The Imagine Cup is a great competition for students to get involved in and something I’ve covered previously http://www.andrewwestgarth.co.uk/blog/post/2012/02/01/You-Can-Change-the-World-Through-Technology.aspx. Well 2012 is the first year that the North East has got involved and the competition is really hotting up as the teams hurtle towards the deadline for submitting their Round Two entry in the Software Design competition.

Last month we had three teams present their ideas to the group at NEBytes and in return all of the attendees gave each team lots of useful feedback ahead of Round Two.  All of the teams were asked some very searching questions about each of their respective entries and gave them a great exposure and practice in presenting their idea and answering questions, they all handled it very well and we all hope they benefitted from the experience.

The final of the North East regional Imagine Cup competition will be held on Tuesday 10th April and I am delighted to have been invited to join the panel of judges along with David Dunn, from Sunderland Software City, Ben Nunney, from Microsoft and Ajay Sood from Orchidsoft.  The panel will have the task of selecting the team(s) from the North East who will go forward to the UK Final and who knows then on to represent the UK in the World Final in Sydney, Australia!

This is the first time the North East has got involved and the buzz at the hack day and subsequently seeing some of the teams at NEBytes last month has been amazing and I’m really looking forward to seeing what the teams have come up with at the final next week.  I hope this is the start of a long association between North East students and the Imagine Cup.

Two new Release Candidates for the following IIS Extensions have been released today:

• Application Initialization for IIS 7.5 (the replacement for the previously released Application Warmup beta extension)
• Dynamic IP Restrictions for IIS7/7.5

Application Initialization for IIS 7.5

Application Initialization is a feature which is coming in IIS 8.0 and is now also available for IIS 7.5 (please note this feature is not available for IIS 7.0).   This module helps to eliminate the lack of feedback experienced by users when an application is first accessed and is not “warmed up”.  Through the use of this module Administrators can enable a website to return a splash page while waiting for the application to be ready for example.  The module also enables seamless recycling of pre-loaded application pools with no noticeable impact to users, something I am sure many application developers will be able to take advantage of.

Dynamic IP Restrictions for IIS7/7.5

The Dynamic IP Restrictions module provides Administrators and Hosters with the facility to mitigate or block Denial of Service Attacks or brute force attacks on passwords by temporarily blocking IP Address from where potential attacks are emanating, this is done by monitoring patterns of traffic and matching those to patterns which would indicate attack.  This can be configured on a server and site level.

Sean Eagan, Program Manager on the IIS Team has a more detailed blog post with links to documentation and download links for both the Release Candidates of Application Initialization and Dynamic IP Restrictions - http://blogs.iis.net/shauneagan/archive/2012/04/02/release-candidates-for-dynamic-ip-restrictions-and-application-initialization-now-available.aspx

I will be looking to cover both of these extensions in both my talks at user groups and also in more detail here on my blog.