I just had Skype crashing on me every time it tried to connect and go online. The following worked for me (on Windows 7):

1. If the Skype icon is displayed in the system tray at the bottom right of the screen, right-click it and select Quit.
2. Click Start, type "run" and press Enter. (On Windows XP: Click Start and then Run.)
3. Type "%appdata%\skype" and click OK.
4. Locate and delete the file shared.xml. The file may be displayed as shared if file extensions are not displayed by default on your computer.
5.If you cannot find this file:
-> Click Start, type "run" and press Enter. (On Windows XP: Click Start and then Run.)
-> Type "control folders" and click OK.
-> In the View tab, ensure that Show hidden files and folders is enabled.
-> Repeat the instructions from the beginning.
6. Restart Skype.
7. Choose ‘Check for Updates’ from the ‘Help’ menu. Perform upgrade to the latest version.

Gartner is mentioning Bangladesh as a country that is growing when it comes as a place for outsourcing IT. Omnext was part of a Dutch trade delegation that went down to Bangladesh to explore opportunities. This article (in Dutch) has the details. Omnext delivers software and services to create an MRI-scan of your software. This can be used in outsourcing projects to measure progress, quality and complexity.

The site has been up for a little while, but I forgot to post about it. Develop-One created this for Law Offices OF Edwards & Johnson, P.A. – Attorneys at Law.

Visit them at: www.lincolnmainelaw.com

I just had an email in my inbox recommending "The Art of Unit testing" by Roy Osherove. I guess I’ll put in another order at Amazon.

I've been doing unit testing for a long time, but since I'm largely self-taught I can probably learn something. Perhaps I’ll even sign up for a course at DevelopMentor. I know all the basics, I feel the biggest challenge with unit testing larger applications is managing test data.

Last night at the BAND meeting Eric Burdo did an open mic talk about usability testing. He referenced two books by Steve Krug. Both seem like a good read to me and both are available on Amazon.

At BAND last night I had some interesting discussions about Windows Phone and as Daniel showed me the racing game on the Zune it suddenly hit me. Windows Phone is not going to be a iPhone killer, at least not based on a single feature that will blast the iPhone away. It is going to blast a hole in the Nintendo DS and Playstation Portable market.

Everything I’ve seen so far about Windows Phone makes it equal to the iPhone as a phone, but the focus on XNA and XBox Live integration will make it that everyone that has an XBox is going to want to have one… It’ll be interesting to see if my hunch is right. It took me a while to figure it out, since my view of the Windows Phone has been influenced by me thinking about ‘enterprise’ applications and how Windows Phone fits in there.

At the Augusta MSDN Roadshow event 2 weeks ago Chris Bowen showed a device and he didn’t show any details about what the Office/email/Outlook experience looked like on the phone. Considering it will still be a while before the devices hit the market makes me believe that a lot of development is still going on in that area and that Microsoft will have some surprises in store for us. I expect the Phone 7 offering to be well beyond what a Blackberry offers. Time will tell.

The hardware specs for Windows Phone 7 require manufacturers to provide at least 8GB of memory. My wish is that these phones will have at least 64GB of memory. That way I can put all my media (music, pictures, movies) and office files on my phone and not have to lug around a USB stick anymore, plus with Office on the phone I’ll be able to actually use the files. Perhaps WP7 will allow me to do a remote desktop session into my phone?

Can’t wait to get one of these phones!

I just had a little scare with Outlook. After installing VSTO 2010 beta 2 64bit on my system my Calendar folder was suddenly corrupt. Luckily there is an excellent (free) way of repairing a broken .pst file. It’s just a little hidden. Read this KB article to find out how to do it.

Tip to Microsoft: Why not register this file as an “Repair” option to a .pst file, allowing me to right-click and fix my broken .pst file?

I’m looking at creating a new website for our ATV club, but we also have a fan page on Facebook… looking to integrate the two… offering some basic info from Facebook onto our site seems easy… now looking to see if and how I can have a list of Facebook events on own site.

The box below shows a Fan Box for our club.

An here is a Page Badge:

Go to http://developer.facebook.com to create these widgets for your site.

Nowadays there are a variety of tools and services available that provide insight into the quality of the code. In order to quantify quality a number of metrics are collected and used to create a maintainability index number. Visual Studio Team System gathers metrics to put a number on the quality of your code. While Omnext offers code is a company which offers services around providing insight into the functioning, quality, and size of software. Now what to do once you have a number? What does it really mean, other than wanting to be good and not score low on a report?

I offer a basic solution:

A project which scores high on maintainability can be maintained by junior to medior skilled developers.
A project that scores low requires senior developers to maintain the application and effectively do what a junior could do on a better code base.

This leads to a simple mathematical deduction.

A senior developer costs 30% to 40% more than a junior. Therefore a bad system will cost 30% to 40% more to maintain than a good system. Of course the increase is not quite linear so if we put it on a sliding scale/table we get:

Feel free to refer to this as the Blomsma Code Metrics Cost Factor.

Amazon is finally offering a Kindle which will also download books when you’re overseas. Not sure if they’re hitting the sweet spot when it comes to pricing. I think I’ll wait for the various slates (slim tablet PC’s) that are becoming available this year.

My suggestion for Apple and HP: put a WhisperNet Mobile card in your slate that will allow free access to just your AppStore!

Last night at the BAND (www.bangordevelopers.com) meeting we all did 10 minute presentations on the tool(s) we love as developers.

On my list were: Total Commander, LinqPad, Microsoft Office (codegen with Excel rules ), VMWare & VirtualPC, Live Mesh. Also on the list should have been Reflector.

Total Commander

Great tool for FTP-ing files and comparing a local folder hierarchy to the hierarchy on the ftp-server. Also much more reliable in FTP-ing large amounts of files than Windows Explorer.

See: www.ghisler.com

LinqPad

A must have for people using LINQ to SQL and Entity Framwork. Helps a lot with figuring out what the exact SQL statement is that get generated from your LINQ statement.

See: www.linqpad.net

VMWare Converter, VMWare Workstation and VirtualPC

These tools are invaluable in creating clean testing environments and separating multiple development environments on a single machine. VMWare converter allows you to grab a physical harddrive and convert it into a virtual machine. Very useful for Windows 7 migration scenarios!
See: www.vmware.com, www.microsoft.com/virtualpc

Live Mesh

Is only in beta, but already an invaluable tool for remote desktop connections across firewalls and synchronizing files across (virtual) machines.
See: www.mesh.com

Reflector

.NET Reflector is a tool any serious .NET developer cannot do without. View sources of any .NET library you use in order to track internal workings. Love it!
See: http://www.red-gate.com/products/reflector/

The Zune-HD has gone on pre-order at Amazon.

I just finished upgrading my laptop (main machine) to Windows 7. I decided to go with an in place upgrade (after making a backup ). I was a little worried that the Live Mesh beta might cause some problem, but… no problem. The system has been upgraded, Office 2007 is running, my Adobe AIR apps are running and Live Mesh is fully operational!

Congrats to Microsoft for an excellent upgrade experience!

Just answered a question from a buddy about Windows Live One Care. The Live One Care product is being discontinued and will be replaced by Microsoft Security Essentials.
Microsoft Security Essentials is in beta right now. From what I understand Microsoft Security Essentials will be a free solution.
More info here: http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/.

From KezNews: “…the final product will be available only before end of 2009...”

Just found out that there is now a company offering sponsored tweets (http://sponsoredtweets.com/). Will this be the end of Twitter, or will my virus scanner move these messages to my ‘spam tweets container’? Where do I get to opt-out? The site pretends to do ethical spamming (http://sponsoredtweets.com/ethics/) but offers no simple opt-out feature.

Looks like Mac OS X Snow Leopard has gone into pre-order mode (look here). Too bad they don’t support my iMac anymore. The latest version(s) of iTunes won’t install on Mac OS X 10.3 and Snow Leopard won’t run on non-intel processors so my PowerPC G4 in my iMac is feeling more and more obsolete by the day.

Upgrade info:

Please note, that only Apple OS X Leopard users are eligible for the Snow Leopard upgrade. Tiger & earlier OS users will need to purchase either versions of the upgraded Mac Box Set. Also, Snow Leopard will only run on intel-based Mac computers.

More here.

Just came across an interesting article from GCN (Government Computer News), quote:

“It’s a victory that performance didn’t drop from XP, which we still consider one of the best operating systems out there. The fact that Windows 7 increased performance slightly across the board is pretty amazing…”

Read the full item here: http://gcn.com/Articles/2009/07/27/GCN-Lab-Windows-7-Performance-Tests.aspx

I received a door prize at last night’s BAND meeting: a Microsoft Natural Ergo Keyboard 4000.
I’ve got still got to get used to a little bit, but it feels good already

After all the misery around the financial crisis is nice to see that Gartner is expecting a turnaround in 2010. Read more here: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1096812.

