Just noticed on the blog of Microsoft watch that there's a a comparison made, by Microsoft, for their own Visual Studio to Dreamweaver (former Macromedia, currently Adobe).

The comparison page can be found here.

Grz, Kris.

Just saw on the Belgian MSDN site that Kurt Claeys, a member of VISUG like me, wrote an article about State machine workflows in Windows Workflow Foundation. Last week we both attended the .NET 3.0 Framework Development event.

Nice to see that he describes the state machine side of WF. Ingo Rammer did a great explanation about creating workflows on the event but didn't show state machines during his speech.

Grz, Kris.

Currently I drive an Audi A4 and am very satisfied of that car. Luckely because I drive about 1000 - 1200 km / week for my work.

Well, I just found out about this new Audi R8 thanks to Coolz0r's blog. Man does this car look hot or what? I would certainly like to testdrive this one myself.

Grz, Kris.

Hmm, I hope the marketing guys of Microsoft aren't going to keep renaming Atlas. I already found it hard enough to not speak about Atlas anymore but of Microsoft AJAX. Seems it's renamed again. Read my former post about the renaming of Atlas.

Here's the new naming for the moment:

Thanks to Microsoft Watch, I found this blogpost that shows the different flavours of the Vista UI.

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.

I guess I'm one of those people who like to experiment with new tools. For my feedreading I used google feedreader, RSS bandit, omea reader and yesterday evening I found out about this new feedreader called Greatnews. I didn't have a lot of time to experiment with it but it looks promissing. It supports labelling, of which I'm a fan, and it also stores the downloaded content on the hard drive so you can reread it even when you're offline.

If you want to learn more about you can take a look at the feature list.

Grz, Kris.

Yesterday evening I upgraded my blog from 1.8 to 1.9.

The things I like already is the easier way to navigate to the previous or next day in the statistics (admin pages). Also the better way to navigate in the itemview to navigate to the previous or next blog article. It makes it much easier for someone to start reading a blog post and navigate to the follow up blog items. The tagcloud control is something I like a lot. It doesn't have the same advanced use like the tagcloud control of del.icio.us where you can further select "subtags".

When I downloaded the code and tested it on my laptop I quickly noticed that my IE7 RC1 didn't show the tagcloud correctly. After taking a look at the .css files of the dasBlog theme that I use, I quickly noticed that dasBlog.css contains definitions for the css classes that are used by the tagcloud but they were overridden in the base.css file. Commenting these overrides fixed it for me.

I also made the necessary adjustments to the itemtemplate in order to get my custom macros working. If you're interested in creating custom macros yourself you can check out my article about it: Creating custom macros for dasBlog.

Grz, Kris.

My morning just got better: dasBlog 1.9 is out. You can already guess what I'll be looking at the coming weekend .

I installed the latest bits of the Release Candidate recently and really like it. Another great thing to find out is that javascript seems to be much faster now. This will especially be a great boost since javascript's becoming more and more important with the AJAX whirlwind. Also Microsoft AJAX will greatly benefit from this improvement.

I got the news from Ajaxian, here and here.

Grz, Kris.

I'm probably one of the last blogging about this but Atlas, the AJAX framework by Microsft, is going to be renamed. Also other good news: they'll do their best to ship a version 1.0, which will be supported, this year. Now we only get to get used to the new names:

• Microsoft AJAX Library:  The client-side JavaScript library (i.e., all the .js files) that works with any browser and also supports any server-side framework, not just ASP.NET.
• ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions: The server-side functionality that seamlessly integrates with ASP.NET and uses the same programming model familiar to existing ASP.NET developers.
• ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit: The set of free, shared source controls and components that currently form the "Atlas" Control Toolkit community project hosted on CodePlex.
• Microsoft AJAX = Microsoft AJAX Library + ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions.

You can read more about it on the blogs of Scott Guthrie, Brian Goldfarb & Keith Smith.

Grz, Kris.