Today I went to OPorto to a seminar organized by Bruno Tavares, a Microsoft Student Partner from ISEP (Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto). It was a great seminar. The speakers were:
Verónica Orvalho: Teacher of Computer Graphics in FCUP, full-time researcher at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, CTO Face in Motion, developer of algorithms for 3D modeling, animation and new platforms of face characterization.
Bruno Tavares: Is a finalist of the degree in Computer Engineering in ISEP, and Microsoft Student Partner
Marco Silva: A finalist of the Master’s degree in Computer Engineering and Computation (MIEIC) in FEUP with specialization in Multimedia and Artificial Intelligence, he is also a co-founder of the Students Group of Computer Graphics (NeCG - necg.fe.up.pt), Microsoft Student Partner and Junior Flash Developer at Fullsix.
There was a lot of people on this seminar, and they were real interested about the video game industry and the whole process of game design and development. They also wanted to know what was the best approach to be successful in this field of expertise, and about technologies like XNA.
After the theoretical sessions in the morning where the subjects were the video games industry, and an introduction to XNA (with a great and simple demo of the Pong game), there was a “hand-on-lab” session where the attendees had a chance to try out XNA Game Studio 2.0 for themselves (using 2D models) with the help of our experts Bruno and Marco. 
Tomorrow it will take place the second part of the seminar, with 3D game development. Good luck for tomorrow!
Take a look to Artur’s post about the news.
Including Internet Explorer 8 Beta, Silverlight 2.0 Beta and Expression Blend 2.5 March 2008 Preview.
Finally I received an e-mail that told me that Office Live Workspace is available!
“Office Live Workspace is your online place to store, access, and share 1000+ documents. Use it to distribute meeting notes, work together on group assignments, or simply store documents that you can access from any computer.”
Take a look at http://workspace.office.live.com. A soon as I try it I’ll write a little bit about it.
After some months willing to buy a Wiimote to try it in my PC, a couple of hours on front of a Wii gaming console convinced me to do finally buy it. After all, now I have some friends with whom I can play using my Wiimote!
Some time ago I wrote a library to the Xbox 360 GamePad (based on XNA 2.0) and a demo which included a PowerPoint add-in to control presentations (targeting Office 2007). Since my GamePad was wired it was just a demo with no real-life usage.
Now I’ve done the same thing with my Wiimote. Based on the Managed Library for Nintendo’s Wiimote available at Codeplex.com, I made a simple (and uncompleted) library that raises events when each pressed/released button state changes. I’ve re-written the PowerPoint add-in to use the Wiimote. Now I finally have a presentation wireless controller (other than my mouse 
).
All the presentation control is achieved using the buttons, but if you quickly move the Wiimote you also move to the next slide. This physics-based control was just a test, is not really necessary. Clicking a button is much simpler than using a movement to move forward. It is just a geek trick.
Download the Wiimote Presenter add-in.
Download the add-in source code.
