The Imagine Cup is a great competition for students to get involved in and something I’ve covered previously http://www.andrewwestgarth.co.uk/blog/post/2012/02/01/You-Can-Change-the-World-Through-Technology.aspx. Well 2012 is the first year that the North East has got involved and the competition is really hotting up as the teams hurtle towards the deadline for submitting their Round Two entry in the Software Design competition.

Last month we had three teams present their ideas to the group at NEBytes and in return all of the attendees gave each team lots of useful feedback ahead of Round Two.  All of the teams were asked some very searching questions about each of their respective entries and gave them a great exposure and practice in presenting their idea and answering questions, they all handled it very well and we all hope they benefitted from the experience.

The final of the North East regional Imagine Cup competition will be held on Tuesday 10th April and I am delighted to have been invited to join the panel of judges along with David Dunn, from Sunderland Software City, Ben Nunney, from Microsoft and Ajay Sood from Orchidsoft.  The panel will have the task of selecting the team(s) from the North East who will go forward to the UK Final and who knows then on to represent the UK in the World Final in Sydney, Australia!

This is the first time the North East has got involved and the buzz at the hack day and subsequently seeing some of the teams at NEBytes last month has been amazing and I’m really looking forward to seeing what the teams have come up with at the final next week.  I hope this is the start of a long association between North East students and the Imagine Cup.

This morning Scott Guthrie announced a new program to help Small Web Development Companies (10 employees or less) and individual Web Developers who develop Web Sites and Services.  The program runs for three years is free to join, all that is payable is a $100 fee on exit.  Benefits of the program include:

• Windows Web Server 2008 R2 – licenses;
• SQL Server 2008 licenses;
• 1 Expression Studio 3 license;
• 2 Expression Web licenses;
• 3 Visual Studio 2008 Professional licenses
• and more…

For full details of the announcement see Scott Guthrie’s blog post and to register visit the WebsiteSpark portal.

Announcements from the IIS Team

Today has been a day for announcements with the IIS Team also announcing a list of new releases – Bill Staples has full details of the releases – which are:

• Final Release of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2 –this is a great application which helps to install all of the components that you need to get started on the Microsoft Web Platform and with some great community apps, for example the great BlogEngine.Net on which I run this blog;
• Final Release of the Web Deployment Tool 1.0 – something I’ve delivered sessions on in the past and will be reviewing the final changes now I’m back from my holiday;
• Final Release of Database Manager 1.0 – a great extension for the IIS Manager which enables easy management of your databases;
• Search Engine Optimization Toolkit – Beta 2 – Another great IIS extension which I have started to look at and will post more on soon;
• Application Request Routing 2 – Release Candidate;

For more information refer to iis.net and to Bill’s blog post, I’m off to read up on today’s great announcements.