Mark Johnston's Blog

Heading to Paris for Imagine Cup...

Joe Wilson's Pre-Kick Off: Imagine Cup 2008 Paris I'll be there from 3 - 6 July with the 3 teams...

Author: markjohnston Date: 06/24/2008

Imagine Cup UK - 5 June Final

A week ago, the best students competing in the UK and our Microsoft Student Partners descended upon...

Author: markjohnston Date: 06/13/2008

Environmental software businesses...

Thanks to the Imagine Cup this year, I've spent quite a lot of time talking to government agencies,...

Author: markjohnston Date: 06/13/2008

Achieve what you can imagine

We had this really slick video created to explain the Imagine Cup. It is now up on Channel 8 and I...

Author: markjohnston Date: 06/10/2008

Microsoft store launches in the UK...

My pal Chris (doesn't blog) has just launched the Microsoft Store. It offers a load of our consumer...

Author: markjohnston Date: 06/02/2008

My lack of blogging....

I've been mad busy planning the UK Imagine Cup finals on the 5th June and haven't had a chance to...

Author: markjohnston Date: 05/13/2008

Student? Want to see the Foo Fighters play Wembley? Look on in...

Ed has the detail on us trying something new with our UK StudentZine Facebook page. The Facebook...

Author: markjohnston Date: 05/09/2008

XNA Creators Club codes in MSDN AA now

Andy has posted about XNA CC codes going into MSDN AA - great news if you are teaching games...

Author: markjohnston Date: 05/07/2008

Game Development Imagine Cup in the UK

This stuff is just too cool! Can't wait to see what the UK finalists come up with and how many get...

Author: markjohnston Date: 04/29/2008

Great advice for Imagine Cup competitors

Pitching Your Idea Some great advice from Philip (MS) and Perry, a marketing professor in the US,...

Author: markjohnston Date: 04/26/2008

The UK Microsoft Student Partner program is an award program for technical students at university...

Author: markjohnston Date: 04/13/2008

HP Mini-Note

I blogged about this before here and now it has been released (in the US it seems). In depth video...

Author: markjohnston Date: 04/09/2008

The Ultimate Steal...or Office for £38.95 is now available to university staff as well

There is only a little while left to get your copy of Office Ultimate for £38.95 if you are a...

Author: markjohnston Date: 04/07/2008

Expression...nah...its all about MSPaint for designers

Looking forward to attending Future of Web Design in London in mid-April. The Academic team will be...

Author: markjohnston Date: 03/31/2008

Imagine Cup competitors - where are they now? Channel 8 videos online

My first two videos on Channel 8 are now online. Yes, I do sound that weird (that's Northern Irish...

Author: markjohnston Date: 03/25/2008

My love for Silverlight...

...is so strong that I had umbrellas made for a recent event: (The pantone matches the nebula logo...

Author: markjohnston Date: 03/25/2008

Last.fm Comes to Vista Media Centre

I'm a big fan of Last.fm and will be giving this a go on my home machine for listening to music....

Author: markjohnston Date: 03/25/2008

Imagine Cup Day on 5th June 2008 - Celebrating the best in UK student talent

It's been a busy couple of months for the Imagine Cup and we have a good 200-odd students fighting...

Author: markjohnston Date: 03/20/2008

Herding cats at Microsoft

I work for the United Nations apparently. I work in the Developer & Platform Evangelism group at...

Author: markjohnston Date: 03/18/2008

Cool ad...

Not wanting to steal Steve's thunder on great ads :-) but this was too cool not to share.... (From...

Author: markjohnston Date: 03/18/2008

New Expression Community launched

  It has all the usual gubbins you would expect from a community site with news, blogs, forums,...

Author: markjohnston Date: 03/18/2008

adCenter Blogs and Forums launched

Mel Carson just posted that the Microsoft had launched a new community around its adCenter platform....

Author: markjohnston Date: 03/17/2008

Visual Express Developer Center in Silverlight

https://www.microsoft.com/express  Features include: Animated landing pages Interactive menus to...

Author: markjohnston Date: 03/16/2008

Designer v Developer

I kept hearing the soundtrack to this and thinking why is everyone in the office watching...