I believe the URL has changed, so just in case you lost it… Keep track of blog posts from all the DevelopMentor instructors by subscribing to: http://browse.develop.com/bmsfeed/developmentor http://feeds.feedburner.com/DevelopmentorInstructors

Updated 08-19-2009: Feed is now available at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DevelopmentorInstructors

I’ve just updated my blog to the latest version of dasBlog and enabled comments again. I picked a new theme (Mads Simple) to freshen things up a little and modified the theme to include a new service offered by DevelopMentor which allows you to browse my blog and that of my fellow DevelopMentor instructors in a great way. Check it out for yourself.

Just got this in the mail:
As you know, Microsoft® Windows 7 was Released to Manufacturing (RTM) this afternoon, July 22, 2009. We are excited to be releasing what we consider our best OS to date and we couldn’t have done it without you, our Technical Beta Testers!
With the announcement of RTM, the beta program is officially closed.

Time to get ready and move my customers to Windows 7

More on availability here: http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2009/07/22/windows-7-has-been-released-to-manufacturing.aspx and http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2009/07/21/when-will-you-get-windows-7-rtm.aspx

Countdown to August 6th has started!

I frequently receive emails in my inbox warning me about all sorts of scandals or terrible things that could happen to my health. Usually the person(s) forwarding these mails to me have my best interests at heart. Most of the time the emails are a hoax. I found a good site to check and see whether something is a hoax or not: http://urbanlegends.about.com/

I was hoping to be able to download the RTM version of Windows 7 yesterday, but it looks like I’ll need to be patient a little longer. Brandon LeBlanc explains the RTM process here in a very clear blog post.

I’ve copied the section on how to get it:

Once Windows 7 is complete, how do I get it?

The answer depends on who you are:

• MSDN & TechNet Subscribers: Subscribers will be able to download the final version of Windows 7 a few weeks after we announce RTM.
• Volume License (VL) Customers: As announced today by Bill Veghte during his WPC09 keynote, Windows 7 will be available to Volume License customers on September 1st.
• Consumers, Enthusiasts, & Beta Testers (Everyone else): The retail version of Windows 7 will be available in stores October 22nd. If you pre-ordered Windows 7, it should be delivered sometime around the October 22nd timeframe (depends on the retailer). You can pre-order Windows 7 today through many online retailers like the Microsoft Store.
• On New PCs: OEMs are expected to start shipping new PCs with Windows 7 pre-installed on them around October 22nd.

I just read this post by Paul Gielens (http://weblogs.asp.net/pgielens/archive/2009/05/06/why-asp-net-mvc.aspx) about why a group of developers decided to use ASP.NET MVC.

The answer to the question “what made you guys decide to use MVC for this applications” was interesting “because we wanted to learn something new, and because it’s cool!”.

So the feedback on this post ranges from “ahumpff” to “these guys should not be experimenting when someone else is footing the bill”.

I’d just like to pitch in:

a) It’s great to see people showing interest in new technologies. I’d rather have some folks on my team who are eager to dive into a new technology than those who shy away from anything new.
b) There is not a lot of additional info: but assuming that the project was not a multi-million dollar project and there was some room for a little risk. Then “why not?”. In my experience you can play with any technology, but you won’t truly learn it until you have a serious goal. Without a fixed goal you won’t find the pain points of the technology.
c) I believe in risk driven project management. I’m not sure whether it is an official approach to project management. But I like to list all known risks, then decide whether something needs to be done to mitigate the risk. If the cost of mitigation outweighs the risk, then agree to do nothing. In essence, just about everything in PM is about risk management. Anyway, back to the new technology: do an assessment: will this new technology cost me more time to develop this app? Yes/no? No, then use it. Yes? How much? Can we afford to spend X hours on learning? Will it make my team happy? Happy coders write more code… aw heck, let them use it .

Just ran across the boxes they will be using to ship Windows 7 (available Oct. 22, 2009):

From Bink.nu:
Microsoft has now set July 13th for RTM “sign-off”.

Sign off is the process where all divisions sign that they agree on the final code, which means the actual RTM build will be created a few days earlier, which is targeted on July 10th.

The general availability (GA) is set to October 22nd, this is when you can buy it in stores in a box or on new PC’s (OEM).

We can expect the RTM much earlier on MSDN, Technet and Volume Licensing download sites, probably a few days after July 13th.

If you’re planning to use Virtual PC or make use of the XP backwards compatibility mode in Windows 7, then you’ll need to have a CPU that supports hardware virtualization. Sadly is not very clear which CPU’s offer that feature.

I found two pages with useful info, one for Intel processors and one for AMD:

• http://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-xp-mode-virtualization-intel,7709.html
• http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-cpu-windows-xp-mode,7739.html

Note: for XP virtualization you will also need a minimum of 2GB of RAM.

I’ve copied the essential information (including the disclaimer) for your reference pleasure

Disclaimer: I believe this information is accurate, but it is possible that some mistakes may be present in the following tables. caused by inaccuracies in Intel’s documentation or by editing and composition errors. I urge you to do your own research before making any buying decisions. Even if a specific CPU appears to support Intel VT, make sure that the PC’s BIOS manufacturer allows this feature to be enabled.

AMD CPUs

“With the exceptions of Sempron-branded processors and Turion K8 Rev E processors, all notebook processors shipped by AMD include AMD-V and therefore support Windows 7 XP mode."

"With the exceptions of Sempron-branded processors and pre-Rev F Athlon branded processors, all of the desktop processors shipped by AMD include AMD-V and therefore support Windows 7 in XP mode."

"Also, all AMD Opteron processors shipped by AMD from Rev F forward include AMD-V."

Today I’m switching my default search provider in Internet Explorer over to the new Microsoft Search Engine: Bing.

It seems fast, perhaps even faster than Google and with the few searches I’ve done it seems to provide the right results.

Did some quick looking around, there is a Bing developer page and Bing API as well.

Links:

• Bing: www.bing.com
• Bing Developer Center: http://www.bing.com/developers/
• Bing API: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd251056.aspx
• Bing SDK (beta): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=0F513086-078B-47A8-A889-842DC93A69AB&displaylang=en

News travels fast in todays world of digital information. Blogs, Forums, Facebook and Twitter allow for easy and quick repetition of a bit of information. Heck twitter even has a name for it ‘retweeting’ (look for the posts that start with RT). I guess not so long retweeting would have been called gossiping. However, just as in real life you can’t always believe everything somebody tells you. Sometimes you need to check to make sure the information you’re getting is true. Because yes, not everything that is repeated, retweeted or posted is always true. Yesterday Ted Neward fell prey to believing someone he received an email from and responding by posting a response on his blog. Now why would I care? Well, the email Ted got told him that DevelopMentor was bye bye… As a former instructor at DevelopMentor Ted felt sad and wanted to pay homeage to the “many good people” at DevelopMentor. As it turns out the email Ted received contained false information, but within minutes of posting the blog entry information was spreading (I believe the word is ‘virally’) across the Internet with re-tweets and all those other forms of digital goodness spreading this piece of false information almost at the speed of light.

Now the good news is that DevelopMentor is very much alive and kicking and that the “many good people” that Ted paid homage to are working there today. They are teaching classes, helping customers be all that they can be. And not just with teaching classes, but also with onsite training, consulting on projects and also with the new Remote Access Open Enrollment Courses*.

Upcoming classes include:

June 15 Essential C# in LOS ANGELES

June 15 Essential Windows Communication Foundation in BOSTON

June 22 Essential Windows Presentation Foundation in BOSTON

More information can be found at www.develop.com

If you don’t believe me, or want to check the facts then call 800.699.1932 right now and register for a class! You can also email requests@develop.com

* Save Time and Travel: Remote Access Open Enrollment Courses

You can now take open enrollment courses in our Los Angeles and Boston facilities without traveling. Remote Access to our ongoing schedule of instructor-led courses will allow you to fully participate real-time in expert-level lectures, demos and labs that have made DevelopMentor a leader in software development training. We've added new collaboration tools and prepared our instructors for remote students in class so you will be fully engaged in the learning process.

Whenever I need one I always need search for a good ASII table.

So here is one:

Here is a shameless plug for my friend Mike who now has his own website at www.ireland-environmental.com.

If you need environmental services or help with getting the right permits to do construction and such, then Ireland Environmental Services is the place to go.
Mike is running a blog on environmental issues too, visit it here.

Yeah, my last Training Kit is shipping!

Get a copy now at Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/dxwdz5

Today I ran into a problem where apparently the registry settings for Visual Studio got messed up since I was no longer able to add a data connection in my Server Explorer, nor create an Entity Framework model from a database. Time to reset Visual Studio command(o) style.

To reset Visual Studio you open the Visual Studio Command Prompt and type:

devenv /resetsettings

And life is good...

