University of Pennsylvania Microsoft Student Consultant's

Strategic Plan

Computing at Penn

Penn is a first-rate academic and research institution where computer use is highest it has ever been these days. There is a lot of development work being done on the campus, which presents me with many opportunities to promote Microsoft products.

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Objectives

My objective for the academic year is to setup several labs with Visual Studio so those students who are not taking a class and want to do some development have a place to go. Right now only the Wharton clusters offer any of the visual tools. The only thing they offer is VJ++ 1.1. I also hope to convince several key faculty members to use some of our tools in their classes. I plan to develop a good Visual InterDev demo that is not very OLAP dependent. I would also like to try it with the latest server extensions to the Apache web server. It would be nice to also sponsor a few research projects since that would get the name out around the graduate student community, who are most often the hard core Microsoft haters.

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Target audiences

I believe the main targets should be as follows (in order of importance): Back to the top

Web Site

I am finishing up work on a great web site. I hope that once it is up I will be able to finish introducing myself to different groups on campus. The web site will be constantly updated, but I have the framework done. It is available on the web at http://studentcoop.isu.edu/upenn/

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Strategies

Demonstrate superiority of Microsoft tools over those currently in use. The biggest competition here is from the GNU tools being used on the UNIX platforms. A few people in the GRASP lab use Macintoshes, and there are a few people in different departments who are using Borland C++. With the new engineering grant the Borland competition is going away. The Solaris/UNIX camp is still very strong among computer science faculty and students. I would like to explore the opportunity of spreading more student-accessible NT servers. The Dining Philosophers may be willing to run an NT server. If we could provide a public NT server with SQL Server on it, using Visual InterDev would become a reality.

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School of Engineering and Applied Science

I have identified several key contacts at SEAS and plan to keep in touch with them throughout the year. Please note that these are general School of Engineering activities. A list of Computer Science-related activities can be found in the next section. A description of possible SEAS projects follows: * We have provided a $190K grant with 150 licenses each of Visual C++, Visual J++, Visual Basic, and NT4 Workstation.

Microsoft tools currently in use:

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Computer Science

The only computer science course that currently uses Microsoft tools is CSE 330 (Database systems). I hope to convert CSE 110, Introduction to C, (the single largest course in the School of Engineering) to Visual C++, and also to move CSE 180 from X-Windows Programming to Microsoft Windows programming. I am also targeting CSE 330 and its graduate version, CIS 550, for use of Visual InterDev, IIS, and SQL Server. The Computer and Information Sciences faculty is for the most part opposed to Microsoft products, and is very UNIX-dependent. I hope through demonstrations of products like Hydra I will be able to convince them that they can do everything they need better and faster on the Wintel platform. With the installation of Visual J++ in the labs I also want to try to switch the introductory CSE course for majors (CSE 120/121/130/131 - Programming Languages and Techniques) to use Visual J++ in its Java portion (only about 6 weeks).

CSE 333 is our parallel-processing course. It would be great to try that on Wintel machines running NT. Each student could have their own machine for a few hours a day and could run some very interesting tests. Right now they are all sharing an 8x166MHz UltraSPARC.

Prof. Smith has traditionally taught CSE 350 on UNIX machines. It would be very interesting to have him do something that would be more Windows-related. He is teaching the course in the spring of 98. I will try to talk to him this fall and see if we can get an interesting project worked out.

While the Wharton school has switched their Computer Business Languages class from VC++ to VJ++, I predict it will be hard to convince the faculty that a course should be taught in SEAS. Programming courses are considered too easy. It is said that they subtract from our learning experience and that we can pick up the programming skills from a book or a video. While that may be true I will work on explaining that there is a lot more to Visual C++ than just the syntax. I will try to push COM and ActiveX technologies, and compare/contrast them with CORBA.

CSE 400, the computer science Senior Design course, is one of my courses this semester. I have been working with several groups in this 100% project-oriented (mostly programming) class. Many people are using Java for their projects and I would like to convince them to use more useful Visual J++ instead of the more familiar for some Sun JDK.

CIS Labs

A lot of research-related software development occurs in the following labs. I plan to meet with each Lab's directory and describe the advantages of our products over whatever they are using now. In the Distributed Systems Lab (DSL) a group of graduate students are working with active networks. Right now all the implementation is done using the Sun JDK on Linux. The professor would not mind using VJ++ in an NT environment if the source code were available. I hope to work with Todd Needham and the Penn legal counsel to get the NT source licensing agreement accepted by Penn. Active networks share some of the design principles with DS (NT5 Directory Services). I would like to try to get the NT5 developers talking to the guys here at Penn who are working on similar problems.

Penn, along with a bunch of other schools, has recently been awarded the Intel Technology grant. Under the grant we will be getting 48 4x300MHz Dell machines, and 25+ 2x300MHz Dell developer workstations. After speaking with Ira Winston I see that about half of these machines are being put in as replacement for UNIX workstations. Since they come with NT and Vstudio97 preinstalled we need to try to keep them that way. If the user does install a UNIX-like operating system (say Linux or FreeBSD) then we should at least promote dual-boot w/UNIX options.

I hope to present to the CIS faculty some advantage of using NT over Solaris/Irix, and in using our IDE. I think most of them are reasonable people and will agree that the development environment is nicer under NT, but what about the OS? They still need UNIX to check mail. Most of them don't have the time to upkeep two computers, so they will need a windows mail reader. Outlook Express with IE4 should fit the bill nicely here. The IMAP support in OE is really neat.

