At Alki Beach for the Day

We had a fire on the beach, and roasted marshmallows

The sunset was so BEAUTIFUL:

OMG!!!!

Right after we got our code working!! We were sooo excited!

Today was the best day at work! For the past few days we have been trying to tackle the problem of how exactly we were going to send a text message from our gadget to someone's phone. It seemed like such a complex problem, and probably would have been if we hadn't discovered what we figured out today. The way we were approaching the problem was by implementing an API that would send an email message through something called exchange web services. The problem was, we didn't always have the URL to get to this EWS(exchange web services) server. Also, the way we would send info was through calls called SOAP calls that act as an envelope in sending a letter. They package the information being sent and contain the information on who is receiving it. We created these soap calls by auto-generating a proxy, which turned out to be these long pages of code that were so hard to work with. So, after talking with many people, we were put in contact with a PM who works with the Exchange Web Services. Turns out, he created an API (that won't be released until the newest version of exchange and is therefore not documented yet) that sends information. It gets the URL through auto-discovery all without using a proxy. We were FREAKING OUT when he told us this. We had been talking with devs trying to figure out how all this was going to work, and in a few hours were introduced to the perfect API that does exactly what we need, and can now send texts from our program containing maybe 20 lines of code. It was sooooo amazing!!!! There is still a lot of work, because I now have to change up my feature a little to be able to store the credentials the user with log on with in a secure way so the gadget doesnt actually have to stay connected to the server constantly, and still not make the user sign in multiple times. Also, we have a lot of testing to do, plenty of priority 2 features to implement if we want, and tons of UI (user interface...the way the gadget looks) work to do. But we finally made it down probably one of the biggest hills put in front of us, and hopefully it will be relatively smooth sailing from here. Our managers jokes that now we figured this out, we need to start another gadget. But so after a pretty stressful week of staring at code and wondering what the heck we were going to do, we made intense progress, and now have tons of breathing room. YAY!!!

Microsoft Models!!

The girls and I decided we needed cute pics by the Microsoft Signs!

(we went sight seeing after our photo shoot and gots lots of crazy looks and comments for all wearing green dresses)

Pictures!!!

The Waterfall from above...before we started hiking to the bottom

Just getting to the bottom of the hill

Climbing down to the waterfall

This is our recruiter, Racquel....She's awesome!!

The Explorer interns!!

The Explorer GIRLS!!!

I just thought this picture was really cool...you can see all the water in the air.

It felt like it was raining, the waterfall was so strong.

This is me and another Exchange Explorer, Akansha

The Exchange Explorers with our recruiter, Racquel

Roommates!!!

At the Mariners Baseball game

We got a shoutout on the megatron

This week has been super productive. Since Monday, we decided to completely change our gadget. The connectivity gadget was getting so complicated in the sense that we didn’t know how to make it accurate enough to be useful, and also to make it exciting enough for people to actually use it. We decided to create an SMS gadget that will work directly with exchange. We figured that since the new product we are working on called exchange labs will target more college students initially, this would be a perfect gadget. Plus, we contacted the SMS messaging team located in china and they sent us a reply with a  link to the class they used to implement SMS messaging in the online email access client that exchange has, as well as links to sites giving tips on how to implement the SDK which we downloaded for using an ID to log onto the server. So today we finally got a server specifically for developing our gadget, as well as access to the entire source code library for exchange! It took almost two hours to download all the files to my machine. Its just crazy that all the super confidential Exchange source code is on my machine. So anyways, for the next few days it will just be a lot of researching technologies. Its like we got over one hill, and are now sitting at the bottom of a brand new, even bigger hill. We have to learn a whole new set of skills and technologies in order to complete the next part of the project. We are however, making progress.

So for the cooking, I am getting better. We cooked a full meal for the first time the other night. We have some friends that make fun of how often we make frozen pizzas when they come over, so we decided to prove that we can actually cook. We made my moms lasagna, green beans, salad, garlic bread, and cheesecake…and it was really good!!! They were so impressed, and we had lots of fun.

Making Lasagna 

Our pretty table!

We had ducks come to our back porch.

This was our group on the beach at sunset

At the bar-b-Que. after the beach

Work Update

So back to work tomorrow. Last week got pretty stressful, I'm still learning what a huge process it is to create an application. We are finally moving to the development stage, so far its been all planning. We kept coming up with ideas, then figuring out how difficult they were, or deciding they weren't useful enough. It was so hard to find something that people would use, and that would benefit the company, but that we could finish in 8 weeks we have. We started with an idea for a gadget that would tell the users if they were able to send and receive email. This idea was useful to the company in that it would lower support calls by letting a user know if they had connectivity problems, and therefore save money, but it became an issue of how exactly do you test whether someone can send and receive email. There are innumerable paths for a email to get to someone's mailbox, so actually checking that an email you sent out was received is impossible. We could check that the connection between a users personal mailbox and the hub that actually transports the email was in tact, but wouldn't guarantee the user was able to receive email because a connection could be out elsewhere. There were also issues of what email service someone is using. Exchange works with on premise servers, and off premise servers (the server is actually on Microsoft campus) as well as other clients like Imap accounts, and  Smart phones . So this idea is proving to be very difficult, and though we haven't canceled it out, we are trying to implement a new idea. We have, however, begun programming a dummy gadget. We split the project into features, and I (along with one other girl) will own the log-in feature. We will be responsible for creating a log in page that will take a ID, find the credentials that correspond with that ID (located on the server), verify the credentials and then display the information the gadget uses from the server. I'm really excited about it. We have already made progress and its so cool to figure something new out and see it actually work. This week will be mostly coding and we hope to have that feature completed by the end of the week! I'm so glad we finally have something to show for our work. We are still deciding on the other 2 features, so we will have to work on that this week as well.

The weekend was good. We went to the beach with a bunch of friends on Saturday evening. We had planned to have a bonfire on the beach but all the fire pits were taken so we just hung out for awhile then went to a friends and bar-b-qued. a lot of the interns were they, so it was lots of fun. Today one of my roommates and our friend went to a few waterfront parks, then went walking around a small town called kirkland. Then we went over to a friends and bar-b-qued again. It was such nice weather, so it was good to spend some time outdoors. 

Just Pics!

Our Limos!!

This was the house from sleepless in Seattle

Where the Mariners Play

Where the Seahawks Play

This is the first beach we went to on Sunday

This is a really cool panoramic my roommate took. Click on it you can see it bigger.