On March 24th the Bangor .NET Developers will host an Ineta sponsored event where Steve Andrews will do a talk about the ASP.NET MVC Framework.

The ASP.NET MVC Framework provides a powerful Model View Controller (MVC) approach to building web applications, and provides separation of concerns, increased testability, control over HTML output, and intuitive URLs. We will start by looking at building a model framework with LINQ to SQL, including validation and model binding. Then, we'll explore a custom generics-based repository and services implementation. Finally, we'll tie it all together with a look at Views and jQuery.   Steve Andrews is a Team System MVP and INETA speaker, and has been working as a developer for more than 9 years. During this time, he has designed and developed applications in such widely varying areas as trust accounting, medical information management, supply chain management, and retail systems. Steve is also a MCTS, ICSOO, and community fanatic.   Go to www.bangordevelopers.com to sign up now.

The combined user groups of the SDN are putting together a terrific one day event with great sessions for software developers, architects, information workers and database professionals. Don't miss it!

Here is an overview of the sessions:

Go to www.sdn.nl/sde to sign up!

It often seems that management believes developers are highly exchangeable. Is an experienced developer leaving the team?

Then just new up a new .NET developer and you're done. This Dilbert episode reminded me of that attitude.

From www.dilbert.com

I just read Daniel's post on 'The Value of Commenting'. Food for thought people

I like to use the following rules of thumb:

a) Code should be self explanatory. This means using well named variables, properties and objects in order to make code as easy to read as possible. It should be obvious from the code what it is that it is trying to do.

b) Code should be easy to read. By easy I mean that you need to be able to scan it pretty fast. Sometimes comments can help make code easier to read by describing what is going on. I find this especially true in if/else constructions where a short comment can guide the reader of the code.

c) If more that one line of code is needed to describe a code block, consider refactoring the code to a private method and put comments on the method. A useful name for the method should help in achieving point (a).

d) Comments should describe why you're trying to do something, but this has limits. Extensive explanations on why the purchase amount of an order should never exceed $10000 should not be in the code. A list of rules should be maintained as part of the documentation and a reference to the rule should be made from the code comments.
Note: I have been known to document a list of rules as an enumerator, where the documentation of the rule is documented as the description of the enumerated value.

Actually (d) is the hardest one. When is it necessary to describe the 'why' of an operation?
The code is readable, the original programmer put it there for a reason. Are the comments there because the presence of the code needs to be justified? No! The 'why' comments are to facilitate (b).

As always, it's easy to spot useless comments, but hard describe a fixed set of rules to describe good comments. Use your brain!

But it is not the same as having a book that sits on your shelve and collects dust.

The Amazon Kindle 2 is here:

Lighter, better display, more storage and longer battery seem to be the improvements in the second generation Kindle.

I want one, but part of buying books and novels is the feel of collecting and adding to my library... I'm not sure I want to miss that feeling. I must be getting old fashioned

More info here.

Microsoft has started a new ad campaign. Why mention it here? I like the ad, that's why.

The year is off to a great start! I got an email this morning informing me I've been awarded the MVP Award 2009. Terrific! 

Quote: The Microsoft MVP Award provides us the unique opportunity to celebrate and honor your significant contributions and say "Thank you for your technical leadership."

Living in the United States it is sometimes easy to forget that some companies are much more America focused than others. Microsoft will offer some of it's betas to the North American region only, but products are usually available worldwide. Windows Azure, as a beta, is offered worldwide.

Amazon EC2 (RTM) has been offered in North America only, but has made the jump across the pond to Europe. In my mailbox today:

"We are excited to announce that we have extended Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to Europe. Developers and businesses can now run their Amazon EC2 instances in the EU to help achieve lower latency, operate closer to other resources like Amazon S3 in the EU, and meet EU data storage requirements when applicable. The new European Region for Amazon EC2 contains two Availability Zones enabling you to easily and cost effectively run fault-tolerant applications with the same scalability, reliability and cost efficiency achieved with Amazon EC2 in the U.S."

Amazon EC2 is the Amazon offering for hosting virtual machines in the Amazon Cloud. Windows Azure is a slightly different, but competing solution from Microsoft.

Note: Interested in Amazon services? Some time ago I wrote Introduction to AWS for C# developers.

Brad Chen from Google just announced a new form of browser technology: Native Client. It will allow you to write C or C++ code which runs, through Native Client, in the browser.

"At its core, our release consists of a runtime, a browser plugin, and a set of GCC-based compilation tools."

With my Microsoft minded way of thinking, I read:

1. a runtime which needs to be installed, like the .NET CLR,
2. a browser plugin, like Silverlight,
3. tools to develop like Visual Studio / Expression Blend.

Sounds to me like Google is a little worried about Silverlight and Flash and wants to play too

Update [9/12/2008]: PC World refers to Native Client as Google ActiveX. It'll be interesting to see how soon the focus will go from computing power to animation power.

I just send the last revision of my chapters for TK 70-561 to the editor. Yeah! Hopefully the book will go to print soon. You can pre-order already on Amazon!

For me the last chapter to work on was LINQ to SQL, but the book includes chapters on learning ADO.NET, Typed DataSets, LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework. You'll need to know it all.

Stephen Forte has an interesting post on the relevance of LINQ to SQL.

The Maine Developer Network is proud to announce that the Northeast MSDN Roadshow by Chris Bowen and Jim O'Neil will once again make it as far north as Augusta!

Don't hesitate: sign up today!

Live Mesh has gone from Tech Preview to official beta status. This also means it has gone world wide!

"Worldwide availability. We’ve removed the limits on what countries are able to sign up to use Live Mesh. We previously had limitations in place so that we could complete our testing with various language and locale settings, and now that work is indeed complete (with the caveat of course that for now the mobile client, as mentioned above, is not actually available worldwide)."

Yesterday I watched Don Gillet's PDC session on building a Mesh Application. It looks very easy.

My main concern with all this data in the cloud is securing my data. I'm thinking I may need to implement some sort of EncryptedDataEntry class which derives from DataEntry. I'll think about it some more...

In the past I looked at the OpenID standard in relation to Cardspace and AOL. Now Microsoft has committed to making Windows Live ID (previously known as Microsoft Passport) support the OpenID initiative.

"Beginning today, Windows Live ID is publicly committing to support the OpenID digital identity framework with the announcement of the public availability of a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Windows Live ID OpenID Provider."

The Live Services page does not mention Cardspace in relation to OpenID, but it stands to reason that as an OpenID provider Microsoft will somehow offer Cardspace support as well, just like www.myopenid.com.

Windows Azure is the name Microsoft has given to the cloud based platform. If you're not at PDC (like me) then go here for more information: http://www.microsoft.com/azure/services.mspx.

"The Azure™ Services Platform (Azure) is an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used individually or together. Azure’s flexible and interoperable platform can be used to build new applications to run from the cloud or enhance existing applications with cloud-based capabilities. Its open architecture gives developers the choice to build web applications, applications running on connected devices, PCs, servers, or hybrid solutions offering the best of online and on-premises."

Looks like my personal point of interest, Live Mesh, is part of this platform:

"Live Services includes Mesh technologies for synchronizing user’s data and extending web applications across multiple devices."

Daylight savings for Europe started today. The United States does not switch to daylight savings until the first Sunday in November (this year: Nov. 2nd 2008). Between now and then the time difference between the States and Europe is one hour less.

At PDC this week Microsoft is announcing a new logo for .NET.

Looks very refreshing!

The SDN Conference 2008 was a great success, thanks to all the speakers and attendees for making it so!

Beth Massi has a great write up on the day after the conference, the traditional Holland Tour: http://blogs.msdn.com/bethmassi/archive/2008/10/14/holland-tour.aspx.

Time to start working on SDN Conference 2009

I just answered an email asking for a referral to a good hosting place, thought I'd blog about my experience with my hosting provider.

I've been running my blog and website with DiscountASP.NET for the last 3 years and never had an incident. They offer ASP.NET 3.5 hosting and usually offer options to test beta versions of ASP.NET or SQL Server as well, which is something I like. They're not the cheapest, but in my opinion, worth the money.

Click the banner to go to their site.

In the spirit of transparency: The link contains a referral code which will generate a kickback for me

The Maine Developer Network is helping out the MSDN Roadshow. Thanks to Shawn we're able to have the MSDN Roadshow come as far north as Augusta, ME. On October 3rd the Developer Evangelists for the New England region: Chris, Bob and Jim will be up (or down) in Augusta to present the latest and greatest .NET technologies. A full day of FREE training, open to everyone!

Sign up here: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032387795&culture=en-US

Topics are:

• Understanding the ADO.NET Entity Framework
• Discovering Dynamic Data
• Exploring Internet Explorer 8
• RoboLunch
• UI, UX, U Confused?
• A RESTed Development
• Befriending Unit Testing

Location:

Riverview Psychiatric Center
250 Arsenal Drive
Sebago Room Augusta Maine 04332-0011
United States

There will be give aways and ofcourse plenty of fun people to meet!

