It's official! One of the coolest new platform on Live is now available in Canada for testing and there is no more wait list. You can now take it for a spin. This open platform allows you to create a mesh between different devices (PC and mobile) so they can be aware of each other and share files. You can find a great description here. Head over to the official announcement by Amit Mital right here for more details.

Happy Meshing!

Yesterday, I interviewed Tony Targonski about the state of computer science in Canada and CompSci.ca:

If you haven't had an opportunity to check out CompSci.ca, it's a site dedicated to students and faculty who wish to discuss matters relating to computer science. Tony is one of its contributors and maintains a blog where he writes about his own experiences as a student at the University of Waterloo.

During our conversation, I asked Tony to give me his opinion on the state of computer science in Canada and provide me with some of his own insights as a second year student. Overall, he was optimistic about the how Canadian institutions are teaching today's youth in the basic fundamentals of computer science (i.e. algorithms). Combined with real-world work experience through co-op programs, potential/current computer science students have great opportunities to be successful in today's economy.

One call-to-action that Tony wanted to see here was to have as many high school faculty (who teach computer science) check out CompSci.ca. In his words:

The forums are an excellent place to find help with assignments or [to] get feedback on personal projects. This fall we are also starting a new season of our high school programming contest at http://dwite.ca/ -- it's a team based competition with a variety of difficulty in the questions, so it should be accessible to all levels of students; it's a good way to test out what was learned in class, keep track of improvements (the competition is hosted 5 times per academic year), or as practice for bigger contests like Waterloo's CCC or ECOO.

Great stuff!

About Tony Targonski

Tony Targonski is a student at the University of Waterloo, pursuing a degree in Computer Science. This programming blog explores computers in education, career, and personal lifes of students, teachers, and those interested in any of the above.

For those of you who missed the announcement, Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .NET 3.5 SP1 have been released. You can find the details right here.

Two senior engineering managers on the Windows 7 product are going to blog about the process of building it and allow the community to share with them through the comments. This is a great opportunity for developers to follow on the journey. Head over there and make sure to subscribe to the RSS feed. Enjoy the reading.