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Wharton

Wharton computing is usually running just behind SEAS in terms of their technology. In some cases they are actually ahead. They installed Office 97 first, and have had the DevStudio IDE on the machines for several years, while SEAS is just getting it now. It would be great to equip the labs with more diverse Visual Studio products than just Visual J++. Hopefully some of my work with the OPIM department professors will lead to that. Other than OPIM (described in the next section) the only departments that do any development are statistics, and finance. Most of their development is statistical analysis, and I hope to encourage some of the professors that I know from my Wharton days to try out Visual C++ and/or Visual J++ in replacement for their UNIX tools. While I am familiar with computer science, I know there is a lot going on in the Wharton school, and even more in the Medical School.

OPIM

Currently the OPIM department has an NT network that is used by their Ph.D. students and faculty. I would be interested in getting an OLAP (On-Line Application processing) project started. OLAP shows off the power of Microsoft's Visual Studio in the best light and I think that OPIM students could really appreciate it.

Last semester I was the teaching assistant for OPIM 311, Business Computer Languages. We taught the class in C++/MFC programming on the introductory level using Visual C++ 4.0 and Windows 95 as the platform. This semester Prof. Tomas Isakowitz is teaching OPIM 311. He is using Visual J++ 1.1 (and the new DevStudio IDE) on Windows NT 4.0. He has run into some problems since the texts he ordered referred to Sun JDK a lot, and were JDK 1.1.1 compliant. We have been working to get his installation of VJ++ on the network updated with the new JDK-1.1.1 compiler.

Tomas is also teaching OPIM 315, Database management systems, and will be teaching OPIM 314, Computer mediated communication, in the spring. He is interested in possibly using Visual InterDev in these courses. He is not familiar with the product, but is very familiar with the techniques since he designed a similar tool when he was a student.

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Student Organizations

The Microsoft recruiting team and I sponsored the Dining Philosophers (Penn ACM Chapter) High School Programming Contest held on November 8, 1997. I hope to bring a few speakers and sponsor some events in the future. I also plan to work with them, Engineering Student Activity Club (ESAC), Penn Math club (a chapter of Pi Mu Epsilon) and the Wharton Technology Club on setting up a COM class.

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Bookstore

The Computer Connection in the Penn Bookstore is really the I try to stop by the bookstore every few weeks and ensure that they have some copies of our products on display, and that they have some information about them out and about. Hopefully once CSE 110 switches to Visual C++, we will see a great increase in the sales of that product. I will have to work on preventing piracy though, as students are notoriously poor. In February I hope to setup a day long booth at the Bookstore and raffle-off some software, while demonstrating the latest and greatest in Visual tools. Hopefully, Jeff James (the regional sales representative) will be able to make it.

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General ideas

To convince faculty to use our products in their classes I try to take my laptop and give them a demo of a product, and help them use it on their workstation to the best of my abilities. When a problem arises I pass it on to K&K and hope to receive help ASAP. I also forward people to http://www.microsoft.com/ and more importantly to http://www.microsoft.com/kb/ the one thing I learned at my internship that will be forever useful.

I try to wear either my Academic Co-op shirt or the Visual Studio Enterprise shirt when I am out on business. I also mention the different web sites that we have been taught about when talking to faculty, staff, and students. I have worked out a pretty good scheme for advertising these events. I have decided on a set of newsgroup I would advertise to. Most people who would be interested in using Microsoft Development Tools read at least one of these newsgroups so they should hear about the events. I have secured pennmsc@technologist.com as an e-mail address that forwards to my mlaskin@studentcoop.isu.edu address.

For over three years now, I have been on the SuperUsers group mailing list. I have gone to several SUG meetings on campus, and know quite a few of the administrators. I couldn't make it to the latest NT meeting (10/13/97), but asked a friend to pass out some of my cards. I guess people were happy to find out that there is a Microsoft consultant on-campus. Calls have begun pouring in.

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Future

The future may see the mail servers (most used machines on campus) such as mail.sas.upenn.edu and eniac.seas.upenn.edu moving to Exchange. Hopefully more people will convert from writing their web pages in Notepad or pico to using Microsoft FrontPage. I also hope to add IE4 to the list of campus-supported browsers. Right now the only supported browser is Netscape.

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A story for other consultants

We have 150 fast PCs in engineering. At the beginning of the year they were running unlicensed versions of NT4, and the only Visual Tool installed was Microsoft FORTRAN PowerStation (w/the 4.0 DevStudio IDE). I spoke to our Lab administrator (Helen) and she said that she had spent too much money over the summer upgrading Office'95 to Office'97 and that her Microsoft budget was all but tapped out. She couldn't afford to spend $2500 for a tool that no class had used. I guess her budget is really closely tied in with tools that classes use. That's probably why the X Lab (where 200-300 CS/EE majors get their freshman/sophomore classes) just got upgraded from Sparc ELCs to Sparc 5s. I didn't try to convince her, and worked to resolve the NT licensing issue. She was happy that I was willing to work with her, and not just push the product. She pointed out a couple of professors who were unhappy with the tools they were using. After talking to one of them, I got him a copy of VS Professional, had him try it, and it looks like we will be able to have a 250-person/semester class using VC++/VJ++ now instead of Borland.

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Summary of Planned Events

I hope some of you found this useful. I am looking forward to receiving feedback about this plan.

Mike Laskin ( mlaskin@studentcoop.isu.edu))