Author: markjohnston Date: 03/14/2008

Silverlight blog for design agencies

My mate Rob has started a blog on all things Silverlight. Not the dev or even the designer stuff but...

Author: markjohnston Date: 03/12/2008

Did I miss something? The king is dead, long live the...

This is what greeted 60 academics from around the UK today at our Silverlight for Academics event at...

Author: markjohnston Date: 03/12/2008

UltimatePC.com launches

New site/community launches for Windows Vista Ultimate users to showcase the amazing things that...

Author: markjohnston Date: 03/05/2008

Silverlight comes to Nokia

Bit slow off the mark on this one as I was travelling north yesterday (wish I was travelling west to...

Author: markjohnston Date: 03/05/2008

Another digital lifestyle video ("Girl from Mars")

Following on from my post last week about the new UK site built using Silverlight here is another...

Author: markjohnston Date: 03/03/2008

Fancy staying on Necker Island?

(Credit for photo to svonog <- IC winner) The Windows Live team are running a promotion called...

Author: markjohnston Date: 02/29/2008

Starbucks prank

There was a nice article on the digital Bedouin workers rocking up with laptops and enjoying coffee...

Author: markjohnston Date: 02/29/2008

Silverlight event for UK Academics - 12th March 2008

We are holding an event for UK academics (students supplying a .ac.uk email will be allowed to...

Author: markjohnston Date: 02/28/2008

Microsoft Digital Life

My good friend Chris has been working on this for a while and I wanted to be the first to blog about...

Author: markjohnston Date: 02/26/2008

Silverlight 2 tutorials from ScottGu

Scott Guthrie, a Corp VP has put up a first look at Silverlight 2 and has included 8 part tutorial...

Author: markjohnston Date: 02/22/2008

SkyDrive out of beta

I love this product! I tend not to back stuff up there much but do use it a lot to send files to...

Author: markjohnston Date: 02/22/2008

Gadget rumour drool...

HP's UMPC 2133 to cost $630 when shipping in April-  If this is true then I'm so getting one of...

Author: markjohnston Date: 02/21/2008

Bill Gates at Stanford on Channel 8

The Bill Gates Stanford Speech Covers DreamSpark, Imagine Cup, Innovation, power of software and...

Author: markjohnston Date: 02/21/2008

DreamSpark is here.... Visual/Expression Studio and more for FREE for university students...

The skinny: Where? https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com What? Loads of dev and design products Visual...

Author: markjohnston Date: 02/19/2008

Dell Regeneration/Graffiti Contest winners announced.

This is a great contest, very similar to this year's theme in the Imagine Cup and the Interface...

Author: markjohnston Date: 02/09/2008

How Microsoft builds software

I got asked a great question by an Imagine Cup finalist who is doing a Software Engineering project...

Author: markjohnston Date: 02/04/2008

Silverlight game Zombomatic launched on MiniClip.com

  Fun game built using Silverlight has just launched on Miniclip.com (a big casual gaming...

Author: markjohnston Date: 02/04/2008

Off to Seattle

It's been a manic few weeks recently trying to get the Imagine Cup Workshops going for the finalists...

Author: markjohnston Date: 02/01/2008

Imagine Cup UK Upload Page

Software Design finalists please upload your entries as a single file (bundle into a ZIP if...

Author: markjohnston Date: 01/30/2008

Conference calls

We ran our first student Live Meeting and had 30 of our student partners from around the UK on, and...

Author: markjohnston Date: 01/24/2008

Silverlight to be available as optional download on Windows Update

Mary Jo Foley has blogged about the release today (22nd Jan) of Silverlight 1.0 through Windows...

Author: markjohnston Date: 01/22/2008

Our house in the middle of our street, la la....

Or "my apartment in the middle of Virtual Earth..." Reading now has Bird's eye imagery -...

Author: markjohnston Date: 01/15/2008

What you can do with a decent video camera these days - Bloody Omaha

It is fantastic what can be done with a video camera and a PC/Mac these days in the...

Author: markjohnston Date: 01/14/2008

Popfly Human style

I caught this one via JohnMont's blog where the Popfly team demonstrate how to build a Facebook...

Author: markjohnston Date: 01/13/2008

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