Light it Up Challenge–Microsoft Australia

If like me, you think Internet of Things is the next big thing, here is a fun little event by Microsoft around it.

Code it. Light it. Win it!

All you have to do is sign up to receive the Challenge Kit, and complete all three challenges.
Tune into Microsoft’s six week lab series and discover how to program your device.
If your LED device is one of 5 to light up on April 13 2015, then you've won.
During the challenge, you'll learn how to code, build and deploy with the Internet of Things.
We'll give you an IoT overview, explain the architecture and MS platform.
Get started today!
*Terms and conditions apply: http://aka.ms/lightitup

See more here - Internet of Things - Light it Up Challenge

Setting up Dynamics GP 2015 in 15 minutes

In the past year, I have done a few run throughs of setting up Dynamics GP 2013 in 5/10/15 minutes much to the amazement of experienced consultants. Now The GP 2015 Virtual Machine is available in the MSDN Azure gallery, so you can start doing the same magic with the latest version of GP. If you need help with this, feel free to add a comment or shoot an email and I will put up a short video tutorial.

Read the post from Errol - Announcing, Microsoft Dynamics GP 2015 image available in the MSDN Azure gallery.

Do you need to access a Microsoft Dynamics GP web client installation for a quick test or demo? Need access to a Microsoft Dynamics GP development environment? The Microsoft Dynamics GP images available in the MSDN gallery on Microsoft Azure can help. Use this image to create a virtual machine with Microsoft Dynamics GP fully configured in a matter of a few minutes. The resulting image will contain Visual Studio 2013 Premium and SQL Server 2012 Express along with the following Microsoft Dynamics GP components.

• Microsoft Dynamics GP

• Microsoft Dynamics GP Web Client

• Microsoft Dynamics GP SDK

• Dexterity for Microsoft Dynamics GP

• Dexterity Shared Components

• eConnect for Microsoft Dynamics GP

• Visual Studio Tools for Microsoft Dynamics GP

• Web Services for Microsoft Dynamics GP

• Web Services for Microsoft Dynamics GP SDK

• Microsoft Dynamics GP pre-requisite software (including Microsoft Lync 2010 SDK Runtime, Microsoft Silverlight 5, Open XML SDK 2.0 for Microsoft Office and Microsoft Application Error Reporting)

Pro Power Tools for Microsoft Dynamics GP

David Musgrave is looking at revamping, and recharging the amazing, but awfully named Support Debugging tools. My suggestion to David has been to name them Pro Power Tools – what do you think about the name ? Tell David Directly at Where is the Support Debugging Tool for Microsoft Dynamics GP 2015?

If you have been living under a rock and don’t know what the SDT is read all about it here - Support Debugging Tool for Microsoft Dynamics GP (SDT).

Azure Machine Learning General Availability

Microsoft has announced the General Availability of the Azure Machine Learning Service.

Additional new capabilities with today's release include:

• The ability to create a configurable custom R module, incorporate your own train/predict R-scripts, and add python scripts using a large ecosystem of libraries such as numpy, scipy, pandas, scikit-learn etc. You can now train on terabytes of data using “Learning with Counts”, use PCA or one-class SVM for anomaly detection, and easily modify, filter, and clean data using familiar SQLite.

• Azure ML Community Gallery that allows you to discover & learn experiments, and share through Twitter and LinkedIn. You can purchase marketplace apps through an Azure subscription and consume finished web services for Recommendation, Text Analytics, and Anomaly Detection directly from the Azure Marketplace.

• A step-by-step guide for the Data Science journey from raw data to a consumable web service to ease the path for cloud-based data science. We have added the ability to use popular tools such as iPython Notebook and Python Tools for Visual Studio along with Azure ML.

The ML Gallery looks especially cool, and should help expand the utilization of this service extensively. http://gallery.azureml.net/

 

Hololens in the real world

I have been geeking out about the Hololens for a couple of weeks now. However, just like any revolutionary technology – the key is how it would fit in the real world. James Ashley, a Kinect MVP has a great post with 21 ideas around Hololens

Here are my favorites from his list.

Education

While cool visuals will make education more interesting, the biggest benefit of HoloLens for education is simple access. Children in rural areas in the US have to travel long distances to achieve a decent education. Around the world, the problem of rural education is even worse. What if educators could be brought to the children instead? This is one of the stated goals of Facebook’s purchase of Oculus Rift and HoloLens can do the same job just as well and probably better.

Shopping

Amazon made one click shopping make sense. Shopping and the psychology of shopping changes when we make it more convenient, effectively turning instant gratification into a marketing strategy. Using HoloLens AR, we can remodel a room with virtual furniture and then purchase all the pieces on an interactive menu floating in the air in front of us when we find the configuration we want. We can try and buy virtual clothes. With a wave of the hand we can stock our pantry, stock our refrigerator … wait, come to think of it, with decent AR, do we even need furniture or clothes anymore?

Medical Care

Technology can be used for interesting diagnostic and rehabilitation functions. The depth sensors that come with HoloLens will no doubt be used in these ways eventually. But like education, one of the great problems in medical care right now is access. If we can’t bring the patient to the doctor, let’s bring the GP to the patient and do regular check ups.