A Real World Experience like No Other. As an intern or Fulltim’er at Microsoft, you’ll have real responsibility, real work, and real opportunities to jumpstart your career. (You’ll get paid, too!) It’s an experience you’ll never find in a classroom. You’ll be given manageable assignments that you can complete while you’re here, and your efforts will likely take shape in Microsoft products—or be used by Microsoft teams—long after you return to school. And imagine millions of customers, not to mention your classmates, seeing your work! Some interns even parlay their experience into a job offer.

An Opportunity to Shine. Our employees make a real difference. Not by filing paperwork or running errands, but by developing real products. Here, you’ll run your own projects and put your skills to work. This is why our internship program is one of the most successful in the industry. You’ll learn more in 12 weeks than you would in a whole school year. It’s the kind of work that gets noticed by millions of people all over the world. Kind of redefines the whole concept of internships, don’t you think?

Current Internship and Fulltime opportunities with Microsoft:

1) Software Design Engineer (SDE) Intern or Fulltime

Work at the Core of Every Product We Build
This internship is where the fun begins for code gurus like you. As a hands-on Software Design Engineer intern, you’ll learn how to make decisions about design and feature implementation, using your mastery of technical tools to help make a product vision a reality. If you would like to write code and design efficient data structures and algorithms to develop next-generation applications or operating systems, listen up. This internship shows you how SDEs bring products to life by working with Program Managers to ensure strong design and Software Design Engineers in Test to ensure quality through testing. Ultimately for the SDE, it’s your code that turns concepts into new technologies and services.

Qualifications:

· Fluency in C/C++/C# and a passion for writing quality code using computer science fundamentals

· Ability to derive creative and innovative solutions by thinking “outside the box”

· Ability to solve complex problems, sometimes by testing and debugging code

· Expertise in feature definition, design, and feasibility

· Demonstrated skill in estimating development time

· Be available to relocate to our corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington, U.S.A for a 12 week internship (Microsoft Corporation pays all costs associated with relocation)

· Functional level English Language skills, written and spoken requirement

2) Software Design Engineer in Test (SDET) Intern or Fulltime

Discover Life on the Last Line of Defense
As an intern Software Design Engineer in Test (SDET), you’ll own it, break it, fix it, and own it again. You’ll ensure a product’s quality by making sure it performs as users expect it to. Part of the fun is how creative you can be devising ways to manipulate, crush, and sabotage software into submission—while creating innovative testing technologies along the way. Ultimately, as an SDET intern it’s your input that can help make the difference between joy and frustration for the customers. Since you’re keen on how things work, and making them work better, you’ll work hand in hand with the Program Managers and Software Design Engineers to design, develop, and maintain automation systems for use in development and testing cycles. Using the tools you create, you’ll help pour over source code for trouble spots, debugging and isolating problems, and executing creative tests to find new bugs while regression testing recent fixes.

Qualifications:

· Fluency in C/C++/C#/VB.NET and experience designing and developing tool architecture

· Ability to solve complex problems and write automation systems and device drivers

· Ability to author test plans and cases, conduct security and stress tests, and debug at source level after identifying, investigating, and prioritizing bugs

· Demonstrated skills in negotiation and conflict management

· Demonstrated interest in customer advocacy derived from a holistic understanding of the product from the code level to delivery

· Be available to relocate to our corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington, U.S.A for a 12 week internship (Microsoft Corporation pays all costs associated with relocation and helps with housing)

· Functional level English Language skills, written and spoken requirement

Whatever position you choose, you’ll make a real impact in the dynamic world of product development at Microsoft. All intern positions are12 weeks and located in the United States at our corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. All fulltime positions are located in the United States.

Send Us Your Resume
Submitting a resume is the only way to get to the next stage of consideration, the interview. Our recruiting team travels to Australia regularly to meet bright and enthusiastic people like you, and we look forward to receiving your resume. Here are a few things to keep in mind when you are updating your resume to send to us:

· Clearly state your graduation date, degree/major and the university are attending

· Specify your technical skills (including programming languages and other development tools you know well), project details (both within university and at any jobs or internships you have held), and technologies you have used on those projects

· Describe your role in the projects that you worked on, and what you personally achieved

· Provide an active e-mail address, physical address, and current phone number  where we can reach you

If interested, please send your resume by the 15^{th of February}

^{to: lisabar@microsoft.com}

^{A recruiter will review it, and if interested will set up a phone interview as a first step. And, by the way, we have many positions available, so if there is someone else you think we should know about; please share this information with them.}

^{If we invite you to interview, we will cover your travel expenses. If you receive an offer, we will cover costs for visa processing and provide help with relocation. Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer and supports workforce diversity.}

This is my final year as being a MSP, as I’ve finished being a student. I highly recommend submitting an application – the MSP program is a lot of fun, offers a lot of unique opportunities, lots of free stuff (the free MSDN subscription is awesome) but most importantly gives you a huge head start in things like the Microsoft Internships (MSPs get somewhat preferential treatment), as well as being able to put down you worked with Microsoft on your résumé!