Here is a good reason to always keep improving:

Registration for the SDN Conference 2008 is open. Visit: www.sdc.nl. 

The annual geekfest, the Software Development Network Conference 2008 is being held on the 6th and 7th of October at the Leeuwenhorst in Noordwijkerhout (close to Amsterdam).

The list of speakers and sessions has been published and the Early Bird discount applies until August 16th. So sign up now.

After last years success, three user groups in the Netherlands are again coordinating their efforts to create the 2nd Dutch Code Camp.

Interested in speaking or attending? Sign up here.

Chris Bowen and and a group of volunteers is putting together the TENTH Boston Code Camp. Call for speakers is out right now. So go ahead and volunteer to speak at this great event!

I use a VirtualPC environment for all my software development work, usually using a unique environment for every customer. This eats up the drive space in my laptop pretty darn quick. So after reading about running a VirtualPC image from a USB Flash Drive I decided to give it a try. I purchased a 32GB memory stick and plugged it in.

After a little experimenting I can now confirm it runs the VirtualPC nice and fast. But writing data to the disk and reading at the same time is horrendously slow. So you need to do two things:

a) Make sure the .vmc file is NOT located on the flash drive
b) Enable UndoDisks

These two steps will create a temporary file on your harddisk, in the folder where the .vmc is located. This means that while using the drive you only read from the flash drive, but never write.

When you shut down the VPC you can choose to commit the changes to the flash drive, this may take a little while, so only do it when you have time to wait for it to complete.
I usually choose 'Save State' which allows me to restart the VPC where I left off.

It seems there is some controversy (1) (2) around whether Live Mesh is good or bad. Here is my 2 cents: I've installed Live Mesh Tech Preview about a month ago and am pretty impressed by it so far. It seems to me Microsoft may have found the tool that will unify the desktop (where they make their money) with the cloud (revenue?). Currently there are two features that I use and like:

a) Sync files automatically with all machines in my Live Mesh group of devices
b) If my Live Mesh device is on, then I can use Remote Desktop Connection (or a Live Mesh version thereof) to remotely connect to that device. Even if it is behind a firewall and on a dynamic IP DSL connection. This is great because my machines at the office are connected to the Internet via a dynamic IP connection and now I can just connect to them, by clicking them via the Live Mesh icon in my icon tray.

The sync files feature will be further improved in the future when Peer 2 Peer synchronization will be supported. I suggested this feature on MS Connect, but it was already planned
Here is the response I got:

We plan to include selectable direct Peer to Peer (P2P) as a sync scenario in a later milestone, which is in effect what you have asked for here I believe.
Thank you for this report!
Tim

I use a lot of Virtual PC images. I'm hoping I can use this P2P sync service to create continuous backups (don't know if the bandwidth needed will prove to be a killer).

What is interesting is that files on Live Mesh will sync, even if the user is not signed in. This means that on the client Live Mesh is connected to the cloud without a user logging on. This offers potential for an interesting feature like 'Live Mesh Lockdown'. Suppose my machine is stolen. I could use some other device, go to the Live Mesh Desktop on the web and mark the device as stolen. This could lead to the machine being locked for further use. I have no idea what information is stored on the server with regards to the device. Perhaps this feature could even become part of the next version of Windows. That way if the thief re-installs the machine the server can still recognize the device (based on MAC address?) and still lock the machine.

Anyway, can't wait to see what the developer API for Live Mesh looks like.

The Software Developer Network user group will be hosting it's quarterly event on Monday, June 23. The theme of the event will be Collaboration, but plenty of general topic sessions will be held as well (a total of 30 sessions!).

Go to www.sdn.nl/sde to sign up.

Here is an overview of the sessions:

Heroes Happen in Bangor! The BAND is proud to announce we will be putting on a mini-launch event for Microsoft's Heroes Happen Here launch of the 2008 products.  Come to the event at Kominsky Hall at Husson College in Bangor on Tuesday, May 27 at 6:00 pm.

Greg Howe and Jeff Hall, BAND co-leaders, will be talking about Visual Studio 2008 and how it will impact your development efforts.  There will be two 45-minute talks, one focusing on the web world, and one focusing on the IDE.  You will leave this event knowing how you can benefit from the new products, including Windows Sever 2008 and SQL Server 2008.

More info here.

My blog runs on dasBlog version 2.x and when I started blogging I did all my typing online. Then Office 2007 came along and Word offered the feature of creating a blog entry offline and then upload it to dasBlog using the MovableType API.

This wasn't too great though, since Word markup would end up in the HTML and sometimes the publish process just froze or refused to logon to my web site. Also, uploading pictures was kind of a hack.

Last week I installed Windows Live Writer and this runs as a charm. Definitely a recommendation!

The Maine Developer Network is hosting a Geek Lunch tomorrow at the State of Maine, Harlow Building at 18 Elkins Ave in Augusta.
Chris Bowen will be presenting on LINQ & Language Improvements in C# 3.0/VB 9.
Sign up here.

LINQ (Language Integrated Query) is a unified approach for querying data using coding syntax that remains consistent regardless of the data source. It WILL change the way you work as a developer and architect and this session will help you on your way to using it effectively. To understand how LINQ works, we'll first navigate the new features of C# 3.0 and VB 9.0 that enable LINQ functionality. Then, we'll dive into .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 to explore the various realms of LINQ: Datasets, XML, Database/SQL, in-memory objects, and more. By the end of this session, you'll have a solid understanding of how LINQ works and what it can do for your applications.

The Boston Code Camp 9 is over and done with. It was a great two day event and kudos to Chris, Chris and all the presenters that put their time and effort into making this an excellent happening!

Here are the two presentations from the session that I did:

The Bangor Area .NET Developers are meeting tonight at the Hampton Inn, Bangor (directions).

Converting VB6 Apps to .NET – Eric Burdo

You feel stuck in VB6 land...there is all this .NET stuff people are talking about.  You know you want to get there, but what does it take?  Eric will show you!  Come learn how to make the jump from VB6 to .NET and find out some of the pros and cons to converting your older apps.

Plus there's a random drawing for your own wireless desktop (keyboard and mouse), among other cool door prizes!

If you haven't done so already: Register For This Gig.

Today is a good day for a laugh... I love this one.

Chris just posted the schedule for Boston Code Camp 9!

Go to: http://blogs.msdn.com/cbowen/archive/2008/03/28/code-camp-9-the-schedule.aspx.

See you next week!

The Boston Code Camp 9 "I Came, I Saw, I Coded" will be held on April 5th and 6th at Microsoft New England District: 201 Jones Rd, 6th Floor, Waltham MA USA.

There are over 50 sessions planned (http://www.thedevcommunity.org/Events/PresentationList.aspx?id=6) and I will be presenting on two topics:

Building a State Machine Workflow
Workflow Foundation offers 2 types of workflows, sequential and state machine. This presentation walks through the process of building an application using a State Machine workflow, including state design, state transitions, data exchange services and handling external events.

Building applications with logic
This session presents a view on how datasets and business logic can be organized to build a working application.
Use basic architectural patterns to enable team development and improve maintainability of your sources.

Hope to see you there!

The 22nd of April the Maine Developer Network is organizing a Geek Lunch. We'll be meeting at the State of Maine offices in Augusta to listen to Chris Bowen present on LINQ & Language Improvements in C# 3.0/VB 9.

Pizza will be provided and attendance is free and open for everyone!

More info and RSVP here.

Slowly but surely more website are starting to support CardSpace. I’ve recently blogged about using Cardspace in conjunction with an OpenID from MyOpenID.com to log on to http://dev.aol.com/. Just the other day I discovered that that my hosting provider has started a beta program allowing me to sign on to my website’s control panel using CardSpace. Never one to shy away from a beta program I gave it a swirl.

After logging in to the website using my regular username/password I proceeded to my account page. Here a new button has been added ‘Bind card to account’, after clicking the button the CardSpace cardselector on my Vista machine opened up and I was allowed to select a card. Press OK and all was good. Time for a little test. Log out of the website. Then go back to the logon page and now instead of using my username/password I can use my CardSpace card to logon. And sure enough it worked!

Next came the real test. Since I also have DiscountASP hosting the website for our user group (Maine Developer Network) I tried to logon to this account using my CardSpace card. While doing so I discovered that this did not work. I could not bind the same card to two different accounts. I had to dive in a little deeper, but soon discovered this not to be a limitation of CardSpace, but rather, the website does not support multiple accounts to one card.
The way to solve this would be to implement an account selector which would become available after logging using the CardSpace card. The same would be true if DiscountASP would support OpenID. Then one ID would have to be attached to multiple accounts.

