Yesterday evening VISUG, a .NET related Belgian user group in which I participate, organised a geek dinner in Antwerp. 12 participants showed up and we had a blast. Talking about work, tech stuff, .NET (of course), comics, movies, ... There were some people I haven't met before so it was also great to socialize with those as well. The food, spare ribs à volonté, was also delicious and if you visit Antwerp on an occasion I can recommend the Amadeus restaurant.

Grz, Kris.

Yesterday evening I attended with several of my friends the concert of Clouseau, a famous Flemish band. The concert itself was great with a terrific atmosphere in the Antwerp Sportspalace. After that we went further celebrating the 30th anniversary of one of the gang. I was the designated Bob of the evening, driving everyone home safely. Luckely I don't need alcohol to enjoy a good time so I didn't mind.

Grz, Kris.

Yesterday I attended the meeting of Visug, a Belgian user group of which I'm a member, with as meetings subject Exception handling and logging. It wasn't a traditional way of presenting but was more like an open discussion which became quite lively at moments. Especially when we reached the stage of discussing the differences between logging and auditing.

It was very interesting to hear different oppinions because of the mixed audiance: architects, developers and even an IT pro who wanted to learn more about .NET and see what the impact could be to the servers he maintains.

I'm already looking forward to the Geek Dinner next week in Antwerp with the fellow members of Visug. If you want more information you can take a look at the site.

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.

Today I went to see the A & B ranked badminton competitors in the Flemish Badminton Championship with my badminton partner Guy, who's also a friend of mine for more than 26 years now. Since I play the sport myself it was nice to see the people who are far better than me at work. I just like to play it recreational, although we also go for the win of course . Nothing as good as playing a couple of sets against equals after a day of sitting in front of a computer screen.

If you don't know the sport or haven't tried it yet I can really recommend it. It requires technique, you use practically every musscle in your body and it helps you to focus better.

You can learn more about it on wikipedia.

Grz, Kris.

Yesterday I attended a workshop about WPF, WCF & WF given at Ordina. One of the presenters used a little tool that I saw Ingo Rammer use also a couple of months ago. The tool itself's called ZoomIt and is able to zoom in during a presentation and also provides a pen to draw on the screen while viewing.

It's free and if you're into presenting you can definitely use such a handy tool.

Grz, Kris.

I noticed yesterday that MSDN has got a new breadcrumb navigation bar. What I like about it is that one can hover over a previous "crumb" and get related information to navigate to. I like it!

Grz, Kris.

I just installed the latest tool from the Live division on my laptop: Windows Live Mail Desktop. I got 10 invitations at the moment so anyone interested of getting one, just leave a comment to this post.

At first glance I can quickly connect to my live mail/hotmail account and see the subscribed RSS feeds of my IE7 RSS platform being integrated. The look and feel, even on Windows XP, is that of Windows Vista. Nice to see that because my laptop won't be capable of displaying the Aero or Glass look in Windows Vista.

One thing I noticed is that i doesn't nicely integrate with my gmail account. Apparently it can't connect to the pop server of gmail. I hope to see this one fixed in the update of this version.

Grz, Kris.