Day 1 at the BizSpark Incubation Week was a great kickoff, but now the true fun begins!  I’ve decided to try something new and make today’s post and active log of our actions through out the day.  (We’ll see how good that works).  All times are US Eastern Standard Times

6:20 a.m – Wake UP and Commute – I live an hour south of Washington D.C. in Fredericksburg, VA and it will me about 90 minutes (I’m I’m lucky) to get to the Reston Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) where the event is held today.  Cross our figures!

8:00 a.m. – Arrived and Ready – The commute today wasn’t too bad and neither was the nice breakfast spread Microsoft provided.  Now I’m digging into the developer machine that Microsoft has provided in the lab for me to start some Microsoft Surface development.

An interesting note about Microsoft Surface Development is getting access to the SDK.  You may have seen the Microsoft Surface product before (or not), but it’s a really cool device/platform for creating an immersive, rich, and collaborative end user experience.  That said, in order to get a development machine (there’s a difference between the development and production device) it will cost you around $14k (I think the production one is $10k).  Only through purchasing at least a single development device will you get access to the Microsoft Surface SDK AND access to the developer community.  If you have a team of 5 people who will work on Surface development, you still only need the one machine.  The developers (those 5 people) will have access to an SDK that you install on top of your traditional development machine with Visual Studio 2008 (or Express Edition which is weird…if you can spend $14k for a Device, I’m sure you’ll have money for Visual Studio).  You’ll build out your Surface application using Visual Studio which includes a new project type/template of “Surface Application (WPF)” and “Surface Application (XNA)” installed.  For this week, we’ll focus on WPF.  The SDK also includes a cool simulator to run and debug your application on.  Even though Surface is a touch platform, you monitor doesn’t require (or will it even leverage) a touch screen.  It’s all done through mouse clicks, but the Simulator does a cool job of enabling you to mimic various user touches and even device simulations.

Now I start my first “Hello World” type project and see where that goes.  Today is really about learning how to develop Surface projects and then take a build and run it on the device.  Should be fun.

11:00 a.m. – Microsoft Surface Newbie – Now that I just started doing some Microsoft Surface development here are my notes and thoughts.

• Starting a new project (Yes…Hello World) was pretty ease.  Even adding videos and manipulating them was crazy easy!
• Make sure the Simulator is running when before you F5 to debug the application.  Visual Studio didn’t start it up for me.  (Nice to have feature I guess)
• Did some simple event handling (XAML for the UI and C# for the coding).  So far Surface development is very easy, straight forward, and with tons of benefits since you inherit many of the UI features like stretching objects (e.g. zooming into a photo), moving objects, and even inertia.

1:00 p.m. – Lunch and Guest Speaker – We had a guest speaker today by the name of “Loren Burnett” who gave a great presentation on “How to pitch your company to an investor”.  Loren was a very good speaker and gave lots of great tips on how to prepare, deliver, and follow up on your pitch to an investor.  I won’t give always his “secrets”, but was very helpful.  Especially on how to deal with Venture Capital funds.

If you have Questions or Comments today – Post it to Twitter for me (make sure to follow me first)!

3:00 p.m. – Moving off of Surface – I’ve reached a point where I’m comfortable with most of what we can do with Microsoft Surface, so now I’ll focus back on Windows 7.  We plan to leverage some off-shore development to build a new WPF application to manage some of the cool WPF Components that InterTouch Media is enhancing with the new Windows 7 Multi-touch.  The Intertouch Developer, James Cadd, has been doing some really cool updates with the code and we’re using an Imagiboard touch screen (who we never heard of) to do our testing.  So far so good.

10:00 p.m. – Wrapping Up – We made some pretty good progress and even had the official meal for developer gatherings… Beer!  We have one quick call with the off-shore developers which will give us our dream scenario…coding while we sleep.  Tomorrow will be all about kicking out more and more code.  It should be a long but fun day/night. I’ll have my Zune fully charged and ready to help me through the burn.  Night, Night all.

Follow Me on Twitter