Moral of the story: We’re a long way away from the ‘one ID to rule them all’. There is more to it than replacing your username/password validation with an OpenID or CardSpace control. You will have to reconsider the relationship between user accounts and your customer.

Just a quick reminder to all who haven't RSVP-ed yet: the Maine Developer Network user group meeting this Friday is still on.

The weather forecast for Friday looks good. So hope to see you all there!

Topic
An introduction to Unit Test, Test-Driven Development and Mock Objects As software development projects grow over the course of months and years, it can be increasingly difficult to manage quality and consistency. With the help of Visual Studio 2005, Test-Driven Development (TDD) can be used with very little effort to insure constant, high-quality code is written during the lifetime of your projects. In addition, you'll see how to create and use mock objects to logically separate development efforts on different tiers of your application to prevent blocking issues.

Speaker
Speaker will be Russ Nemhauser.
Russ Nemhauser is a Microsoft ASP.NET MVP and a Microsoft Certified Professional, and has served as an Architect, Developer, Team Leader, and Project Manager over the past several years. His projects have included enterprise applications, online commerce sites, and corporate intranets for Wall Street, Universal Studios, Microsoft, Seagram, and others. Russ actively participates in the development community, speaking at several conferences and user groups each year. He also writes for several technical magazines and industry web sites.

On Friday the 28th of March 2008 the Software Developer Network in the Netherlands will host the 'Expedition 2008' Software Developer Event.

Below is an overview of the sessions. For more information and registration go to: http://www.sdn.nl/Default.aspx?tabid=280

Sessions

Maine is getting another .NET User Group and this one is actually close to where I live,yeah!!!

The B.A.N.D. (Bangor Area .NET Developers) will meet monthly. More info at: http://www.bangordevelopers.com.

Bill's last day...

Hurray! What a great way to start the new year. I got an email this morning informing me I've been awarded the MVP award for the fifth year running.

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2008 Microsoft MVP Award! The MVP Award is our way of saying thank you for promoting the spirit of community and enhancing people’s lives and the industry’s success every day. Your extraordinary efforts in Visual Developer - Visual C# technical communities during the past year are greatly appreciated.

Thanks to Microsoft, and in particular Rafael Munoz, for the award. Excellent!

I just created my first PopFly mashup.

Last month Russ Fustino did a presentation in Portland, ME where he showed a little tool to grab areas of the screen. I looked on his blog, but could not find a link to this particular tool, but a little Googling did the trick.

Screen Grab Pro is a very nice (FREE) tool from Traction Software that allows you to easily grab a region on the screen and save it as a file, or paste it in a Word document.

Update: Windows Vista also offers a build in tool called 'Snipping Tool'. On some machines this tool does not get installed by default, read more on the Snipping Tool here (thanks Marcel!).

Online video services like YouTube and AOL Video may appear to be a global phenomenon, but when you try and view some of the higher quality videos you'll find that the ad-riddled Flash wrappers around the movies contain DRM which implements region encoding. Today I emailed Amazon support because I purchased a couple of episodes of Shark while I was at the airport in the States, waiting for my flight to Amsterdam. All was well, and I downloaded 2 out of 5 episodes, the last three were queued since I had to get on the plane. After reaching the Netherlands I discovered that Amazon Unbox refused to let me download the remaining three episodes since my IP-address is showing that I'm no longer within the US. When is the video industry going to discover that region encoding is a bad idea?!?!

With all the excitement about .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 being release you might almost miss the release of .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1.

It can be downloaded here (x86) and here (x64).

Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1 provides cumulative roll-up updates for customer reported issues found after the release of Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0. In addition, this release provides security improvements, and prerequisite feature support for .NET Framework 3.0 Service Pack 1, and .NET Framework 3.5.

Amazon Unbox is an online video service, allowing you to download videos to your laptop. As a frequent traveller I've started using this service recently and am extremely pleased with the quality of the video, the ease of use and availability of titles. I like to watch series (currently Shark season 2) and this is a great way for me to keep up with what I like to watch, even if I'm on the road. Episodes seem to appear on Unbox within a week, often one day, of airing on TV.

Wikipedia says:

Amazon Unbox is an Internet video on demand service offered by Amazon.com which according to their website is available to "U.S. customers located in the 48 contiguous states, Alaska, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia". The service became available on September 7, 2006 and offers television shows and films for rental and purchase from eight major television and film studios.^[1] Rental pricing for feature length films range from $0.99 to $3.99, while television shows can be purchased for $1.99. Additional discounts are given for full season purchases. Downloaded films includes two versions of videos requested, a full resolution video file and a lower resolution copy for portable devices.

Maybe 70-291 is comparatively easier than 70-296, still, merely studying for 156-215 or 350-001 is not just enough to go for the latter certifications. Just in the way preparation material for 642-552 differs from that of 642-176 and cannot be used to go for a 350-030, same is the scenario in the previous case.

This thing is amazing. Last night I was at a party where one of the people had one of these and the clarity on the screen is great and very comfortable to read. I want one!

With the build in phone service, called WhisperNet, which I'm told runs on the Sprint network, you can download books without going to a store, needing a hotspot or network connection. Now Sprint does not have coverage throughout the States, if you're unlucky and live somewhere without service (like in Lincoln, ME) then you can download books from Amazon and copy them to your Kindle using a USB connection.

Wikipedia says:

Amazon Kindle is an electronic book (e-book) service launched in the United States by Amazon.com in November 2007. It uses an electronic paper display, reads the proprietary Kindle (AZW) format, and downloads content over Amazon Whispernet, which uses the Sprint EVDO network. This means that unlike previously existing e-book readers, the Kindle can be used without the need for a computer. Whispernet is accessible through Kindle without any fee. ^[1] The Kindle sold out in five and a half hours,^[2] although Amazon has not stated how many units were available in the launch offering.

This month Omnext presented their solutions for controlled outsourced development at the Gartner IT Expo 2007 in Cannes.

"The dynamics of today’s world demand a quicker and better reaction from organizations to internal and external developments.
This can be taken care of with, among other things, “Agile” system development.

Furthermore, outsourcing and offshoring have now become a permanent part of IT.
All of this needs to come off in accordance with the diverse regulations in the field of governance, compliance, and control. This relates to, amongst others, Sarbanes Oxley, SAS70, and ISO20000.

These trends are, primarily, in the domain of EDP auditing."

The solutions include products like Source2VALUE to quantify your (existing) software, Source2UML to document existing software and Source2WIKI to create a WIKI based documentation environment for your application. These solutions are all cross platform and work on a multitude of languages like C#, T-SQL, VB.NET, Java, Delphi, Cobol and Powerbuilder.

Omnext teamed with Gartner to produce an excellent whitepaper on governance.

Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite has just become available on MSDN Subscriber Downloads.

Tudor posted a couple of pictures from my visit to Cluj, Romania on his website.

Update: Sorin Dolha also posted some photos from the presentations:


Windows Live Spaces

A Dutch buddy of mine has been running a (fun) website called 'Het Late Nieuws' (the late news). Check it out.

Yesterday I spoke at the iSDC and Ronua Community Workshop. We had a great day and it was a pleasure meeting the people at iSDC, meeting the developers in Cluj and surroundings (some drove over 200km to make it to the meeting) and Petru Jucovschi (the DPE for Microsoft Romania).

Here are the two presentations that I did:

11-09-2007 - Developing Windows Vista gadgets.pptx (431.43 KB)

11-10-2007 - 2008.NET.pptx (252.91 KB)

In the Visual Studio 2008 presentation I also talked about the work I've done for AOL. The AOL developer site can be found at http://dev.aol.com and for more reference material on Vista gadgets you can visit my AOL blog.

Sometimes you just run into something so geeky, yet so cool that you just have to post a link

Andrew Dugdell experimented and found out he can use his iPod to store a VHD file (the file format used by VirtualPC) and run the virtual machine from his iPod. Excellent!!!

Somasegar has told the audience at TechEd 2007 that Visual Studio 2008 is on schedule for RTM before the end of November. Huh? Wasn't the release date set for February 2008? Yes it is. There is a difference between RTM, which means Release To Manufacuring and 'launched' in terms of marketing effort. It used to be that software was not available until the CD/DVD was in your hand. Nowadays RTM means: 'send to DVD factory AND make available for download'. So when VS2008 goes live this month it will be available to MSDN subscribers on via their MSDN Subscription account and it will be available on DVD in February 2008.

Our (=SDN) quarterly event is coming together. The session schedule is complete and registration is open. The topic this time is 'Usability'. Want to learn, share, see, meet and have fun? Sign up now!

Sessions

I just reinstalled Plaxo for Outlook 2007. A great tool which I used to use for Outlook 2003, but initially I had some problems running the integration on Vista with Outlook 2007. A couple of versions down the line these problems appear to be solved and my address book now synchronizes quite smoothly with my Plaxo account. The great thing about Plaxo is that it will automatically update all the contact info of my friends and contacts as soon as they make a change in their info, assuming ofcourse that they also run Plaxo.

