In this introductory article to Silverlight we will see what it takes to get started developing with Silverlight.

What is Silverlight?

• Cross-Browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari,...) plugin
• Cross Platform (Windows, Macintosh, Linux)
• Used to create rich internet applications (RIA)
• Create rich media experiences
• Not just for creating eye-candy applications but also used to create line of business applications
• As of this writing Silverlight stands at version 2. Silverlight 3 Beta is available for developers to play with.

What do you need to view Silverlight based applications?

Visit the official Silverlight website to install the Silverlight Plugin: Silverlight Website . Once installed you can visit some sites that are powered by Silverlight to have an amazing experience, some examples below:

• HardRock Cafe - Memorabilia - Uses Deep Zoom feature of Silverlight. Multiple objects (images) can be detected when mouse rolls over.
• Yosemite Extreme Pano Imaging Project - Uses Deep Zoom feature of Silverlight.
• SmoothHD - Uses Silverlight, IIS Smooth Smooth Streaming, Smooth Streaming Encoding of Expression Encoder.
• Woodgrove Online Bank - Showcases the Line Of Business side of Silverlight by showcasing the various aspects like rich interfaces, rich controls (built-in), ability to create custom controls, multiple pages and smooth animated transitions, use of data through webservices and their display using rich set of controls.
• Infragistics Quince: UX Patterns Explorer - Shows the various design patterns.
• Tafiti - A search engine with a difference. Silverlight , Live Search integration.
• IDV Solutions SpatialWIKI: An example that shows Silverlight and Virtual Earth integration.

What do you need to build Silverlight based applications?

You will need Visual Studio 2008 SP1/Visual Web Developer 2008 SP1 and Expression Studio. Visit the Silverlight GetStarted page and read all about what needs to be installed to get started.

As students of NUS, you can download all the necessary software from DreamSpark and use it at no charge at all. If you are part of the NUS Incubator program and have started a new startup company then you may want to see how you can take advantage of the Microsoft BizSpark program.

Great, so now you know what Silverlight is all about, saw some great examples and also know how to get started but what about learning. Well there is lot of information and examples that show some cool Silverlight code.

Resources for you to learn Silverlight from and use

• Silverlight.net - Learn: byte-sized video tutorials, white-papers, links.
• andybeaulieu.com: Learn how to create games in Silverlight.
• Stefan Wick's Weblog: Great Silverlight Inking related information.
• Delay's blog: Lots of cool silverlight stuff.
• ApurvaLawale.com: Silverlight code
• CodePlex: Lots of cool silverlight frameworks, libraries, reusable components, user controls.
• Silverlight Live Streaming: Free hosting of Silverlight applications and video.

The above information should be sufficient to get you started with Silverlight, however there will be times when you needed someone to help you out and then we have forums out there that will help you out.

• Silverlight.net Forum: Global forum for Silverlight.
• Silverlight A to Z: Silverlight forum with the intention of getting a tight community of Silverlight developers and companies in Singapore.

Enjoy Silverlighting and light up the web.

Imagine a computer 10,000 times more powerful than the one you are using right now. Imagine a computer so powerful that a person having access to it could hack into all top security databases in the world in an instant.

Scary as it may seem, such a computer is not far off and is one of the major areas of computing research today.

Introduction
The word “quantum” essentially means “a packet or discrete quantity of something”. It probably brings to your head the scary image of electrons and photons interacting in complex ways with each other if you have read about quantum physics, or probably the not-so-scary image of Daniel Craig running around with a gun if you like watching James bond movies.

Unfortunately, as you would no doubt have guessed, quantum computing is closely related to the former. Though quantum physics is admittedly scary and makes no sense at all (The great physicist Richard Feynman rightly said, “nobody understands quantum physics”), it is also intriguing for the same reason. And it is not going away. Whether we like it or not, the smallest particles in the universe are weird. And as we dig deeper and explore the power of this “weirdness”, we must learn to think weirdly. So fasten your seatbelts, open your minds and we will catch a quick glimpse of the phenomenal power of quantum computing.

Why quantum computing?
It would be useful to understand why we should bother about this craziness when we already have ultra fast computers which are doubling in speed every 6 months (Moore’s Law).

