After all of the presentations, I made my way up to the Community Showcase. This is where the competitors get to show off their projects to important individuals visiting the event. There were people from Microsoft, Government, and the Media all present at the event. One notable journalist in attendance was Brennan LaBrie, 10 year old reporter for Time For Kids magazine. I highly recommend you check out his blog, as he has covered some great events and has done an excellent job bringing back the stories.

Next thing I knew, the special guest had arrived. That’s right, James Cameron, director of Avatar and Titanic, visited the Community Showcase. He was ushered from team to team by his staff, but I was lucky enough to snag two minutes of his time:

(Please forgive the horrible quality of the video. We were in very tight quarters.)

Next, we made our way back down to the presentation rooms to hear the keynote speaker, Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer. He spoke for a while about innovation and the future of technology. James Cameron also took the podium for a while, talking about what kind of technological innovation went into Avatar, and how Microsoft helped him create the movie.

And then it was time to find out who had won the competition. Mark Hindsbo, General Manger of Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Evangelism, took the stage once again to announce the winners of the GDI and SDI competition. The rankings were:

Software Design Teams

• Grand Prize:     Mobilife, University of California, Davis
• First Prize:        MangoBunnies, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, DePauw University
• Second Prize:   Extraplaid, Utah State University
• Third Prize:      Team Blob, South Dakota School of Mines & Technology

Game Teams

• Grand Prize:   To Be Announced, Central Piedmont Community College & U North Carolina
• First Prize:      Coffee Powered Altruism, Yale University
• Second Prize:  Ifrit Salsa, University of Houston
• Third Prize:     LeveL 13, University of Houston

It was truly an incredible accomplishment for each of these teams, and they each did a fantastic job. Everyone quickly cleared the stage so the teams could have their photo op. I returned to the Community Showcase, where I caught up with Anthony Salcito for a quick follow up question:

After that, it was time for me to head home. I said my goodbyes to all of the awesome people I had met, and made my way to the airport with MangoBunnies, Diane Curtis, and a few other Microsoft developers. Next thing I knew, I was on my plane and returning to Port Huron.

I just wanted to conclude by giving a special thanks to Austin Stewart, Jessica Anderson, Hilary Pike, Diane Curtis, and Alfred Thompson. Thank you all so much for making my time in D.C. so fantastic.

Until next time,
Patrick Godwin

The day consisted of the competitors going around the D.C. Office attending sessions about new Microsoft technologies. They had sessions about the KIN, NUI, .Net, Windows Phone, and plenty more. I was able to sit in on the NUI/Natal session, which was very informative and interesting.

Between sessions, I was able to catch up with Team AwesomeSauce, a game design team, and talk with them about their project:

After that, I sat in on the Microsoft Recruiting session, to learn a bit about what it’s like to interview for a technical position at Microsoft. I’m not going to go into details about that session now, but I will cover the important notes in a later blog post.

Before long, 4:20PM rolled around. I made my way to the room where the finalists would be announced, and got ready to tweet the results. During the time before the announcement, I chatted with Mark Hindsbo, General Manager of Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Evangelism for Microsoft USA, about the event. He was excited to see so many young people passionate about computer science and innovation. He felt proud to be a part of the event. Before I knew it, the time was 4:30 and the announcement had to begin.

The announcement started of with Jessica Anderson, the business manager for Microsoft Student Insiders, talking about the trip to the Newseum for the finals. Once that was done, the announced that special guest James Cameron, director of Avatar and Titanic, would be joining us for the finals at the Newseum.

Once the logistics was out of the way, it was time to announce who was going to be competing on Monday. Mark Hindsbo took center stage, announcing the top 4 SDI and GDI teams:

Software Design Teams

• Extraplaid, Utah State University
• MangoBunnies, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, DePauw University
• Mobilife, University of California, Davis
• Team Blob, South Dakota School of Mines & Technology

Game Teams

• Coffee Powered Altruism, Yale University
• Ifrit Salsa, University of Houston
• LeveL 13, University of Houston
• To Be Announced, Central Piedmont Community College

After this, each team was debriefed, and the rest of us made our way back to the hotel for some rest before another busy day.

More tomorrow morning.

And be sure to tune into our live blog on Monday, where Alfred Thompson, myself, and possibly Ashley Myers will be covering the Imagine Cup Community Showcase this Monday, live, as the event occurs.

We started off our time with Mr. Hanselman by introducing ourselves. He then lectured us on the history of Bulletin Board Systems, relating it to a recent interview he had done on his podcasts. He then talked about his blog, and how useful social media is.

And then we got to the new technology. Mr. Hanselman first showed us Boot to VHD, a new feature in WIndows 7 that allows us to take the VHDs created in Virtual PC 2007, Hyper-V, and other parts of the virtualization platform, and boot our machine to this virtual OS. This allows the virtual hard disk to use hardware rather than the emulated environment when running. This follows the idea of “less virtual, more machine”.

The next demos Mr. Hanselman showed us struck me as very cool. He decided to demonstrate two new features of .Net 4.0: PLINQ and MEF. Now when I heard him say PLINQ, I had to do a double take. My understanding was PLINQ had been around for at least a year. But I was happily surprised to find that PLINQ (Parallel Language Integrated Query) was finally shipping as a part of the .Net Framework. This made me happy. Finally I could add support for multi-core processors with very little hassle. Simply invoke a query with the .AsParrallel() extension method, and you’ve got yourself a query working across multiple cores. There are other features in PLINQ, and I urge you to check out the Parallel Programming With .Net blog for more info.

