Blog

The morning started very early with a 3:15 am ride to the airport to check in for our flight to Sydney. Before we even checked in the flight was delayed 30 mins (coming in from Dallas Fort Worth). We weren’t … Continued

We’re taking a little time off and heading over to Africa for a few weeks. While we’re there we’re doing a few presentations in Johannesburg. If you’re nearby, come say hello – details are here. So apologies in advance for … Continued

Last week we built a battery pack for our Kinect For Windows. This weekend we wanted to make the battery pack and the kinect more portable, and do some testing on the batteries to see how long they last. Firstly … Continued

In a couple of weeks we’re heading over to Africa for a well-deserved break. While we’re there, we’ve lined up a couple of presentations on our favourite topics: Windows 8 and Kinect For Windows. It’s been 2 years since we … Continued

As you know, we love our Kinect device, but one of the big problems when you want to play with it is that it’s a powered device which means you need to be close to power, or have a really … Continued

Hit an interesting snag when using Windows Azure Websites recently. We had a solution using MVC4, a bunch of worker roles and did a bit of sql spatial to do intersects, create bouding boxes etc. Deployed to azure and once … Continued

Over the Xmas break I decided it was time to try moving to a standing desk. Working from home I quite often spend over 12hrs straight sitting at my desk and it can’t be good for me. So off to … Continued

I’d started out uploading files into Windows Azure Blog storage with the old sdk based on a few examples I’d seen. After I had it working I refactored, and upgraded my references to use the latest 2.0 Azure Storage 2.0. … Continued

I woke up this morning to find I’ve been renewed as a MVP for the 6th year. This year I move over to being a Kinect for Windows MVP which is quite exciting! I’ve changed names a few times in … Continued

Combining Knockout with Bing Maps Ajax control will give you bindable properties similar to what you may have experienced with the Bing Maps Silverlight control. Further it has a great way to communicate with your JOSN web services. I’ve put … Continued

I’ve been playing with some MVC4, Knockout JS and some unobtrusive validation, specifically I was trying to replicate the Grid Editor Example.   I had a problem with the example when I had: $("form").validate({ submitHandler: function () {     viewModel.save(); … Continued

Yesterday over 100 of Brisbane’s keenest developers descended upon QUT for the 2012 DDD Brisbane. The doors opened at QUT at 7:45 and we had a bunch of people keen to get inside and out of what was a very … Continued

My little application was put on hold for awhile for testing, feedback etc. and in that time PhoneGap released a bunch of new versions. So today I updated to version 2.2.0. It was quite different to 1.9 that I had … Continued

After a sell-out conference last year, DDD Brisbane is back! This year we’ve got more space and more swag and of course more content for DDD Brisbane 2012. We’ve got a great agenda this year with special guess speakers borrowed … Continued

On the 14th November we held our Windows 8 Kickstart Workshop at the Edge. I’d been to the edge on a few other occasions but have never been into this particular lab before.  It was a great room that meant … Continued

We’ve been invited to run a free full day Windows 8 App workshop at The Edge as part of the National Telework Week celebrations. Abstract In this workshop Bronwen will introduce you to the world of Windows 8 RT apps. … Continued

This was me this morning…pulling my hair out, trying to work out why I was getting the following error: "Element not found. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8002802B (TYPE_E_ELEMENTNOTFOUND))" when I called await BackgroundExecutionManager.RequestAccessAsync(). I still don’t know exactly WHY it happens … Continued

On Saturday 13 October, we popped along to the Jumpstarters Codefest 2012 event which is a weekend-long festival of innovation. Teams of between 2 to 6 individuals competed to demonstrate a new product or service for the judging panel, with … Continued

Last week we ran a Windows 8 Kickstart workshop at Microsoft Brisbane. I had a fun morning showing off lots of Windows 8 features on both my laptop and my Samsung “Build” slate. We went through a bunch of content … Continued

We’re going to be presenting a half day Windows 8 kick start session at the Microsoft Brisbane offices in October. It will be a good chance to spend the morning thinking and starting to build your Windows 8 application idea. … Continued

I was invited to be a judge at this years’ Young ICT Explorers QLD competition for the Grade 4-5 category. Students from around the state come to UQ for the final and present their project in ICT to a panel … Continued

We’ve been playing with Kinect for Windows since it launched over a year ago in Beta. There’s a few things we’d really like to see that we think would make it that much better. Here’s our top 10. 1. Make … Continued

Technology Takes You Anywhere (TTYA) -  an event aimed at getting schoolgirls interested in IT was back again this year. This is the 4th year we’ve been involved with the event. This year the location moved to QUT Kelvin Grove … Continued

Today was the exciting day for everyone. Finding out who will win the Imagine Cup for 2012. Just after lunch they took all the contestants out to get a group photo at Darling Harbour. Then one of my favourite parts … Continued

Today was the big day for the top 6 teams. Their final presentation to the panel of judges. It was an interesting morning watching all the cool solutions: Taiwan – had created a device + software to monitor activity levels … Continued

Today was another big day for the competitors and judges. Round 2 meant seeing 3 teams twice in the same day. First up was the normal presentation round where students pitched their solution to a  team of 6 judges. The … Continued

Today was fairly massive. Started at 8am and finished about 10:45 pm. Judged 6 teams today. There were lot of nerve but also lots of excitement and passion about their solutions. Tonight they announced the 20 teams progressing to round … Continued

Today was the opening ceremony day for Imagine Cup Australia. Registration opened and we were issued with our name tags and event guide for the week. We had  bunch of briefings on our duties as judges for the week. We … Continued

Today I headed to Sydney ready for the Imagine Cup 2012 World Wide finals. I was fortunate enough to be selected as a judge again this year. As I wandered around the local area it was cool to see the … Continued

In my PhoneGap project I want to grab some data to display on Bing Maps.  Originally I created myself a really neat rest formatted WCF service that return JSON, but after I spent a day pulling my hair out trying … Continued