Yesterda I went to Kinepolis in Brussels for what was going to be a great afternoon. Scott Guthrie doesn’t come every year to Belgium, actually it was its second time, so when he does you better be there to hear what he’s talking about.

The guys from Visug did a great job preparing the event and had prepared a little fun ingredient for Scott. Everybody got to wear red polo shirts:

The session itself covered the following topics:

• ASP.NET 4.0 and Visual studio 2010
• Silverlight 4
• ASP.NET MVC 2

For me personally it was a great opportunity to see and talk with Scott again after the last MVP summit and there was some pretty interesting content about web related technologies (my favorite). Microsoft’s really doing a great job for webdevelopers with brining out new tools, new little additions to a more maturing web platform (ASP.NET 4.0), investing in new ways to let developers develop close to the raw metal with MVC and making it possible for them to create compelling applications with Silverlight.

One of the nice intros about Silverlight is its streaming capabilities with a cool pixar style animation: http://www.iis.net/media/experiencesmoothstreaming.

 

Grz, Kris.

Taken from the download site:

SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is now available. You can use these packages to upgrade any SQL Server 2008 edition.
Note:We remain committed to our plans to keep service packs contained, focusing on essential updates only, primarily a Roll-up of Cumulative Update 1 to 3, Quick Fix Engineering (QFE) updates, as well as fixes to issues reported through the SQL Server community. While keeping product changes contained, we have made significant investments to ease deployment and management of Service Packs:

• Slipstream – You are now able to integrate the base installation with service packs (or Hotfixes) and install in a single step.
• Service Pack Uninstall – You are now able to uninstall only the Service Pack (without removing the whole instance)
• Report Builder 2.0 Click Once capability

Download it here.

Grz, Kris.

Got the mail today with the great news that I’m renewed as an MVP for the year 2009. I must say, a week after hearing that I became an ASP Insider this is also very good news. I also got the news that my colleague Marc Gregoire, one of the 3 colleagues I went to the MVP summit with, also got renewed. So also my congratulations go to him.

Grz, Kris.

I got the message from Microsoft that I’ve been added to the ASP Insiders crew. This is a great reward from Microsoft towards certain people. Like Scott Guthrie described it:

The ASPInsiders team spends countless hours answering questions and giving guidance to other ASP.NET developers, as well as providing feedback and direction on new features for future ASP.NET releases. Their work and contributions are invaluable.

I’m very excited and honored by having this reward as it shows the recognition from Microsoft towards my continuous support towards members on the ASP.NET forums. The benefit for members are that I’m in more direct contact with the ASP.NET team itself being able to provide feedback and make suggestions about things I noticed either as a question on the forums or from personal experience. This can result in having Microsoft to create even better products for their customers.

Grz, Kris.

Just found on twitter about the release of the ASP.NET MVC Training kit.

Grz, Kris.

Grab it here: www.microsoft.com/ie8. Better security included, faster rendering on pages and more standards based.

I only hope that gmail and facebook update their CSS quite rapidly as they don’t render too well at the moment.

Grz, Kris.

Noticed it a couple of hours ago on the forums that someone was able to download the bits and just noticed that the download link itself was available: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=53289097-73ce-43bf-b6a6-35e00103cb4b&displaylang=en.

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 provides a new Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework on top of the existing ASP.NET 3.5 runtime. This means that developers can take advantage of the MVC design patterns to create their Web Applications which includes the ability to achieve and maintain a clear separation of concerns (the UI or view from the business and application logic and backend data), as well as facilitate test driven development (TDD). The ASP.NET MVC framework defines a specific pattern to the Web Application folder structure and provides a controller base-class to handle and process requests for “actions”. Developers can take advantage of the specific Visual Studio 2008 MVC templates within this release to create their Web applications, which includes the ability to select a specific Unit Test structure to accompany their Web Application development.
The MVC framework is fully extensible at all points, allowing developers to create sophisticated structures that meet their needs, including for example Dependency Injection (DI) techniques, new view rendering engines or specialized controllers.
As the ASP.NET MVC framework is built on ASP.NET 3.5, developers can take advantage of many existing ASP.NET 3.5 features, such as localization, authorization, Profile etc.n

Time to read the free eBook from Scottgu: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/03/10/free-asp-net-mvc-ebook-tutorial.aspx.

Grz, Kris.

Aaaah, something to look forward to. The yearly Microsoft local techdays will be in Antwerp this year. Good for me as that city’s way nearer than all the other locations where they did it during the last year (Ghent & Louvain laneuve). If you should attend it I’ll be there too so just come over and say hi.

Take a look at the official site: http://www.microsoft.com/belux/techdays/about.aspx.

Grz, Kris.

At the PDC a new logo for .NET was introduced:

 

It looks like a helix shape to me and that reminds me of that other helix shape: DNA. When one says DNA, and who has been around for a while, probably immediately thinks about Microsoft DNA, Windows Distributed interNet Applications Architecture.

Actually the helix is also flipped over an angle of 90° and that reminds me of another story: Flipping the funnel. It’s an eBook by Seth Godin. During my college years I liked my course of marketing a lot. Actually when I remember reading this particular book and how the new logo looks… well it kind of mixed you know. The DNA helixes also got flipped like the funnel into a megaphone. It reflects it perfectly as Microsoft tends to spread .NET where it can: on the server, on the desktop, in the browser, …

Grz, Kris.