The final demo Mr. Hanselman showed us was MEF. MEF stands for the Managed Extensibility Framework. Imagine the following situation: You are an enterprise developer working for a company that keeps inventory of different kinds of cars. Each car has similar qualities, defined in an interface, while being unique in itself. Your boss approaches you, requiring a new brand be added to the application used for keeping inventory. Due to the lack of a quality plugin system, this task would be very tedious and an all around pain in the neck. What MEF allows you to do, is simply create your new class, implementing this interface, export it through a new DLL, and the inventory application will do a “composition”, loading any and all classes that use the interface declared in the core of the API. I was extremely excited when Mr. Hanselman showed us this new feature. I’ve always loved the idea of extensibility, but hated using slow Reflection based techniques for dynamically loading classes. I highly recommend you take a look at MEF over on CodePlex. It’s a very cool framework and could make great leaps in improving application development productivity.

After that demo, we had to go our separate ways again. Like I said, Mr. Hanselman is a very busy man, and I was very grateful to have met with him. I highly suggest your follow him on Twitter or read his blog, as he frequently provides interesting links related to social media and new technology.

I arrived at Building 5, the building where the CodePlex team works, at around 1:00 PM. Within a few minutes of my arrival, Ms. Ford met me down in the lobby and took me up to the CodePlex office.

The office was different that most of the offices I visited throughout the day. The developers all sat in a common area, writing code in stations that had two keyboards. Ms. Ford explained that this was their unique version of “pair programming”, where two developers write code and do near real-time code reviews. This plays into their own version of the Agile release cycle.

You may be asking: What is Agile? Well, the common release cycle for a product is know as Waterfall. This is a more traditional cycle, where the product goes from specification, to implementation, testing, release, and finally maintenance. Agile is a lot more rapid than Waterfall. Agile, on the other hand, is a three week release cycle. The first two weeks of any Agile cycle are spent developing new features for the product, with a third week spent on fixing bugs from previous releases and tightening the features for the latest release. After they deploy, they start over again, figuring out what to do for the next release.

After that, Ms. Ford shared some interesting facts about CodePlex. CodePlex is home to roughly 13,000 projects, with a total of 200+ Million Lines of Code, with 100-150 projects being added weekly. They’ve recently added support for Mercurial based projects, which was seen as a huge addition to the site.

Ms. Ford also shared some interesting facts about her career at Microsoft. She attended college at the Mississippi State University, where she was a member of ACM. While in college, she refused to think of herself as ever working at Microsoft, hating the idea of “becoming a code monkey” for Microsoft. And now she’s been a key part of one of Microsoft’s best open source initiatives, and continues to contribute to the Microsoft community with her new role in the company.

I had a great time talking with Ms. Ford, and I highly recommend you read her blog and follow her on Twitter as she continues her career, moving in to DPE for a new exciting career experience.

Until next time, thanks for reading
Patrick Godwin

First, a little background about Frank Arrigo. He’s been an employee for Microsoft since 1991, and has had a substantial role in community relations since then. He’s essentially a social media whiz, having blogged since before I was born. As he put it, he was “blogging before it was called blogging”.

At the beginning of the meeting, Mr. Arrigo asked us each a very interesting question: What do you think of when you think about Microsoft? A truly interesting question. What is the Microsoft experience? I hadn’t given it much thought before that moment, so it caught me off guard. Each of us brought a unique answer, like Joe Osborne’s answer: he pictured Microsoft as a sort of behemoth Pentagon-esque building. Some of us thought of the developer culture, while others pictured a typical corporate environment with cubicles and white collar shirts.

This discussion allowed the conversation to move towards what it means to be a blogger. What is a bloggers job within a corporation. That brought us back to a point raised earlier: blogging allows employees to show that they aren’t drones, brainwashed to do what Mr. Ballmer commands. Microsoft isn’t some sort of machine, hell bent on the complete domination of the world. It’s a living, thriving community of developers, businessmen, and other professionals. And we use our blogs to convey that back to the people who are interested in the topic. That’s why we see blog posts about personal issues, family, and vacations. It show’s that developers are in fact human, and do have lives outside of work.

He then presented us with some interesting facts: roughly 5,000 to 10,000 Microsoft employees write on a blog. Wow. That’s a lot of articles. But how does this help the User? What do they gain from reading about the experiences of these employees? Simple: connections. Around 2000-2001, Mr. Arrigo realized that maintaining a blog with an active community allows users and developers to network, creating an environment in which developers could receive feedback, share knowledge, and build professional relationships that would provide jobs down the line.

Mr. Arrigo was also an early adopter of Twitter. This allowed him to take his networking abilities to a whole new level. Rather then relying on traditional forms of communication like email and blog comments, he could interact with his readers in real time. This allows a higher quality of feedback and a way to extend topics beyond the blog. This essentially transformed blogs, making them living discussion prompts rather than static editorials.

We concluded are meeting with a simple idea: Blog smart. Talk about topics you would want people to read and not be ashamed about. Don’t write incoherent rants, don’t write foolish stories about how trashed you were last weekend. Blogs are a powerful tool, they can either make or break your career depending on how you present yourself online.

I just want to conclude by thanking Mr. Arrigo for taking time out of his busy schedule to talk to us. It was a great experience, and I thank you for all of the useful information about social media.

Next I plan on writing a post about my meeting with CodePlex’s Sara Ford. Stay tuned!

Thanks for reading,
Patrick Godwin