To join the social network frenzy there is now also something called 'Plaxo Pulse' a kind of Facebook like way of keeping track what your friends and contacts are doing. It's interesting and since I upgraded to the latest version of Plaxo I seem to automatically be on Pulse. So I'll give it a try and see how it compares to Facebook.

As far as I can tell there is no Pulse API available yet. Although several parts of Plaxo are accessible through the Plaxo developer API. Personally I believe the Open Facebook API to be a great part of Facebooks succes.

Here are some events that I'm involved in, either as speaker, and/or as (co)organizer:

• iSDC Master Class (by iSDC & RONUA), 10-nov-2007, Cluj, Romania.
• VO/Vulcan & FoxPro Software Development Event (by SDN), 12-nov-2007, Ede, The Netherlands.
• MDN Usergroup meeting (by the Maine Developer Network), 29-nov-2007, Waterville, ME, USA.
• December Software Development Event (by SDN), 14-dec-2007, Ede, The Netherlands.

After taking a look at becoming an Amazon.com affiliate last week, I decided to place some Google Ads on my blog page as well.

Steps to take:

1. Sign up to Google AdSense.
2. Confirm account.
3. Use the Google site to create a banner appropriate for this blog, then copy and paste the JavaScript code into my site. For DasBlog I modified the 'homeTemplate.blogtemplate' file of the theme that I use for this blog.

It's pretty interesting, the first two or three hits on my site generated pretty random ads, but now they all seem to be IT related. Nifty!

Hurray, I just upgraded this blog to version 2.0.7226.0 of DasBlog. Pretty painless install. The 'dasBlogUpgrader' program worked smoothly

The Amazon associate program also offers to provide links to specific product. Ofcourse I can't help but put up a link to my book

The way it all works is pretty clever. Using the Amazon tools I search and select a product, then have them generate a little bit of HTML. The HTML is actually an iframe which displays content generated by Amazon. Cool!

Today I've signed up for theAmazon.com associates program. I'm trying to learn more about making money on the web and trying to see what vaious parties have to offer. Part of the program that Amazon offers includes being able to place a cloud of tags on your webpage. The tags in the cloud automatically relate to the content on this blog.

Making money through advertising is considered an important revenue model for 'the Web 2.0'. I guess I belong now

Shop at Amazon.com!

I was under the impression that VS2008 would allow you to develop .NET 2.0 applications. This is true, but with one footnote: .NET 2.0 SP1 is supported (from Brock Allen).

Exciting! I've been invited by iSDC to do a presentation for RONUA, the ROmanian .NET User Association.

So I'll be in Romania in November. Land of Dracula?!?! 

Microsoft has created a very cool experimental interface for searching the web, implementing a Silverlight based userinterface on top of Live Search.

Testdrive it at: http://www.tafiti.com

Just 26 days to go until the Software Developer Conference 2007.

Have you signed up yet?

We're proud to have an excellent lineup of speakers.
The current list of speakers:

More info: http://www.sdc.nl/

I just installed two new Vista sidebar gadgets:

Visual Studio 2008 Global Launch Wave - this gadget counts down to the launch of VS2008.

SDC 2007 - this gadget counts down to the start of the annual software conference organized by the SDN.

Chris Bowen blogs about the registration of Code Camp 8 being open! A great event for the New England and Maine developers!

Code Camp 8: Rise of the Silverlight Surfer will be held at the Microsoft offices in Waltham, MA on the weekend of September 29th and 30th.  Registration at 8:30 AM, sessions start at 9:00.  As always, it's a completely free event (and you'll probably walk away with some swag as well.)

More excellent news: Omnext will be present as a sponsor at the Gartner ITxpo 2007 in Cannes.
This ITxpo 2007 is designed to help IT and business executives exploit technology to better their business.

Read more: http://www.omnext.net/bedrijf/news/content/gartner_symposium_itxpo_c/index.xml

Excellent news: Omnext will be present as a sponsor on the 24th and 25th of September at the Gartner Financial Services Technology Summit 2007. Read more: http://www.omnext.net/bedrijf/news/content/gartner_financial_service/index.xml

My cousin Rodie Blomsma has started his own company, specializing in Software Testing.

Go to: www.blomsmasoftwaretesting.nl

Portland, ME: Thursday August 9th 2007 at 6:00pm.
Chris Bowen will be presenting on Visual Studio 2008.
More info.

Visual Studio 2008 beta 2 has just become available for download.

Go to: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa700831.aspx

This is a question I've been getting quite a bit lately. People have heard about it, but don't quite know what it is.

www.silverlight.net says it is:
Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows.

So what does it boil down to?

Microsoft Silverlight is something you install in your browser which allows you to view Silverlight content.

Silverlight content can be closely compared with Adobe Flash: rich design, animations, a statefull application that runs in the browser.

Silverlight is supposed to have better capabilities in integrating streaming video within your Silverlight application/website than Flash, but not having much experience with delivering video I can't tell from personal experience.

Silverlight content can be written using JavaScript or one of the many .NET languages.

Note 1: As of right now the plug-ins and tools for writing Silverlight content are still in beta.
Note 2: Silverlight was developed as WPF/E, which stands for Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere.
Note 3: Silverlight content can be viewed on Microsoft and Mac platforms. Novell has pledged a browser control based on Mono called Moonlight. This will bring Silverlight to the Linux platforms also.

Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals Service Release 1 has been released. This is must have tool for people that develop using Visual Studio Team System!

Go to: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9810808c-9248-41a5-bdc1-d8210a06ed87&displaylang=en

Microsoft just keeps 'em coming. Expected release date for Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 is now February 27th, 2008.

Read more: http://entmag.com/news/article.asp?EditorialsID=8800

I reinstalled a tool today which I used years ago and was impressed by how, and how easy, it worked in the current version: Fiddler HTTP Debugging Proxy.

The tool allows you to analyse all requests and responses from your browser. Works great and very usefull for AJAX debugging.

More on: http://www.fiddlertool.com

Rocky has an interesting post responding to something Martin wrote about.

I'm afraid I do have to agree with Martin a little.

I've run a huge usergroup for the last couple of years (2500+ developers, www.sdn.nl) with members from all corners of development world and the enthousiasm displayed by a Delphi or FoxPro developer is much larger than a .NET developer. Don't get me wrong, there are people out there who are very enthousiastic about all Microsoft technologies, I'm one of them, but if I'd have to throw a ball park number out there, then I'd say that 50% of the Delphi programmers are active in communities whereas only 5% of the Microsoft developers do more than 'just show up for work'.

I always like to say that in any profession you have workers and you have craftsmen. Workers come in for the paycheck. Craftsmen take pride in their work, love it and go the extra mile. The Microsoft arena perhaps has ratio wise a larger % of workers. Why? Anyones guess. Perhaps the whole certification processes and quality of tooling make it easier to be a worker in Microsoft land then in other products..

Anyway, that's my 2 cents.

I just discovered that my uncle, Evert Blomsma, has put up a brand new website for his company: PetroNomics.

I've been doing some technical writing for Amazon Web Services, so now I'm trying to keep an eye on what's going on at their shop.

They've just announced a price cut got their Amazon S3 service.

Read more on: http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261

I ran across this on Bink.nu. It's amazing! I want one!!!

Go to: http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

Somasegar just announced a new tool which will allow non-software developers to develop… something. Being interested I surfed over to www.popfly.com but it would seem the site is not quite up and running.

At the MVP 2007 Summit Microsoft opened the Summit with a video containing pictures of lots of MVP's. Nice! Anyway, I just discovered the video is on YouTube. See below.

Only 3 days to go until the first Code-Camp in the Netherlands.

I won't be in the Netherlands this weekend, so I'll have to miss out on the fun, but Maurice de Beijer will take good care of everyone.

More info: http://www.code-camp.nl/

Mark your calendar: next meeting of the Maine Developer Network will be on the 12th of June.

Bob and Chris head back out on the New England roads.

The Bob & Chris MSDN Roadshow hits Portland on May 15th.

Go to:  http://blogs.msdn.com/cbowen/archive/2007/04/27/bob-chris-msdn-roadshow-back-for-more.aspx

My Amazon <-> WF integration article is now listed as a download on the official .NET 3.0 web site. Cool!

Go to: http://wf.netfx3.com/files/folders/web_services/default.aspx

The weather just won’t give us a break. Due to snow and sleet being forecasted for tomorrow afternoon and evening we will once again have to move our meeting back.

I’m very sorry about any inconvenience this may cause to your personal schedules, but I’d feel worse if someone got into an accident while driving to or from the meeting.

To allow everyone to pencil in the meeting in their calendars the meeting is now moved to April 26^th!!!

Please send an email if you plan to attend!!!