Several of the teams were very evenly matched, with four of the games ending up at 50-to-49!

With about 50 people show up, it was a great night. Thanks to the guys who helped out setting up and packing up, without their help I don’t think we would have been able to successfully pull of the night!

Congratulations to Cobra Commanders (from Deakin!), who took out first place. Sabo, Camberwell Clowns and Silhouette took out second, third and fourth respectively. 

See the rest of the photos up on flickr

Firstly, entry requirements have changed to make it easier to compete: there will be no entrance fee, and teams may include up to two people from outside uni.

Secondly, we have a firm date and location:

• Silverlight 3 SDK/Tools for Visual Studio
• Visual Studio
• Amazon Web Services account (free)

Okay okay, it hasn’t exactly been all within the same month, but with exams and illness, I haven’t had time to dive into it! Unlike last time, I’m not going through every single step, just the interesting snippets. Because of that, there isn’t a starter kit, just the final project.

Click to view the demo!

Silverlight 3 bringing in more awesome

You may notice that I am now using Silverlight 3. Silverlight 3 is even closer to WPF than before and it solves some of the "hackery" in TastyLibrary. In the first post, I used LINQ to rebind the ItemSource every time you click a new category. Thanks to the filtering capabilities introduced in Silverlight 3, we can "do it right" by filtering the CollectionViewSource.

private void lstCategories_SelectionChanged(object sender,     System.Windows.Controls.SelectionChangedEventArgs e)

{

    cvsItems.Filter += new FilterEventHandler(cvsItems_Filter);

}

void cvsItems_Filter(object sender, FilterEventArgs e)

{

    if (lstCategories.SelectedIndex >= 0)

    {

        if (((Item)(e.Item)).Category == ((Category)lstCategories.SelectedItem))

            e.Accepted = true;

        else

            e.Accepted = false;

    }

    else 

        e.Accepted = true;

}

Functionally, it appears to be the same… until you start adding more data. When you’re setting the ItemSource to a LINQ query, it doesn’t automatically update when new items are added into the base collection but when you are filtering every item has to pass through the filtering method even the new items that are added.

Apart from filtering, Silverlight 3 now has hardware accelerated effects, such as drop shadows or whatever you can build with pixel shaders! While it sounds gimmicky, drop shadows can help to create a much more refined UI. I’ve chosen to add this to various Grid’s in XAML:

<Grid.Effect>
    <DropShadowEffect BlurRadius="16" Direction="238" ShadowDepth="0"/>
</Grid.Effect>

(Don’t worry, there are plenty of other new features in Silverlight 3, but those are all I’m using)

Adding more data

In the last episode, we created a very basic clone of Delicious Library. Our version let you view a "bookshelf" of a set of albums, DVDs or games, the only problem was it was a fixed set of data. That makes it not particularly useful, because you’d have to manually edit the XML files whenever you wanted to add or remove an item. For a data source, I’d recommend and I have used Amazon simply because they are one of the (if not the largest) online stores and they provide a nice API.

If we were creating a desktop application, we could quiet easily use the SOAP interface and auto-generate the classes from the WSDL. However, Silverlight has security restrictions on the way it can interact with websites. If you are interacting with a web service on the same domain there are no restrictions, but interacting with services on other domains requires the domain to implement a cross domain policy file (and it must permit your application). Flash has similar restrictions on it. A common work around to this ‘problem’ is to use a proxy on your own server which does all the interaction with the service, but it’s messy, particularly when in this case, the Amazon Advertising (formerly ECS) REST/XML API has a cross domain policy file that works properly with Silverlight.

The SignedRequestHelper is provided from Amazon’s C# example of connecting to their API, while the Amazon namespace is a small helper library I’ve made to make it easier to choose various parameters/methods when interacting with Amazon’s API.

private void Search(string Keyword, string SearchIndex)

{

    SignedRequestHelper helper = new SignedRequestHelper(amazonAccessKey,       amazonSecretKey, Amazon.Destinations.US);

    IDictionary<string, string> requestParams = new Dictionary<string, String>();

    requestParams["Service"] = "AWSECommerceService";

    requestParams["Version"] = "2009-03-31";

    requestParams["Operation"] = Amazon.Operation.ItemSearch;

    requestParams["Keywords"] = HttpUtility.UrlEncode(Keyword);

    requestParams["SearchIndex"] = SearchIndex;

    requestParams["ResponseGroup"] = Amazon.ResponseGroup.Medium;

    string requestUrl = helper.Sign(requestParams);

