"Office 12" BETA2 was released for public download earlier this week. I installed it earlier today, and haven't had any problems with it. I have to say that the user interface looks smooth! I especially liked the "SmartArt"-feature which enables you to create good-looking illustrations quickly.

Download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/getthebeta.mspx

2007 Microsoft Office system preview site: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/default.mspx

Last friday my team participated in the Nordic Imagine Cup Software Design final in Oslo. We competed againts a Finish and a Danish team. And we won! The Danish team got second place and the Finish team third place. The first price was a Qtek SmartPhone. Both the first and second place go to the worldwide finals in India, and all teams got a nice SQL Server 2005-jacket

The days before the final were quite busy. We worked quite a bit on our presentation and on the demo we were going to show. The last night before the final we got some serious issues with a reluctant SmartPhone, so we stayed up almost all night, until 7 to get it working. Then it was a coulpe of hours of sleep and then straigt out to IT-Fornebu and Accenture's offices for the final.

Our team, "Team NTNU", consists of:
Jan-Kristian Markiewicz (http://thespoke.net/blogs/prismejon/default.aspx)
Gøran Hansen (http://goeran.greit.no)
Jonas Follesø (http://jonas.follesoe.no)
Hans Olav Norheim (me)

Check out the pictures from the final at J-K's Flickr account: http://www.flickr.com/photos/j-k/sets/72057594125728297/

We have also got some publicity:
Teknisk Ukeblad - http://www.tu.no/nyheter/ikt/article53247.ece
Teknisk Ukeblad, PDF - http://www.tu.no/multimedia/archive/00030/Teknisk_Ukeblad_1606_30379a.pdf
Digi.no - http://www.digi.no/php/art.php?id=302349
msstudent.no - http://www.msstudent.no
Grunder.no: http://grunder.imaker.no/cgi-bin/grunder/imaker?id=1971

From the left: Gøran, Me, Jonas and Jan-Kristian
In front: Frode Kristensen from Microsoft Norway

Coding too much and sleeping too little is a setting I'm not too unfamiliar with. You know you should sleep a bit more and code a bit less when you have nightmares about debugging and are wondering what method of which class to call to shut off the wakeup alarm in the morning. I'm coding on a project with a few friends these days and came over some interesting code, probably caused by the setting above:

public string MyProp
{
   set {value = value; }
}

Hmm... useful property...