Once again we hope everyone will be able to make it, and maybe even some people that couldn’t make it today will be able to attend next week.

The newsletter on the website has a complete description on how to get the meeting.

Just to remind you the complete session info:

Date : Thursday the 26th of April 2007.
Time : 1:30pm to 3:30pm
Location : Augusta, ME (The Deering Building on Route 9 / Hospital Street)
Topic : Developing with Windows Communication Foundation

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is Microsoft's unified framework for building secure, reliable, transacted, and interoperable distributed applications. Learn how to leverage the new features in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) to make a smooth transition to service-orientated development.  The capabilities exposed through this new addition to the .NET Framework will enable the core building blocks of connected systems such as data & service contracts, security, reliability, administration, and management.

Chris Bowen is the Microsoft Developer Evangalist for the New England region.

Please use the form on the contact page to let us know you'll be attending!

I guess some days are better than others... the Maine Developer Network user group meeting was cancelled due to severe weather warnings. I did however intend to go and pick my parents up at the airport in Bangor. Bad idea...

The picture below shows my truck in a ditch on the side of the road. One second I was motoring along... next second I had zero control over the truck, it just started sliding... no brakes, no steering, no ABS... nothing... luckily no one was injured and my truck only has a couple of dents...

Here is a short overview of what has been happening with .NET and what is soon to come:

- Windows Vista has shipped and comes with the .NET Framework 3.0 installed.

- .NET 3.0 = .NET 2.0 + WF + WCF + WPF

- WCF = Windows Communication Foundation

- WF = Workflow Foundation

- WPF = Windows Presentation Foundation

- .NET 3.0 does not contain changes to C# (or VB.NET) and is based on C# 2.0.

- The next version of Visual Studio, codename "Orcas" is targeted to be released in Q4 of this year.

- Visual Studio "Orcas" will come together with .NET Framework 3.5.

- The .NET Framework 3.5 will contain (amongst many things) C# 3.0.

- In the same timeframe as Orcas there will also be a release of Team Foundation Server and the whole Team System suite.

I've implemented an RSS feed for the Maine Developer Network.

Go to www.maine-devnet.org and look for the subscribe image on the left side of the page.

See you at our meeting this Thursday (don't forget to sign-up).

Over a 100 people have registered already. Great!

We only have room for 130, so sign up quick!

Go to: www.code-camp.nl. 

The very first Dutch Code Camp will be organised by a confederation of user groups. I love it when people come together to organize something great! Maurice de Beijer has taken the lead to get things started but with three user groups coming together it should be an excellent event!

Go to: http://www.code-camp.nl/

I found the following on Frans Bouma's blog, and I agree: recommended reading!

Jeroen van den Bos started a very interesting series of articles about software maintenance and software maintainability, what it does with your architecture, how to evolve implemented systems to contain new functionality etc. etc. Below the links to the articles which are currently online, more will follow soon. Highly recommended.

• How maintainable is your code?
• Evolution depends on architecture
• You can't measure architecture
• How does this work? Let's see the requirements
• Software maintenance estimation considerations

Here are the powerpoint and demo code from my session about developing for Windows Vista using .NET 3.0 at the Maine Developer Network user group meeting on the 27th of February 2007 in Augusta, ME.

WorkflowConsoleApplication1.zip (35.87 KB)

HelloWorldGadget.zip (14.31 KB)

02-27-2007_MDN_-_Developing_for_Vista_with_.NET_3.0.zip (417.06 KB)

[Updated: Fixed download link for powerpoint]

Individuals who have been in web development for quite some time, are now slowly converting to internet advertising. Working with tools for web design gives them an added benefit of course. They already have background knowledge on dedicated hosting. All they need is a cheap web hosting service and they can actually start an seo consultancy of their own. Usually pay per click and adsense does not agree with these people. More creative strategies like email marketing appeals to them.

Here are the powerpoint and demo code from my session about implementing application logic in .NET 2.0 at the Maine Developer Network meeting on the 27th of February 2007 in Augusta, ME.

UserManagement.zip (2.1 MB)

02-27-2007_MDN_-_Implementing_application_logic_in_.NET_2.0.zip (1.14 MB)

[Updated: Fixed download link for powerpoint]

SQL Server 2005 SP2 is available for download via MSDN subscriptions.

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 (SP2) enables all editions of SQL Server 2005 to take advantage of the enhancements within Windows Vista and the 2007 Office System including SQL Server Analysis Services and Reporting Services improvements for Office 2007; increased interoperability; and enhanced manageability and data compression.

VirtualPC 2007 is out of beta and available for download.

Use Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 to run multiple operating systems at the same time on the same physical computer. Switch between virtual machines with the click of a button. Use virtual machines to run legacy applications, provide support, train users, and enhance quality assurance.

Virtual PC lets you create separate virtual machines on your Windows desktop, each of which virtualizes the hardware of a complete physical computer. Use virtual machines to run operating systems such as MS-DOS, Windows, and OS/2. You can run multiple operating systems at once on a single physical computer and switch between them as easily as switching applications—instantly, with a mouse click. Virtual PC is perfect for any scenario in which you need to support multiple operating systems, whether you use it for tech support, legacy application support, training, or just for consolidating physical computers.

Go to: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=04D26402-3199-48A3-AFA2-2DC0B40A73B6&displaylang=en#filelist

The SDN is holding its quarterly event on the 23rd of March in Bunnik, the Netherlands.

The session schedule is almost complete and looks once again to be very promising. Check it out below:

Sign up here.

C# sessies

• Enterprise E-Commerce met Commerce Server 2007 - Mark Willems
• Domain Driven Programming a Lego Mindstorms Robot - Edwin van Dillen
• Sharepoint solutions voor informatiewerkers - Frans Coenders
• Customizing Visual Studio Team System - René van Osnabrugge

Delphi sessies

• The Document Management Project - Olaf Monien (D)
• Introduction to IntraWeb 9.0 - Olaf Monien (D)
• Programming OpenOffice.org with Delphi - Bernard Marcelly (F)
• CodeGear & Delphi roadmap; office in Delphi for Win32 - Pawel Glowacki & Jeroen W. Pluimers

Chris Bowen (Microsoft Developer Evangalist for New England) and Bob Familiar will be touring New England with a roadshow about development on the .NET 3.0.

Roadshow Schedule and Registration

At the event in Portland, ME yesterday they showed a funny video of the WE-SYP program. A quick search on Google revealed that someone has uploaded this video to YouTube.

I spend the day in Portland, ME yesterday, helping out with the Microsoft Across America Launch Tour 2007. The event where Microsoft presents Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007 across America.

Russ Fustino (http://www.russtoolshed.net/) invited me on the stage twice and allowed me to promote the Maine Developer Network (www.maine-devnet.org), our Augusta, ME based user group. Quite a few people in the crowd came from the Augusta area and did not know about our group, so that was great!

I also did a quick demo of Workflow Foundation. Without preparing it was a little haphazard, but people seemed to be okay with that. A great crowd! Come to my presentation on the 27th of February to see a better prepared session which will include WF demo's.

Microsoft is releasing a patch for Windows to update the behaviour of automatic daylight savings adjustments. This is necessary because DST dates in the United States will start three weeks earlier (2:00 A.M. on the second Sunday in March) and will end one week later (2:00 A.M. on the first Sunday in November).

The .NET Framework uses the operating system to determine current date. So as long as you apply the Windows patch, your .NET application will automatically use the new DST rules.

Read more information in the Microsoft knowledge base: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/bb264729.aspx

My article on integrating Amazon Mechanical Turk into Windows Workflow Foundation has been placed on the Amazon web services developer connection.

Read it here: http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?entryID=635&ref=featured

Good news for all those that own the original iPhone (the one made by Linksys).

There is a Windows Vista driver available at:

http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satellite?c=L_Download_C2&childpagename=US%2FLayout&cid=1115417109934&packedargs=sku%3D1127783455701&pagename=Linksys%2FCommon%2FVisitorWrapper

I just ran across this little bit of humor in the Skype billing site.

I went to my bill for March (it is February now), I guess I cannot call into the future 'yet'!!!

In Windows Vista the Add/Remove Windows Components screen in Windows XP has been replaced with the Windows Features list.

Some of these option definately require a little more explaining than the tooltip info provided.

Luckily someone has figured out what every option means and posted quite a comprehensive guide on bleepingcomputer.com.

Go to: http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial134.html

I finally updated my website some. I now use the RssToolkit from Dmitry Robsman to display my latest blog posts on the front page of my business website (www.develop-one.com).

The RssToolkit allows you to define an RssDataSource using drag-and-drop, just enter the url of the feed and create a gridview which binds against the RssDataSource. It's great!

The code has been updated since last year, but it runs like a charm!

Go to: http://blogs.msdn.com/dmitryr/archive/2006/03/26/561200.aspx

Update:
The project has been moved from Dmitry's blog to CodePlex. Go to: http://www.codeplex.com/ASPNETRSSToolkit.