    WebClient req = new WebClient();

    req.DownloadStringCompleted += new DownloadStringCompletedEventHandler      (req_DownloadStringCompleted);

    req.DownloadStringAsync(new Uri(requestUrl));

}

Searching for items is easy! Wait, hang on, where is the response? Silverlight requires network interactions to be asynchronous so that the calling thread (ie, the UI) doesn’t hang which would result in the entire browser locking up! (unless it separates tabs/plugins into threads like Google Chrome)

The response…

private void req_DownloadStringCompleted(object sender, DownloadStringCompletedEventArgs e)

{

    XNamespace ns = NAMESPACE;

    XDocument results = XDocument.Parse(e.Result);

    var resultItems = from i in results.Descendants(ns + "Item")

                select i;

    foreach (var item in resultItems)

    {

        try

        {

            var img = (from i in item.Element(ns + "ImageSets").Elements(ns + "ImageSet")

                       where i.Attribute("Category").Value == "primary"

                       select i).First().Element(ns + "MediumImage").Element(ns + "URL").Value;

            Item temp = new Item()

                    {

                        Name = item.Element(ns + "ItemAttributes").Element(ns + "Title").Value,

                        Image = img

                    };

            if (cbCategory.SelectedItem == cbiGames)

                temp.Category = catList["Games"];

            else if (cbCategory.SelectedItem == cbiDVDs)

                temp.Category = catList["DVDs"];

            else if (cbCategory.SelectedItem == cbiMusic)

                temp.Category = catList["Music"];

            lstSearchItems.Items.Add(temp);

        }

        catch (Exception ex)

        {

        }

    }

}

To parse the response I’ve used Linq-to-XML, created my new Item, and then inserted into the listbox containing all the search items.

This post shows off some basic Silverlight 3 features as well as interaction with web services uses Silverlight. Next post – interacting with persisting data!

Checkout the demo or grab the full source code

Expression Studio 3 Highlights

• Expression Encoder 3
• Improved H.264
• VBR Smooth Streaming
• Source CODECs
• Audio Enhancements.
• Performance
• Live Encoding
• Screen Capture
• Improved profile pallete
• Silverlight 3 Media Players
• New player skins
• API Enhancements
• Win7 Integration
• SDK "in the box"
• Expression Blend 3
• SketchFlow – Sketch WPF/Silverlight interactive prototypes.
• Photoshop and Illustrator support
• Styling Controls: Creating templates from artwork
• Styling Controls: Creating TextBox Templates from Artwork
• States: Improved Support for VSM
• Interactivity: Behaviors
• Working with and Generating Data
• Expression Web 3
• Super Preview – view side by side comparisons of your website in Firefox, Internet Explorer 6/7/8 and more
• Publish with SFTP/FTPS
• Improved Photoshop PSD support – import just the layers you want!
• Silverlight support – uses Expression Encoder 3 to encode (nearly) any video you want to Silverlight and embed on your site!
• TFS SC support
• Deep Zoom Composer support

XNA Game Studio 3.1 Highlights

• Avatar Support: Render and animate Avatars to use in your game to represent gamers and other characters within your game.
• Xbox LIVE Party Support: Enabling gamers to communicate, even when each gamer is not playing the same game in the same multiplayer session. LIVE Party supports up to an eight-way group voice chat for gamers and keeps gamers connected before, during, and after a gameplay session, persisting across title switches.
• Video Playback: XNA Game Studio now supports the ability to play back video that can be used for such purposes as opening splash and logo scenes, cut scenes, or in-game video displays. This set of XNA Framework APIs supports the following features:
  • Full screen video playback
  • Video playback to simple textures in game
  • Control of playback such as pause/resume and stop
  • Retrieve properties of the video, such as playback time, size, and frame rate
  • Determine the type and usage of the audio track, such as if it has music, dialog, or music and dialog
  • Play back multiple video streams at the same time
• Audio API: 3.1 has a new usage pattern of SoundEffect.Play. Sound instances created by Play calls are disposed automatically when playback ends, and SoundEffect.Play returns a Boolean to indicate success or failure.
• Content Pipeline Enhancements: improvements making it much easier to add custom types (custom attributes for run-time of an object and run-time type version of an object, and the ability to determine if deserialization into an existing object is possible).
• XACT3 Support: includes support for XACT3 with new features including the ability to enable a filter on every track, and support for the xWMA compression format.
• Visual Studio Changes: XNA Game Studio 3.1 supports both 3.0 and 3.1 projects, and it includes support for upgrading projects from 3.0 to 3.1.

I’ve got 15 copies of the Windows Mobile Developer Tools, which contains everything (minus Visual Studio) you need to get started on enter the Student APPrentice competition.