Just found out about this site about security: Hellosecureworld. Take a look at it. It's in Silverlight (always a good reason to check something out) and it has comics (another good reason). What are you waiting for: click the link!

Grz, Kris.

I just noticed at home that the look & feel of live search has changed. Steve Balmer recently stated that Microsoft is updating its whole live experience and certainly search. Could this be a new step forward to a renewed platform? Recently I found myself using live search more and more instead of google.

Grz, Kris.

Tomorrow I'm heading for Seattle for the annual MVP summit. I just got renewed so I'm quite happy to be there as a full blown MVP. This is also the first time that I'll be visiting the US. I'm very excited about the whole thing because it means also for me the chance of going to Redmond itself, the "Mekka" for people that are into Microsoft technology.

We'll be arriving on Sunday after a flight of about 10 hours and on Monday stay in Seattle itself. Tuesday and Wednesday all sessions will be at Microsoft campus and Thursday again will be in Seattle. A lot of it will be under NDA but I hope to be able to blog about my adventure while I'm there.

If you're also going: I'm staying in the Sheraton hotel. I'm a very social person that likes to meet new people so don't be shy to come to me and say hi.

Grz, Kris.

Tim Sneath, a well known evangelist of Microsoft was in Belgium yesterday. I got invited for a meet and greet with him by Microsoft Belgium. The first part was technical, Tim talked about Silverlight and we had the opportunity to ask questions. It was very interesting for me. The other fun side about it was that I got to know new people as well. Something I enjoy a lot since I'm quite a social person.

Afterwards we went with the group to a restaurant and enjoyed a very tasty meal in good company.

Here are some pictures that were taken:

Grz, Kris.

Join the conversation and explore how you can create next-generation Web experiences. Now, for the first time in Belgium, the MIX essentials conference brings you the latest information from the global MIX'08 conference held in Las Vegas in early March. With Keynote presentations from Steve Ballmer, and other international speakers, unveiling the latest Web-oriented solutions from Microsoft.

Hope to see you there too.

Grz, Kris.

It seems Microsoft recently put up a couple of new sites that might be of interest to you:

• A revamped site dedicated to the Expression family: There's lot to find already, tutorials, starter kits, forums, ... While the Expression family's mostly targeted towards designers I also used Expression Web in the past and currently am taking my first steps in Blend 2.5 preview to get to know Silverlight 2 a bit better.
• TaskMarket: a new place for freelancers to find each other for short term assignments.
  

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.

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.

Yesterday I went to the first of 5 sessions for my LEAP course. Taken from the website:

LEAP (Lead Enterprise Architect Program) is meant at complementing the existing skills and experience of aspiring architects with specific architect-level information about Microsoft technology. The acquired knowledge will help the aspiring architect in their day-to-day architectural work.

I found it to be very interesting. Most of the time courses are just sit and listen but this course is all about interaction. First we got some introduction talk and of course a course. Directly afterwards we were divided in groups to think about a possible solution for an architectural problem. After about an hour 2 groups defended their ideas towards each other. The group that I was in almost came out with the same idea like the other group and it was also very alike the approach that Microsoft came up with. I got to know new people, something I always like a lot since I'm not really social challenged. I'm looking forward to the next session already.

Grz, Kris.

Like Silverlight? Like search? Like them combined? If so be sure to check out the new Tafiti search engine. I especially liked the treeview option where you can see, in a rotating tree, what's been found. Probably it won't replace, for me anyway, google or live search but it shows the possibilities that you can obtain when using Silverlight.
Speaking of which, if you're in Belgium on September 20th you can join the VISUG meeting about Silverlight. I'll be there too.

Grz, Kris.

Always fun to know what those names stand/stood for and what they became when the product got actually released. Take a look here: Microsoft codenames.

Grz, Kris.

I just read the sad news about the death of a great .NET community person: David Boschmans. I knew David as being a great and nice guy that took the time to listen to the community. I heard at the VIP community weekend that he had health problems but that he was recovering. Rest in peace good man, you'll be missed.

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.

Since I became an MVP I also got into the VIP pool of people. This was my first time but it was nice to see some other Belgian MVP's but also others that made it to the VIP pool thanks to their outstanding community awareness. First we had an informal meeting as to what direction Microsoft sees the community going and where the VIPs see it going. Not all people were developers but also IT pro's were there. Some of them I already knew but most of these people were strangers to me. After we had introduced ourselves there was an IT pro that came to me and said: "thanks for the help on the forums". Apparently he had asked a question on the ASP.NET forums and I helped him out (and actually gave a correct answer too).

After that meeting we settled down in our hotel rooms, a very nice hotel in Ostend (Golden Tulip Bero). After that we gathered for a small game in Ostend where we had to find several key locations and put a card on a board that corresponded with something we could see in the neighbourhood. It was fun and actually the team I was in did win. After the competition we had a nice dinner in the Kursaal (a known building in Ostend). After that we gathered in a lounge bar with a lot of possible cocktails. I had some nice chats with several people that evening/night and not everything was tech related.

The day afterwards, which came too soon as I nearly couldn't sleep during those 4 hours I spent in the hotels bed, I was the first of the group to eat breakfast. But soon several other members of the group joined me so I immediately had some new conversations going on.

Normally at 10 o'clock the group would gather to play some other games but some of us had to leave. I was one of them as I went to Westend to team up with my parents.

Actually I had a lot of fun and want to thank the people that made it possible for me to attend it and I hope to see the other VIP people back soon.