Last week I attended an interesting presentation about version control with Team Foundation Server. Yves Goeleven presented about the different patterns when it comes down to branching and merging.

If you're interested you can watch the presentation online divided in 3 different pieces (taken from Katriens blog):

• Introduction: http://www.microsoft.com/belux/msdn/nl/chopsticks/default.aspx?id=461
• The Basics: http://www.microsoft.com/belux/msdn/nl/chopsticks/default.aspx?id=463
• Increasing Quality & Managing Risks: http://www.microsoft.com/belux/msdn/nl/chopsticks/default.aspx?id=464

Grz, Kris.

Wow, this is a cool application. Be sure to check it out and have Silverlight installed. Funny thing for me is that I worked in a team in 2001 that was also into adding/upgrading a software tool for patient handling in hospitals. If we only had the UI possibilities of Silverlight/WPF in those days to work out everything...

Personally, I foresee much more of these kind of applications with these great technologies.

Grz, Kris.

You can already start downloading the MIX08 sessions. I just finished watching the keynote and boy am I looking forward to Silverlight 2 final edition. Also the new capabilities of IE8 are looking very promising and I bet every web developer/designer is really looking forward to the support of CSS2.1 in it. Hopefully Microsoft decides to push IE8 to every windows installation as soon as possible after the final release so we can get rid of IE6/7 incompatibilities and CSS hacks just to get it to work.

Grz, Kris.

Ok, it seems this year has been the year of new technologies from Microsoft and yet new stuff's coming out. I found this blog post from Julie Lerman that had a talk with Scott Guthrie on how to handle everything that comes out of the firehose: ScottGu on how to deal with the Microsoft firehose.

Grz, Kris.

To build software that meets your security objectives, you must integrate security activities into your software development lifecycle. This handbook captures and summarises the key security engineering activities that should be an integral part of your software development processes.

These security engineering activities have been developed by Microsoft patterns & practices to build on, refine and extend core lifecycle activities with a set of security-specific activities. These include identifying security objectives, applying design guidelines for security, threat modelling, security architecture and design reviews, security code reviews and security deployment reviews.

It's not a book that you would read but rather a security best practices checklist. Download the free eBook if you're interested.

Grz, Kris.

Yesterday evening I and several colleagues attended the MSDN evening about Visual Studio 2008. It was most of the time an introduction of the possibilities of the new IDE and there was a whole lot of talk about the enhancements to the C# language. Not that I mind because that's also my language of choice. Especially the principle of extension methods look great and very interesting. Too bad however that the new enhancements of VB.NET weren't shown as that's also a language that's used very often. My current project (winforms, .NET 2.0, NHibernate, SQL Server 2005) also is created with VB.NET.

Most of the stuff that they showed, enhancements for web developers, great integration of tools for CSS that I already used with Expression Web, I already knew off. The thing that I didn't saw before is the cool VSTO ribbon designer. No more crafting with custom xml files anymore, just design. Cool. I guess several of my colleagues, that are mainly using VSTO, were glad when they saw this.

Afterwards we all had a drink and it was nice to see some familiar faces again that I haven't seen for a long time. One of the reasons why I like to go to these evenings/events is the social aspect. According to some people I'm a walking Facebook application myself.

Grz, Kris.

Just signed in to MSDN subscriptions and apparently the Beta 2 after Visual Studio 2008 dissapeared. I know what I'll be downloading evening.

Grz, Kris.

Yesterday evening I attended an MSDN event in Utopolis Mechelen dedicated to Silverlight. Not a really deep dive technical session and you could tell by seeing quite a lot of designer in the audience as well. Tom Mertens did a little keynote about the different versions of Expression Studio and where to locate  and Gill Cleeren presented the session. It was very interesting though not very technical but a nice showcase of what's possible with it and which products one can use to visually create stunning RIAs (Rich Interactive Applications).

Afterwards it was a nice gathering in the Movie Café. Nice because I had the chance to see some familiar faces that I haven't seen in years. Afterwards several people hooked up together to get something to eat in La Fleche. They served quite a good lasagne. A very nice evening: some tech stuff, good food, nice company to talk with.

Grz, Kris.