There are 2 reasons:

1. We are not sure how long Moore’s Law will hold. As our chips get smaller and smaller we get closer and closer to the subatomic world whose behaviour majorly screws up our current computer architecture. 
2. As mentioned, the possible computational power from quantum computing is tremendous.

How does it work?
Quantum computing is based on the property of particles to exist in a superposition of different states till they are “observed” by an external observer. This is called the wave-particle duality. This means that in addition to the ‘0’ bit and ‘1’ bits we base our computers on today there can also be various degrees of “0 and 1 at the same time” bits as well. These are called quantum bits or “qubits” for short.

Thus, we can have a 3 digit qubit which represents 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 at the same time. This opens up the possibility of doing large number of parallel computations at the same time. It is as if the computer goes through all possible computations at the same time before arriving at the answer which makes it much more powerful than doing the normal one thing at a time.  Of course there is a catch. The more digits we use, the harder they are to manipulate.

Another property that quantum computers use is called “entanglement”. Or “spooky action at a distance” as Einstein called it. This essentially involves connecting two particles such that the property of one depends on the other. And later, by changing or even observing the property of one, we automatically affect the other instantly. This provides a communication mechanism of sorts between qubits. Entanglement also has great implications on cryptography as it prevents eavesdropping and ensures privacy of your message.

So, will I have a Quantum Computer on my desktop anytime soon?
While all this is theoretically possible, there are a lot of practical challenges to overcome before we can fully harness the potential of quantum computers. And a “quantum Desktop PC” is definitely not going to happen anytime soon.

However, a lot of progress is being made towards realizing viable quantum computers. Simple factorization problems have been solved using quantum computers. Scientists at D-Wave claim to be in possession of a 128-bit quantum computer as of December 2008. The “quantum nature” of this computer is being disputed by some scientists, but they are planning to release a product by 2010 and we will know the truth very soon. Meanwhile, lot of independent research is being carried out by various universities as well as corporations. We even have a “Center for Quantum Computing” at NUS near the Science bustop. <http://www.quantumlah.org/>

So, if you are bored of 0s and 1s, love mathematics and have a passion for things that make no sense at all, you could consider being part of what promises to be the next BIG technological revolution!

Related Links
http://www.quantiki.org/wiki/index.php/Basic_concepts_in_quantum_computation
http://k21st.wordpress.com/2008/12/20/dwaves-systems-128-qubit-chip/
http://dwave.wordpress.com/
http://www.quantumlah.org/

The 'HOW TO' section is an all new feature of the IT Bytes, created with the intention of providing answers to those little yet nagging questions about technology that a common man might have. Here are a set of questions whose answers you might find useful.

HOW TO speed up Windows Vista? - Praveen Sekar, Year 2, FoE

This should be the question ringing inside the minds of all those people who get up in the morning, switch on their system and finish brushing and bathing before it finally boots up. But its not the fault of Vista after all. Vista gives as much priority to looks, stability and security as to utilization of system resources. There are a whole bunch of things you could do to speed up Vista and each of these steps has its own pros and cons. Therefore, the choice lies with you to decide what compromises can be made. Here are links to websites that offer useful tips on speeding up your system.

Link 1

Link 2

Link 3

HOW TO take a snapshot of my computer screen? - Huang Timothy, Year 3, Arts

The simplest way to do this on a PC is to locate the 'PrtScr' (Print Screen) button in your keyboard and to press it. Then, open Microsoft Paint and choose Edit->Paste. You could then save it using the File->Save menu.

For Mac users, there are a whole lot of ways of taking screenshots. Take a look HERE.

Windows Vista provides a new tool called the Snipping tool that can be used to take snapshots of only a PART of your screen. You can access this tool by going to All Programs->Accessories->Snipping Tool or by typing 'Snip' in the search box.

If you want to take a snapshot of only the currently active window, just press Alt+PrtScr and paste into Microsoft Paint. Simple isn't it?

Questions for the next issue

How to put folders on share if I am not part of NUS domain?

How to download videos from Youtube?

How to spend my holidays fruitfully?

Your questions and replies to questions can be mailed to newsletter@nusacm.org.

