It's been a while since I blogged about the progress that Inspiratech have made in the Imagine Cup, due to a mass of deadlines. So I'll give you quite a large update now.

As you may or may not know, the Imagine Cup is a competition run by Microsoft, which encourages people to "Imagine a world where technology helps to solve the world's toughest problems".


If you want to see what it's about and enter check this out.


The first round of this competition is submitting our idea for a project. This is then judged on how well thought out, original and ingenious the idea is. This is due for submission by the 10th of December. As a team we have been collaborating heavily on the creation of this document.

We want to be fairly open about the content of this, without actually disclosing the document itself. So I'm going to discuss what our solution will entail and how we intend to set it in motion.

Firstly on our use of huddle. Huddle is a collaboration tool with a vast amount of functionality. Tasks can be added along with meeting scheduling, email notification and file management. We set up our workspace on huddle adding each team member to it. This means we can assign tasks to team members and keep everyone notified with the help of huddle's notification system.

We decided to treat the competition as if it were a real world project. Complete with Team Leaders and Minutes Secretary, however each of us carry the same weight as each other. Each of these roles are rotary; meaning that the Leader changes on a monthly basis, and the Minutes Secretary changes bi-monthly. This helps us meetings run smoothly and gives us all the experience of project management and minute taking. We keep track of this using huddle's task system - it's especially handy that we can assign team members to this to keep track of who is doing what, when. The minutes themselves are stored on huddle's file management system. This allows for us to approve the document, or make changes to it, whilst keeping a full audit trail.

Onto our Functional Specification. We spent quite a few meetings to firm up our ideas for the solution before starting on this document. Once we had settled on a decision we moved on to a feature list. Detailing what we want each of our screens to do; along with what we want the cloud to store.

We'll be storing a lot of data about the refugees being entered into the system in order to raise the chances of finding a match when a lost loved one tries to search for them, and vice versa. We decided the key to finding matches, in what has the potential to be a huge amount of records, was a field weighting system. This meant that a field - let us say nationality - has a higher weighting than hair colour as it is deemed to be either more unique or relevant. Prioritising various matches over others we feel that a user can find who they are searching for quickly and efficiently.

We're focusing on using the Windows Phone 7 platform for data capture, Windows Presentation Foundation for capture, search and administration. Tying these together with a solid cloud-hosted solution with SQL Azure.

Hey folks! It's with great pleasure that I can say Inspiratech has acquired a domain and is now live. You can check it out at www.inspiratech.eu. We've had a few meetings to get things sorted and organised. We're not pressing on with our project fast. Thanks to some awesome php by Josh we have it aggregating our RSS feeds so you can find our updates in one place. The slick look is bought to you in no small part by JJenZz and her site onedollartemplates.

This is our first big step towards more the Imagine Cup. In addition to the website; decisions have been made as to which version control and document management system we’ll be using.

So yesterday I was pleased to be one of the last people to snap up my place at Reading's PDC10 event. I turned up a little late and sadly missed a bit of the keynote. After quite a lengthy overview of what Microsoft is doing. Essentially with the cloud, they're going "all in". They've been listening to developers qualms and making the changes that they wanted so it becomes easier and smoother for you to create and deploy your applications in the cloud.

It was after this we were let loose on Microsoft's tasty offering of food and drink. Never underestimate how much hungry geeks eat.

I went to a couple of talks after this. Building Windows Phone 7 applications with the Windows Azure Platform. This was a demo heavy session, as such I'll be watching it again later on and taking notes. It essentially gave an overview of how to push and pull data to and from Azure from a WP7 application.

Next there was a break for further refreshment, quickly followed by a quiz to be in with a chance of winning a Windows Phone 7 device. Sadly I fell at a question relating to how many followers someone had. The others I'd got right though. Daniel Parker, a friend and Inspiratech team member, was one of the last people standing and entered into a final phase against 3 others to be in with a chance of the device. This deciding round was a pretty intense battle on Kinect's running game. He even went on to win the device! Great for him, and for our Imagine Cup team as it will give us a real device to test on once we get to that stage.

After this I had my first play on Kinect. I have to say I was amazed at how responsive and awesome it was. Despite there being a good 20 people in the field of view for the final phone competition it easily distinguished between the players and the crowd, with no configuration needed for each running pair.

I played a far less energetic game of Table Tennis with Kris - it was a little different from playing the actual thing (playing face on), but great fun. I think there is some video footage of this - will add it once I can access it. Hardly any input lag and nothing incorrect. Awesome when you consider the work that must go into translating images into game input. Step aside Wii and Playstation Move, Kinect is getting ready to blow them out of the water!

The last session I went to was about optimising your WP7 application, something I thought would be very relevant for our Imagine Cup effort  as we want the user experience to be as slick and intuitive as possible. Essentially if you want things to happen in the background, take them off the UI thread and use another. This'll ensure that the user doesn't have input lag or hangs.

I want to say a big thank-you to the Microsoft UK team for putting on such a great event, way later than a normal event. A thoroughly enjoyable evening!