Hi,

if you're into Microsoft technology you'll probably know about Channel 9 and On10. While I was surfing/investigating the revamped ASP.NET site I noticed a new entry in the community toolbar: Channel 8.

Channel 8 is THE place to be for STUDENTS who want to code, connect and create technology. Stay plugged into tech news and share in the experience with students around the world just like you who want to see their creations come to life. This is also a back door directly into Microsoft just like Channel 9 but from a student point of view. This means access to the inside scoop about our products and life working inside Microsoft and information on cool things coming out. This is your community – a place for you to share your tips and tricks and even your problems. Go check out what others are doing and talk about what you think is cool.

I hope a lot of interesting content will come up there just like on Channel 9. More to watch for all of us.

Grz, Kris.

In case you didn't notice it, the MSDN site got revamped. Actually I like the new look & feel. If you're tired of seeing the treeview on the left you can just press the "T" key to make it hiding itself.

When you hover over the parts in the breadcrumb that also shows a nice dropdown to which you can easily link to other parts. I like it!

Grz, Kris.

I'm already subscribed for that event and if you would like to come to you can go to this page: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032340308&Culture=en-US.

Hope to see you there!

Grz, Kris.

I received a VIP access for Dev Days 2007 which will start on March 27th. And thanks to my boss, I'm also able to attend it. So thanks everyone for the opportunity!

Grz, Kris.

I'm just announcing the upcoming Microsoft Developer & IT pro days. This year there's also a preconference day entirely dedicated to ASP.NET AJAX and WPF/e. The other 2 days are also packed with interesting sessions so be sure to check them out.

Grz, Kris.

Yesterday evening I attended an MSDN Technical Evening about VSTO 2005 Second Edition presented by Patrick Tisseghem of the company U2U. Although it's been a very long time since I developed some small things with VSTO it was an interesting meeting to attend. Especially when you look at what's available with the latest VSTO, although for the real cool stuff it seems we have to wait for the Orcas Release of Visual Studio. We saw several techniques, the good and the bad, of creating a simple add in for Office 2007 and how to make one for Outlook. One of my collegues, one that almost whole the time spends his development time with Office, was glad to hear that VBA isn't the big thing anymore but .NET languages like C# and VB.NET are the way to go.

Grz, Kris.

Yesterday I visited the .NET Framework 3.0 Development event provided by Microsoft. It was a great introduction to the new upcoming technologies: WPF, Cardspace, WCF and WF.

The first 2 sessions were presented by Peter Himschoot, a regional director for Belgium. The last 2 were presented by Ingo Rammer, the known Austrian regional director.

My impression: WPF looks way cool. It looks quite flexibel and the 3D effects were also looking great. Peter also showed us a WPF application running sandboxed in Internet Explorer and apparently this is called an XBAP application.

CardSpace looks promising but I still need to see it in practice. If it can live up to the expectations it could have a very bright future though.

Then Ingo showed us WCF and later on WF. This was for me the first time I saw WF in action. Boy did I wish I could already use it in my current project, it would a great time saver for the workflows I need to implement.

The last session, and also the most interesting probably, was the one where WCF and WF were used together. I just checked Ingo's blog and as he promised he uploaded the slides and demo applications. You can download them here.

Grz, Kris.

Last thursday I attended a session presented by Jan Tielens in Mechelen on the subject of Office 2007.
The session was dedicated for developers and because I haven't tried it out myself I found the new possibilities of Office 2007 very interesting. Especially the new file formats and the distinction between macro enabled and macro disabled documents are great. I still remember the time that macro virusses became available and the harm they could do to someones computer. Also the files themselves are smaller than in the past because they're, behind the scenes, compressed zip files. So in order to take a look at what's inside you just have to rename the file and add .zip behind the file extension of the document and you can open it with winzip for example. After that you can clearly see that all the data is now inside xml files and there are dedicated subfolders available to hold the embedded data like for example images.

The fact that the data is now xml means that a developer can quite easily manipulate the data, or create documents, with .NET. Especially because the next version will hold extra capabilities to interact with the so called "packages".

Besides the new file formats and what a developer can do with it we also had a demo about how to use the VSTO to create custom task panes or to create custom ribbons.

Well, I hope to get into experimentation on this topic soon because it really looks great to me.

Grz, Kris.