Engineering Excellence Award – Enterprise Engineering Center (EEC) at Microsoft Redmond

Last week I had the great opportunity to spend some time at the Microsoft Enterprise Engineering Center at Redmond.
As I mentioned in my previous posts as a winner of the Imagine Cup 2008 “Engineering Excellence Award“ me and my team had the opportunity to run our “EOS.NET” application on a Windows HPC cluster at the EEC.
Here is a picture of the coolest thing I have ever seen:

And here is a short video that demonstrates some of the features of “EOS.NET”:

The trip to USA was really a great experience and the people at Microsoft are really cool.
Many thanks to everybody that made our stay at Redmond so perfect.

Chart Controls for WPF

I few days ago Microsoft released a new version of WPF Toolkit.

http://wpf.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=29117

The good news is that the Chart Components are already officially part from WPF Toolkit.

Until now only Silverlight Toolkit had charts and you had to use a lot of so called “hacks” in order to us them in WPF. For example:
http://yordanpavlov.blogspot.com/2009/03/using-silverlight-charting-control-with.html

Now you can make bar, pie, bubble, scatter, line graphs.....
So review in details the new “cool” charts.

1.Add a reference to the System.Windows.Controls.DataVisualization.Toolki.dll assembly in your project:


2. Add the namespace for the Charting controls

3. Add a chart in XAML :


4. Add some data in code behind:
public Window1()
{
InitializeComponent();
chart.DataContext = new KeyValuePair[] {

new KeyValuePair("Dog", 30),

new KeyValuePair("Cat", 25),

new KeyValuePair("Rat", 5),

new KeyValuePair("Hampster", 8),

new KeyValuePair("Rabbit", 12) };
}
Here is how charts looks like:


As you can see WPF charts are absolutely the same like Silverlight charts:

http://silverlight.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?title=Silverlight%20Toolkit%20Overview%20Part%202


So enjoy charting!

Tech-ed EMEA Barcelona 2008

Recently I had the opportunity to attend a lot of great events. Here is a brief review of my experience in Tech-ed Barcelona 2008.

Between 10- 15 November I was in Barcelona attending Tech-ed EMEA and some Microsoft Student Partners meetings. Barcelona is a wonderful city I was really impressed from the palms and the warm weather in November:)



I think that it is may be one of the most exciting cities in Europe attracting with everything: palms, sunshine, seaside,friendly people, sightseeing....
On the other hand the modern and innovative look of the city really impress people.
I will definitely go back to Barcelona in the summer for a sea side vacation:)
Although I had only one day for sightseeing I managed to see a lot of them.

On Tech-ed I met a lot of great people who gave presentations for Silverlight, Windows 7 and other Microsoft innovations.
Duding the stay on Barcelona we had a special Microsoft Student Partners evening there I meet with all the other MSPs from Europe. The place of the meeting was very unusual but great idea: a carting center. Unfortunately I had no driving license and did not took advantage of the incredible offer for carting racing, but the other colleagues did:

The next day we had MSP meeting where some of us gave presentations about student forums, groups and communities in their country. In the end we were surprised because David Chappell gave a great speech about “Giving Technical Presentation: A Discussion.”

As a conclusion it was a great experience for me because I met a lot of interesting people from all part of the Europe and had the opportunity to attend a some really great presentations on Tech-ed.

Imagine Cup 2008- World Final in Paris

Hello,

As I mentioned in my previous post my team "Atlas" won the Bulgarian Final of IC2008 and we had the opportunity to present Bulgaria at the World final in Paris.

So three weeks ago we came back from Paris : fortunately as the Winners!!!

http://imaginecup.com/about/news.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/bulgaria/press/news_09072008.mspx

It was really incredible experience meeting a lot of different people and watching all kinds of Software ideas. We had two presentations in front of different jury and also had a demonstration stand where we gave more specific information to all the people that were interested in our application.

We did not have much free time, but managed to see some interesting places in Paris. Of course the "Eiffel Tower", it was wonderful watching the whole city from the top floor of the tower. The last two days including the Final Rewarding Ceremony we spent in the "Louvre Museum". We also visited the "Notre-Dam", "The Arc de Triomphe", "Shanzelize" and other nice places.

Everything was perfect and Microsoft were thinking about everything, I would like to say Microsoft :”Thank you for giving the young people the opportunity to show their ideas and to be noticed!”.

During the competition I was selected to participate in another interesting event “Women In IT”. That was live forum where we discussed the problems for women working in the It sector. And there everybody presented their points of view. We met with Claudie Haigneré, Astronaut and former French Minister of Research and IT. But the most annoying part was the number of interviews in front of the camera. There were many journalist from almost all parts of the world and everyone wanted to interview us.

So when the Final came nobody knew who was going to win. And when we heard “The Atlas Team from Bulgaria…” we were so exited and happy and proudly went to the scene in front of so much people.

We were awarded for Engineering Excellence.

The Engineering Excellence Achievement Award, sponsored by Microsoft's Enterprise Engineering Center, is designed to recognize three outstanding teams from the Software Development category that have created solutions that demonstrate the potential to be developed to scale with focused guidance from a Microsoft engineer. So we were the first team.

It was really great success for us and now we are looking forward to see The Microsoft Campus in Redmond. But until them we will have to work even harder in order to present our project better and to succeed.

As a conclusion I would like tell everybody that Imagine Cup is a great competition and there everybody from all over the world have the opportunity to be noticed and to show their ideas. What is important is never to give up ,to be strong and motivated, to defend your ideas and to understand that everything is possible and could be done. I wish luck to all the competitors who are going to take part in the next year IC2009 in Egypt….

Imagine Cup 2008 –Bulgarian Final

Hi ,

Recently some cool things happened to me and today I decided to blog for some of them.

Two weeks ago I participated in the Bulgarian final of Imagine Cup 2008 Software Design competition and fortunately my team “Atlas” won (http://www.microsoft.com/bulgaria/press/news_21052008.mspx) and we will present Bulgaria in the world finals of Imagine Cup 2008 in Paris this summer.

This year's theme is "Imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment". It gave us really a great opportunity to show our project and to help in saving the world….

Here is some pics from the final.

Our project EOS.NET is an extensible software system that uses data from satellites to detect disasters. It supports multiple disaster detection algorithms, but we are most proud with our implementation of a contextual fire detection

algorithm. This allows us to be able to process satellite data as soon as it is available and in that way warn for forest fires earlier. We have also implemented a deforestation detection algorithm.

The presentation and demonstration was 15 minutes, but after that we spent 45minuteas answering the questions of the jury .

We are looking forward to meet a lot of interesting people and having lots of fun at the worldwide finals in Paris, France.

My first blog post :)

Hi,

As this is my first blog post I’ll begin with a brief introduction to myself. My name is Boryana Miloshevska. I’m working as .NET Developer in a leading Bulgarian software company and I’m also Microsoft Student Partner.

I have wanted to start blogging for a long time, but I have never had enough time to do this (or at least that was my excuse) until now…

In this blog I’ll share with you things that I find interesting in my development experience and my daily life .

And so let’s begin....