Here is an update on the activities and events that were recently organized by NUS ACM.

Interview Skills Seminar - 3rd April 2009

NUS ACM in collaboration with RealAcad Venture Management Program brought up an Interview Skills Seminar for the students of NUS. The main motive of this seminar was to get people up and ready for any challenge when they attend an interview and to provide them with valuable tips for interview-tackling.

Professionals from RealAcad started off with a small CLAPPING game which was meant to get people relaxed and comfortable before the actual talk began. The main objective of this game was to have a good eye contact with the interviewer and to test how vigilant the interviewee is.

However, the major highlight of the event was the MOCK INTERVIEW in which professionals from RealAcad tested the participants on many areas and fields. Participants were later notified of the mistakes they had to learn from, while attending any interview. When asked about the seminar, Jonathan, a second-year bio-enginner, said that he was very pleased with the way it went. He also added, "I would like to be a part of all the upcoming (NUS) ACM workshops and would like to see more like this."

Microsoft Silverlight Workshop - 13th April 2009

Microsoft's new tool called "Silverlight" placed its first step into NUS with the help of NUS ACM, which organized a workshop on Silverlight for NUS students.

The workshop was conducted by Apurva Lawale, from Microsoft. The main objective of the workshop was to present a clear idea of what Silverlight was and how it could be useful to students. Silverlight, being a browser plugin, provides us with tools to create powerful internet applications quite easily. It can also be seen as Microsoft's answer to Adobe Flash only that it is much better and also simpler to use. The deep zoom composer was the highlight of the event as it showed students how deep an object could be zoomed in (to the extent that it showed them fingerprints of a guitarist on a guitar!).

Students were asked to work on Silverlight not only to fetch them CCA points but also to become proficient in web technology and make web pages look more eye-catching. Goodies were given away during the workshop and students were given some interesting URLs to the websites that were designed using Silverlight. Thus, in short, students at last got to know what " ALL THAT YOUR IDEAS NEED IS A SILVER TOUCH " - the tag line of Microsoft Silverlight, meant.

Second Annual General Meeting

The second Annual General Meeting of NUS ACM was conducted on the 7th of April 2009 at the School of Computing. It was a lively event with members of both the new and the old Executive Committee as well as our mentor, Prof. Lee Wee Sun, being present.

It started off with Nishanth, our ex-chairperson, who presented the annual report and introduced the new Executive Committee. (To view the new Exco click here) Nishanth ended his speech on an encouraging note with the words, “The more ideas there are, the potential there is to grow”.

Then Amar, our new Chairperson introduced his plans for the next year. He observed that there has been an increase in IT awareness in NUS and that it provides a challenge to rack one's brains and come up with new ideas. He made a point to have a technical team this year, to empower other CCA clubs with IT tools to make them self-sufficient. He addressed the issues in the past year and ensured to learn from them.

This was followed by NUS ACM's mentor Prof Lee Wee Sun's address to the students. He was very pleased with the way NUS ACM had blossomed and had increased the visibility of computing within NUS. He concluded encouragingly by saying, "So go on and do stuff!"

Then, there was a Question and Answer session, following which Professor Lee Wee Sun was presented with a small memento, as a token of appreciation for his support to the club. The meeting came to an end with Nishanth wishing good luck to the new Executive Committee.

Here is a brief summary of the NUS ACM's milestones over the past year.

Events

• Adobe Flash Workshop
• Adobe Photoshop Workshop
• Resume Building Workshop
• E-Genting Talk

IT Projects
We worked on 7 IT projects, including 6 websites for different clubs. We built websites for clubs such as ECE and NUSSU Hotline. We even made a game for Museum Club for one of their events.

Computational Thinking Seminars
A series of seminars conducted by NUS ACM, which taught us some great computing skills which prove to be very helpful.

iTrivia
Started off as a flash game, it is now a facebook application with over 100 users. Some of the users are very enthusiastic about it. You can try out this application HERE.

IT Bytes
The monthly dose of “Wassup” in the IT world! Having articles from students, professors and IT professionals on varied fields of technology and development, IT Bytes is proud of a 500 member strong subscription list.