Yesterday we kicked of Microsoft Student Community at NTNU in Trondheim for this school year. We got 100 registered participants, 80 of these came to the event. It could have been more, but we had to close the registration today because of the size limitation of the room and the size of the pizza order.
The meaning of the event was to enlighten and motivate new students to be a part of Microsoft Student Community. Microsoft Student Community NTNU is an organization for students with interest in Microsoft related technologies, especially .NET. It’s driven by students, and has no commercial influence by Microsoft. It’s a place where students can come together to learn new cool stuff. So if you want to stand out from the crowd and be little different form all the other students, this is the place to be. My experience is that students with experience in Microsoft and .NET related technologies, will certainly get positive responses from potentially employers.
The theme for the kick-off was a bit vivid, but it certainly caught the eye of the students since 80 students did care to participate. We branded the event with lots of posters saying “Do you want a job?”. I think we hit bullseye, because it’s not a secret that students/employees with background in .NET related technologies are very hot in the job market today.
Hans Olav started the event by telling who we are (Microsoft Student Community) and what can we do for you. He also said something about Imagine Cup, and he talked about our experience within this contest. We also had some technology sneak peak previews on WPF, LINQ and XNA for the students and what they have coming if they continue to participating in Microsoft Student Community events this year.
I gave the presentation on WPF where most of it really was a demo. In the demo I did create and photo viewer application that read photos from disk. The demo contained of 3 lines of C# and the rest was XAML. I used the HTML/CSS analogy for the XAML and XAML template feature, since many of the students as I expected had has some experience with web/HTML development.
Resources
I promised some of the students that I would post links to WPF resources on my blog. Here you go:
Here are the tools you need to get started with WPF development:
Here is my source code from the presentation. Feel free to drop me a comment or send me an e-mail if you have any question concerning the source code or Microsoft Student Community.
Happy hacking and coding!