At the Tech ED Conference

We started our journey to Tech ED Europe, on Sunday the 8^th of November. All of the Danish Microsoft Student Partners had agreed on, meeting at the airport, because we were on the same flight. But as the plane was going into the air we were missing one of our MSP’s. He had unfortunately missed the flight, and had to wait until Monday morning to get the next flight down to Berlin.

Picture 1 - First day at Tech ED, Jacob Korsgaard and Martin Esmann

Welcome to Tech ED

The first day of Tech ED came, and we started with a check in – to get our access passes – and thereafter headed directly to the SWAG hand out area to collect a brand new bag, that could hold our laptops, and of course the bag had even more goodies in the form of a Windows 7 ultimate etc. After this it was a matter of finding the sessions that you had put in your calendar from home. One thing that I hadn’t calculated into my schedule was the 7200 other conference attendees! And the fact that finding things among so many people would not be easy. But luckily that turned out alright and I found all my sessions (and on time). After this first day, we headed back to the hotel, ready to put the day’s experiences and newly acquired knowledge onto our blogs….. But, the hotel did not have free internet!? In fact the hotel wanted us to pay 4 euro per half hour of internet usage!? I’ll let that hang for awhile….. That’s 6 Dollars or 32 Danish kr. FOR HALF AN HOUR!!!! So if you go to Berlin and need internet, please keep away from - Hotel Grand City Excelsior, or you will lose money! That’s the main reason why most of our post to our blogs, are being done after the Tech ED event, and not during the event. When attending the event, you don’t have the time to, attend sessions, be social, post on blog and do some coding, if you don’t have the possibility to do some blogging from the hotel... (If you want to be serious with your blog posts, internet access is necessary to check up on facts before posting).

The next thing about going to Tech ED as a Microsoft Student Partner is, that there are MSP’s from all over Europe gathered at this event, and we were all put together on Tuesday in an event just for us Microsoft Student Partners. At this event we were given some of the top speakers at Tech ED at our disposal, so we could ask them any questions we might have, and get top of the line expert answers to the questions. To name a few of the speakers we could talk to: Rob Miles, Microsoft Most Valuable Professional and lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Hull (he also gave an exclusive talk on building games with XNA, and he took some awesome pictures of us! See his version of the event here http://www.robmiles.com/journal/2009/11/10/student-session-fun.html), Don Syme, Microsoft Research and developer of F#, Olivier Bloch, Embedded Systems Engineer at Microsoft and many others…

Picture 2 - The panel of speakers at our disposal

This event did indeed bring us MSP’s closer together, and we began talking to one another on daily basis, exchanging contact information and knowledge. We had a meeting point at the conference, which was called The Community Lounge, where we all hanged out whenever we had time. And as it turned out so did some of the top speakers which gave us MSP’s opportunity to ask even more questions and get quality answers.

On Thursday, all the MSP’s were gathered again (after the sessions had ended) and now it was time for us to see some of Berlin’s culture. We went to a restaurant and had dinner (all 77 MSP’s), and after dinner, we went out to see the Berlin underground, how it looked from medieval time till now, and why things had changed (of course did had something to do with breweries and us drinking a few beers while taken the tour). This tour lasted for one and a half hour, after which we went back to the restaurant and held a party.

Picture 3 - At the Comunity Lounge

At one point a fellow MSP named Jacob Korsgaard and I decided to enter a contest, where we should develop artificial intelligence for an ant colony. We could create as many ant personalities we wanted to, and deploy these ants to collect foods and sugar while avoiding other teams ant and bugs that wanted to kill our ants. This turned out as a very fun challenge, and we actually won the daily contest as well as the final. Whoo hoo ;-)

As a Microsoft Student Partner you always travel to Tech ED with a hope to get to talk to specific speakers, and my hope was to catch Harry Pierson who is a Senior Program Manager in the Visual Studio Languages-team, with focus on IronPython. And I was not disappointed! A was able to catch by the Visual Studio stall, where he took his time to talk about IronPython and Dynamics languages in general. This was really awesome to be able to get to talk to him at the Tech ED, and of course I was attending his session on the DLR (dynamic language runtime).

Picture 4 - Harry Pierson geting ready for session on DLR

But that wasn’t it! While I was resting in the Community Lounge, I suddenly saw Harry Pierson and Don Syme getting ready for a live stage talk on programming languages. I went over and sat on a chair, and I was in for a treat! Harry and Don gave us all a good debate talk on IronPython, F# and C# (to name a few), and afterwards we could ask them questions to our liking… They really gave all of us an in dept insight into their opinions on the differences and forces of the languages and the DLR.

