nusacm.org / ACM Student Chapter

Microsoft Silverlight Workshop

Amar — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:25:57 +0000

As we had mentioned before, our focus continues to be on building an active developer community in NUS. We have therefore organized a series of events towards meeting that end.

Next in line will be the Microsoft Silverlight workshop this Friday. Come down and learn how you can seamlessy integrate Silverlight with your .NET applications! We are teaming up with the technology evangelists’ team at Microsoft Singapore to bring you this event. You can look at it as our Chinese New Year present for aspiring developers here!

The free workshop will be between 6pm and 8pm at COM1/B12 (Programming Lab 1) and I believe, it would be especially useful if you are/will be taking either/both of the Software Engineering courses. Spice up your projects with the Silverlight touch!

Mosync 1101 – Take Away

Amar — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:14:17 +0000

For those of you who managed to come down to the session on Monday – A big thank you!

Now that you know how useful a tool Mosync is and have seen the magic it does, the best way to move forward will be by trying to wave the wand yourself -

Download the latest version of the Mosync SDK. Set it up, play around and get used to the environment.
Use the Getting Started guide to create your first application.
Learn from examples, tutorials and the documentation. Ask questions and share discoveries (big or small) with others at the MoSync forum or at our own forum.
Share your applications on the developers site and let your friends download and install it. (Drop us an email and we could easily put it up for you)

In the process, not only will you be growing as a application developer, but you might also be building the winning entry of the 2010 MoSync Code Challenge. Remember to register yourselves before 28th February for the contest. If you have a brilliant application idea and are looking for students to help you build it, you can use our forum, again.

Mosync Demo on Feb 8th

Amar — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 05:48:33 +0000

Our first event of the new year will be a workshop to help students get started with Mosync and participate in their 2010 Code Challenge. Aaron from MobileSorcery (the company behind Mosync) has kindly agreed to come over and conduct the workshop for our members.

This event is the first in a series of workshops we will be organizing this semester to spot the developers among students and to promote application development for both mobile and the web.

Mosync is a open-source framework that can be used to build cross-platform mobile applications in C++.

NUS Connect – OpenID

Amar — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 04:06:11 +0000

This was an exciting find for me, personally while working on the web chat for Hotline. NUS has its own web-authorization mechanism, called webauth very similar to the OpenID. While I am unsure of other applications that are currently using this service, I do know that Microsoft Dreamspark makes use of it. Try downloading a software from there and you’ll be redirected to this page to verify that you are indeed an NUS student.

I think it is safe to say that we couldn’t find the documentation to use this service very easily on the NUS site. In fact, we couldn’t find it at all. So, we had to google a bit and finally managed to get this excellent guide from the Georgia Tech site that employs a similar service.

The implications of this discovery are immense from the point of view of a developer. Now, we can have applications exclusively for NUS students like the Hotline Chat. Any online competition can now have a university-level ranking system. You are fourth on iTrivia among your Facebook friends but where do you stand among your peers on campus. Imagine the Module Review site employing this to verify student login. (Keeps the NTU students and spammers away)

We are calling this NUS Connect, after Facebook Connect and are currently looking at creating a generic wrapper that makes this button (and hence, the service) embeddable on any website.

Hotline Web Chat in Beta

Amar — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:27:09 +0000

You might remember completing a NUSSU Hotline survey in IVLE a couple of months back. The student club which serves as a listening ear to all NUS students, was recently toying with the idea of moving online. As anything connection to Computing even a remote one excites us, we offered to help them out and the end product is the beta version of the NUSSU Hotline Web Chat.

I think it is a brilliant move taken by the current Hotline Executive Committee. It is a challenging project and a bold experiment but we are having a lot of fun building it. If you are interested in contributing to this project, ping us at contribute@nusacm.org.

They are planning to release this to all students quite soon. Who knows? This could potentially evolve to edge out the phone-based service Hotline offers as of now.

Project Refresh

Amar — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:20:59 +0000

After a quiet first semester, where we just had a few projects going on at the backend, we realized it is time we took our ideas from the drawing board to the field.

The focus of the club this semester will be on application development. While everyone loves programming, students are still hesitant to take that extra step and enter the creative world of building applications. We are concerned about this and have therefore, decided to direct our events towards this end – To give programmers the taste of building applications – web and otherwise.

The plan is to create a developer community on campus. In the process, we hope to build a platform for developers to meet and exchange ideas and also host and share their applications. Ambitious? Let’s see.