radu.poenaru@studentpartners.de.

   Note: ONLY the contest participants who submitted an application  will be able to grade the applications! So participate to the contest! Keep in mind that all others are starters just like you in development on Windows Phone 7– Never say never!

5. Rewarding: On 10^th of December, the owner of the application with the greatest number of stars/points will win the voucher certification.

You develop, you submit, you grade, you win!

Good luck!

Post from: Radu Poenaru's Weblog

WP7 Workshop Contest

So I wanted to develop for the Windows Phone 7 device. I started humble, reading and understanding any source of information. I've studied a lot of MIX conferences, blogs, webcasts and attended Microsoft workshops. After some time I got the opportunity of having a device. Naturally, I wanted to deploy my applications on the device, having a proof that they work as they were supposed to. But this wasn’t so easy!

This is my experience about registering on the Marketplace.

1. Register: Given the fact that Microsoft offers free access for students to the Marketplace,  I registered myself as developer with my LiveId. But this is not enough to publish applications. You must first get authenticated that you are who you claim to be. This is not done by Microsoft, but by a 3rd party company which specializes in authentication – GeoTrust. And if this sounds familiar to you, might be because they also sell SSL certificates.

2. Build In order to start the authentication process, you have to add a application to Market place. In my case I created a simple application based on Single Page Application template.I added a button on which Click handler I set the phone to vibrate for short time. Be careful to give it a meaningful name, maybe you’ll continue the application and transform it into a big hit later.

In this step, you should also create some media files for application artwork – required are 4 files : 3 PNG application icons with sizes: 173 x 173px (Large mobile app icon), 99 x 99px (Small mobile app icon), 200 x 200px (Large PC app icon) and at least one screenshot of your app running with the size of 480 x 800px.

3. Publish I logged on Marketplace with my LiveId account and added a new application – be careful to name the just added application as your already built app. Upload the image files and setup pricing. One developer can have just a small number of free apps, so be careful with free ones. When you hit the submit button, your application is created on Microsoft server, but will not be sent to be verified! You have to set its status to Verification.

4. Authentication Now it is the tricky part – you have to wait for the GeoTrust representatives to contact you for asking you some personal data in order to figure out if you’re the developer you claim to be. In my case, after 7 days of waiting I contacted them on their live chat and one nice guy helped me to finish the process in less than 3 hours. Why less? Because you have to fill a form, scan your ID and send the scanned pictures by e-mail. After this, I contacted them again on chat and the same nice guy confirmed me that everything was ok after some more clarifications. The issue was that I live now in Germany and he asked for a German Id, but since Romania is part of European Union, my Romanian passport was good too!

5. Microsoft Confirmation - Later on that evening, I received the confirmation from GeoTrust that I was authenticated correctly and this was followed by Microsoft confirmation that I can use the device to test my application.

The only thing remained is that my application that I uploaded to get certified It was uploaded on 17^th of  November and now it is 27^th and unfortunately it didn’t complete the tests yet.

That was my story, I hope you’ll find it useful!

Post from: Radu Poenaru's Weblog

5 Steps to Deploy on WP7 device

Because I got quite a few questions about the CIP Pool location for my latest Windows Phone 7 workshop location, I will add some clarifications:

First, it is located in UniBonn on RömerStraße 164 and enter through main entrance. You have to go in Halle 5 direction and when exiting the building, you'll see in the right a nice yellow construction, like this:

Once you enter in the building (the entrance faces the Old UniBonn building), the last door on the right is the Windows Pool where we'll meet and have fun on 26^th of November.

To help you easier locate the building location, you can also look at this map:

View WP7 Workshop in a larger map

Post from: Radu Poenaru's Weblog

CIP Pool UniBonn – new location