I got the message that I won a HTC Dual Touch thanks to a contest of one of the sponsors (Ausy) on last Visug event. It's a nice phone with a bright screen. The only thing that's lacking is wifi. Too bad because I would've really loved that feature.

Grz, Kris.

Last Thursday I attended a Visug seminar about WCF. This session was presented by Juwal Lowy, a dedicated and well known employee of IDesign. The session was great, really great. Juwal's a great presenter that could even make the belgian crowd to laugh on several occasions. That might seem strange but most foreign speakers know how hard it is to interact with a Belgian audience that mostly doesn't make sound and watches the presentation with a lot of interest. I've already followed several WCF presentations during the last years (TechEd, tech days, ...) but this one was actually the one I liked best. Most presentations show a host and a client and then dive right into the config files. Not this one. We got shown little chunks at a time and more about the architecture. Not so much configuration but small samples which showed the stuff. I liked this approach a lot.

Grz, Kris.

I just noticed this message in my inbox:

Dear Kris Van Der Mast,

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2008 Microsoft® MVP Award! The MVP Award is our way to say thank you for promoting the spirit of community and improving people’s lives and the industry’s success every day. We appreciate your extraordinary efforts in ASP/ASP.NET technical communities during the past year.

I admit that I'm at least a bit proud of myself. Especially because I was able to help out people that were in need of getting into the right direction. And for the next year? Well I'll try to do my best to keep on helping the community.

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.

I just found out about this one: Silverlight Essential Training. Extra video material for free. Man, I really need a couple of weeks off soon to dive into the cool stuff.

Grz, Kris.

Finally the cat's out of the bag: Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista has been released. MSDN subscribers could already download and install it. I tried a couple of weeks ago on my Macbook Pro (on which I run Windows Vista Ultimate thanks to bootcamp) and it worked out nicely for me.

Grz, Kris.

Just noticed this one on the blog of Brad Abrams: Silverlight 2 Developer Poster. Always nice to have such very visual representation of the possibilities of a new technology.

Grz, Kris.