These DVDs include

• Windows Mobile 6 Standard and Professional SDK Refresh
• Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard and Professional Images
• Windows Mobile 6.5 Standard and Professional Developer Toolkit (which includes the 6.5 Images)
• Codemason’s Guild Live Meeting videos

It totals up to 1.76gb of SDK goodness, which can be a pain to download.

If you want one of these 15 DVDs, use the contact form on our about page to give me your name and postal address, and I’ll get these out as soon as possible! First come first served basis.

Oh nuts, you don’t have Visual Studio? As a student you can get it for free via MSDNAA from your University or from Dreamspark.

If you’re interested in the APPrentice competition but have questions on the inner workings of the Windows Mobile Marketplace? Well, the Codemasons guild are holding a series of (free, I think) events on down the east coast of the country.

Next week we will be holding a series of events to help developers get their application development moving for Windows Mobile 6.5 and into Marketplace.

These Debug Days will be held from 4.30pm till 9pm on;

• Monday August 10th – Microsoft Brisbane, Level 9 Waterfront Place, 1 Eagle St, Brisbane
• Tuesday August 11th – Microsoft Sydney, 1 Epping Road, North Ryde
• Wednesday August 12th – Microsoft Melbourne, Level 5, 4 Freshwater Place, Southbank

We will provide an update on Marketplace, the signup/registration process, and the guidelines.

The evening is then over to the developers – so what are the topics you want out MVPs to cover – let us know;

• post your comments to this post
• Tweet James McCutcheon or Nick Randolph on Twitter
  • James : @jamesmcc
  • Nick: @BTRoam

We’ll update the topic lists here @ WMOZ, @ the Codemasons’ Guild, and James/Nick will Tweet as well.

Rego links coming soon – but slot some time in your diary.

PS – we’ll have some drinks & food on hand as well

via WinMoOZ

I’ve been very slack in posting this, sorry Karo!

Microsoft AU are running a competition for students to celebrate the upcoming launch of the Windows Mobile Marketplace.

Don’t worry, if you don’t have a Windows Mobile phone you can still create apps for it, thanks to the device emulators in Visual Studio. Remember students can get Visual Studio 2008 Professional for free directly from Microsoft at www.dreamspark.com

If you’ve never thought about developing for Windows Mobile, it just uses the .NET Compact Framework – so the chances are if you’ve used Visual Studio before, you can write a mobile app.

However, if you want to learn a bit more, there are some excellent videos up on MSDN entitled “How Do I? Videos For Devices”.

The competition closes AUGUST 17th! Details about the competition are below, or the full details can be found at the Codemasons Guild.

What’s up for grabs?

The two successful applicants will win:

• A full pass to attend Microsoft Tech.Ed on the Gold Coast, from September 8–11, 2009 (which includes a complimentary HP Mini 2140 Notebook PC, worth $990 (recommended retail price))
• A return adult economy airfare to the Gold Coast from your nearest capital city
• 3 nights accommodation at The Crown Plaza Gold Towers on the Gold Coast in a standard room
• A session with a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) mentor during Tech.Ed
• Tickets to Smackdown on September 11, 2009, where the best Windows Mobile app will be awarded to the overall winner!

Who can enter?

To be eligible to enter the APPrentice competition, you must be an Australian resident aged over 18 years or over, who is currently enrolled in a part time or full time undergraduate or postgraduate course at an Australian University or TAFE institution.

How do I enter?

Entry is via email only. To enter, provide the required information and attachments below and send to codemgld@microsoft.com before 11:59pm (AEDST) on August 17, 2009.

Your entry needs to include the following information:

• Full name, contact email address and a contact phone number
• Your Mobile application name
• The genre that your Mobile application fits into: Game/Entertainment/Utilities/Communications/Music & Video/Lifestyle/Finance/Business/Health, Sport or Fitness/Productivity/Travel/Education
• A 300 word or less description of the application you are developing. Your response should include the operation of the application, the type of device it would target, if it would be a free app or paid app, and why you think someone would want to buy and download your application.

Your entry must include the following attachments:

• Visual Studio Project file containing code for application prototype.
• Video or Slideshow of application prototype in Windows Mobile 6.5 emulator, or on a WM6.5 device.

via Codemasons Guild (MSFT AU)

This release of Silverlight includes more HD video support (H.264/MP4), better streaming, 3D support (GPU accelerated!), Out-of-browser support and more.

The Silverlight 3 Tools for VS2008 have been released too.

Expression Studio 3 will also be released within 30 days of Silverlight 3’s release (so roughly two weeks from today), while the release candidate for Expression Blend 3 and SketchFlow have been released. Expression Studio 3 will be released free to students via Dreamspark – yay!

More information can be found on Scott Guthrie’s blog.