Picture 5 - Harry Pierson and Don Syme talking about languages

The experience as a Microsoft Student Partner at the Tech ED is one of the best ones I’ve had in a long time. I have used this Tech ED to gain a stronger knowledge base, and to create a large network af other MSP’s and other delegates. And I hope that you too one day get to experience this technical highway of knowledge at your disposal.

Oh and of course!

The last night in Berlin, we were a couple of MSP’s going into the streets of Berlin to see if we could find some of their famous beer, and we did!

Picture 6 - Green apple beer and red raspberry beer

These are the funniest tasting beer I’ve ever tasted, but they were not bad! The bar had as different beers as Banana beer, ginger beer, beer with coca cola, raspberry beer, cherry beer and many others. If you ever go to Berlin, don’t miss out on their beer ;-)

At this Tech ED Session Pete LePage Talked about top 10 mistakes that web developers do, when creating a website. This has for a long time been a problem, although standards are there, too aid the developer in designing/developing the website (and apparently this is very much still an issue.

• The use of colors on websites 
• Not optimizing websites for search engines
• Over extended use of Flash, Silverlight and Rich Media in general
• Not giving the ?tab? key any thought when using forms
• Inconsistent website design
• No easy navigation of the website
• Errors in the code 
• Extreme use of ads on websites, and sticking them in everywhere
• Having non designers, design the websites

Web developers have to pay close attention to the use of colors on their sites. There are many great resources out there to help finding those ?websafe? or ?websmart? colors. When building a site using a lot of colors, we tend to forget about the millions of colorblind people out there not being able to use the sites due to web developers use of colors that suck! And because of the developer being a little to creative with the use of colors like yellow background with blue text etc?

There are also a lot of developers, that do not make use of the meta tag keyword in their websites. This meaning that search engines will categorize the websites using their <h1> tags (So please also make sure that this tag gives a meaningful interpretation of what this page has to offer!). An search engine rank a website by their use of meta tags:

their <h1>, <h2> tags and the text used to describe the <h1>, <h2> tags.. (Think about his before making everything as a picture on the site!).

When designing a website there are trends moving towards using a Flash only website?? Please open up a browser and take a look at this awesome car site

 http://www.miniusa.com/ 

Looks really cool right? Now open up your browser and disable JavaScript and browse the site again! If you click on a few links, you even get an 404 error!!  Be aware of using to much flash will cut some people from using your site. And if it?s a products site trying to sell something, then you?re cutting potential buyers from buying your product?

A basic an simple thing to keep in mind when using forms on the website is to have a tab order index, and have that index match what you would expect when filling out a form.

When creating a web site, one of the most important things to keep in mind is to design/develop the site consistently. Every page on the site most have the same look and feel to it (when ever possible). There are a lot of sites on the web, which do not have consistent look and feel to them, and honestly it look ridiculous and un-professional.  For example look at these two sites:

http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/traffic/seattle/flowmaps/bridges.htm

http://wsdot.wa.gov/traffic/
It is the same site, just different views of traffic information, but the two pages doesn?t have the same look!

Links on a web page is the most important thing to have! But some sites really makes you guess what are links and aren?t.

http://www.samanzerin.com/

It?s graphically a really cool site, but it makes the users have to guess what the links are? Too much ?Glam? in a site, will ruin what the site is actually supose to say? Hey we want to sell you something, and that something is?.. Remember that the users have to be able to use the navigation, let alone find the navigation on your website.

Be aware of using to many automated tools, without knowing what they do! Make sure you know what DOCTYPE your using when developing your site. When developing your site, the architecture must be designed with DOCTYPE in mind. Otherwise you will end up having HTML code tags that are not supported by the given DOCTYPE, and the web browser engines will not render your site correctly. This tend to leave even more hacks in the HTML code just to make the site function as intended. When web site is designed with a specific DOCTYPE in mind, you will ? in advance ? know what tags you?re able to utilize, and in the architecture design fase, how to implement it?..

A quick word on ads on your site!

http://www.barcelona.com/

What are they trying to tell me? Is this an website promoting ads? Are they selling ads, or do they just like lots of ads? Too many ads, in ?weird? places ruins the site entirely, and the user will click away!

In the end, find out what you want your site to state! And be aware of too much information on the website (not too little, and not too much) . This web page gives a good example of ? what not to do!

http://www.havenworks.com/

What just happened here!?

Also, when putting up a website, developers are very often not the right persons to get to write the content on the website! In general, people with deep knowledge of the subject is very often the wrong ones to write the information made availeble on the site. They tend to use specific language terms etc. in the text, that end-users will not understand? Get someone to read through the text, sugesting normal langu<ge terms, and please?? Check the spelling! ;-)

And again, because you can do something, it doesn?t mean it?s a good idea!?

http://web.archive.org/web/20060613061524/http:/moire.ch/

Try hovering over the links?