My hosting provider send me an email today informing me that ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 is now available to all DiscountASP.NET customers. I guess I'll have to put some AJAX in my site, just because I can

The message did contain an interesting warning though:

Microsoft officially released ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 and we have installed AJAX 1.0 in the webserver GAC.
(More Info | KB Q10460)

Note: Microsoft has yanked out some features from the AJAX RTM and used the same version number for both v1.0 and the RTM. If you built apps with the RTM, they may not be backward compatible.

ASP.NET AJAX v1.0 is available for download!

Go to: http://ajax.asp.net/default.aspx?tabid=47

About ASP.NET AJAX:

"ASP.NET AJAX is a free framework for quickly creating a new generation of more efficient, more interactive and highly-personalized Web experiences that work across all the most popular browsers.

With ASP.NET AJAX, you can:

• Create next-generation interfaces with reusable AJAX components.
• Enhance existing Web pages using powerful AJAX controls with support for all modern browsers.
• Continue using Visual Studio 2005 to take your ASP.NET 2.0 sites to the next level.
• Access remote services and data directly from the browser without writing a ton of complicated script.
• Enjoy the benefits of a free framework with 24x7 technical support provided by Microsoft."

Mark Gibbs has a cool column on Network World where he compares a quote by George Lucas with developing software.

George Lucas has been quoted as saying that "A movie is never finished, only abandoned."

Software is never finished, it is release when deemed usable and new versions appear as features get added and bugs get fixed.

George is, as far as I know, one of the first directors to release new and improved versions of Star Wars, adding scenes as if he was adding features.

I'll be working the Ask the Expert booth at the Windows Vista lauch event in Portland, ME. Hope to see you there!

Yesterday I reinstalled my new laptop with Vista x64. I figured since the Centrino Duo processor is 64bit I should at least run a 64bit operating system.

Ofcourse I forgot to backup my email and my last backup was a couple of days old. Hope I didn't loose anything too important, anyway. A bunch of stuff doesn't run on 64bit.

For instance the driver for my Linksys iPhone doesn't work, luckily my laptop has build in speaker and microphone, nevertheless I logged a support mail at Linksys, let's see what happens.

Microsoft Office 2007 runs like a charm on 64bit. Cool!

Next I discovered that I need a 64bit version of VirtualPC. No problem, just downloaded the VirtualPC 2007 x64 beta and installed it. My heart started beating a little faster when I remembered I had at least one virtual machine in saved state mode. Guess what? No problem! Just added the existing Virtual Machine, it recognized my save state and booted like a charm!

Windows Live Toolbar has some issues in 64bit. It seems that some of the toolbar buttons, most importantly the 'MSN Weather' button does not install :-(  Luckily my Windows Live Favorites is working though!

Plaxo (www.plaxo.com) runs fine on Outlook 2007 so that's great too.

My NVidia driver is working, but the fancy desktop management stuff doesn't install :-(

All in all I'm pretty pleased with how things are running.

The Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007 Launch Event in Maine will be held on the 13th of February 2007 in Portland, ME.

Location:

Portland Marriott at Sable Oaks
200 Sable Oaks Drive
South Portland Maine 04106
United States

There will be Developer, IT Pro and manager sessions!

Sign up: http://www.microsoft.com/business/launch2007/signup/default.mspx

Our usergroup (the SDN) uses a sharepoint site to communicate amongst the guys organizing the events. Great tool. Internet Explorer however kept asking me to re-enter my password. The solution appears to be to add the site your list of Intranet sites.

Below a screenshot of how to do that:

Next make sure that you've enabled automatic logon in the security settings of your Local Intranet Zone (this is default).

My new laptop arrived this weekend, after removing the usual junk I sat down and installed Windows Vista, Office 2007 and VirtualPC 2007 (RC). I have to say it's running like a charm!

Laptop specs: Latitude D820, Intel Core 2 Duo T7200, 2.00GHz, 667Mhz 4M L2 Cache, Dual Core, 15.4 inch Wide Screen WUXGA LCD (1920x1200), 4.0GB of memory, 512MB NVIDIA Quadro NVS 120M TurboCache, 100GB Hard Drive 9.5MM 7200RPM.

With a docking station I have my 20inch regular screen to run Vista in dual screen mode. Excellent

I've submitted another suggestion on the VS2005 feedback site:

Improve the documentation feature of Visual Studio.

Right now in ASP.NET you can switch between 2 views: design and code.

Similarly I would like to be able, for a *.cs file to switch between code and documentation.

This would improve the usefulness of the documentation, by making the documentation more visible the quality go up, because developers will put more effort into it.

Again, feel free to vote for this feature if you think it is a good idea: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=251027

Sadly it does not appear to be possible to define a custom AutoFormat scheme for Visual Studio. I'd love to be able to implement a customers presentation guide line as a scheme so when I add a new table to a page I can just select AutoFormat and choose 'Develop-One Corporate color'

I've submitted this as a suggestion on the Microsoft feedback site. Feel free to vote for it: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=250988

The day started off great! Just received an email informing me I've been awarded the MVP Award 2007.

Thanks to my MVP contact person Gerard Verbrugge and the whole MVP team at Microsoft!!!!

Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Service Pack 1 is now available as a download from MSDN.

Go to: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=BB4A75AB-E2D4-4C96-B39D-37BAF6B5B1DC&mg_id=10055&displaylang=en

Service Pack 1 also provides over 70 improvements for common development scenarios including:

• New processor support (e.g., Core Duo) for code generation and profiling
• Performance and scale improvements in Team Foundation Server
• Team Foundation Server integration with Excel 2007 and Project 2007
• Tool support for occasionally connected devices and SQL Server Compact Edition
• Additional support for project file based Web applications
• Windows Embedded 6.0 platform and tools support

The complete release notes can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/928957/.

As it turns out, it's pretty unclear what has been fixed in this service pack. The 'What's New in Visual Studio 2005 SP1' page doesn't provide any information. Back in September Somasegar promised to provide a list of fixes, but in his post about the release of SP1 he makes no mention of what has been fixed.

Update: a list of fixes in Visual Studio 2005 SP1 can be found at: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918526/en-us

A friend of mine in India had some problems with calling a Java web service from .NET 2.0 using web references generated using Visual Studio 2005. Some serialization error occured, but the message was very much useless.

I recommended using WSCF to them and as it turns out the WSCF gave a much more detailed message pinpointing the error to a namespace issue on the Java side.

WSCF is a tool created by Thinktecture supporting the Web Service Contract First approach to developing web services.

I guess not all search engines have to have a boring interface: http://www.msdewey.com/

Microsoft has released version 1.0 of Microsoft Robotics Studio.

The Microsoft Robotics Studio delivers in three areas of software:

1. A scalable, extensible runtime architecture that can span a wide variety of hardware and devices. The programming interface can be used to create applications to drive robots using 8-bit or 16-bit processors (from a connected PC) as well as 32-bit systems with multi-core processors; and devices from simple touch sensors to laser distance finding devices.
2. A set of useful tools that make programming and debugging robot applications scenarios easier. These include a high resolution visual simulation environment that integrates software physics supplied by the Ageia Technologies PhysX engine.
   While Microsoft Robotics Studio can be used with programming languages such as those included in Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft Visual Studio Express, also included is a new visual programming language that enables the creation of applications using a simple drag-and-drop interface.
3. A set of useful technology libraries services to help developers get started with writing robot applications, and tutorials which illustrate the basics of how to get started in a variety of programming languages.

Read more: http://msdn.microsoft.com/robotics/getstarted/v1_0/default.aspx

With Microsoft Robotics Studio, robotics applications can be developed using a selection of programming languages, including those in Microsoft Visual Studio^® and Microsoft Visual Studio Express languages (Visual C#^® and Visual Basic^®), which are free to download, as well as Microsoft IronPython. Third-party languages that support the Microsoft Robotics Studio services-based architecture are also supported.

Ofcourse the most interesting part to me is the fact that it can all be done with C#, the language and tool I love most

IE Patches
Microsoft today also issued a cumulative patch that addresses at least four serious vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer versions 5.01 and 6. The vulnerabilities -- which are susceptible to memory corruption and information disclosure exploits -- affect IE's script handling, DHTML scripting and Temporary Internet File features. At least two of them, a Script Error Handling Memory Corruption Error and a DHTML Script Function Memory Corruption Error, could allow attackers to execute code on -- and gain control over -- vulnerable systems.

All Windows versions running Internet Explorer 5.01 or 6.0 are affected by the vulnerability. Internet Explorer 7.0 is not affected, Microsoft said.

Nice to see that a newer version of IE finally delivers better security, from this article I gather that IE6 was not much of an improvement over IE5.01 which I think was released in 1998!?

Just wanted to congratulate my buddy Marcel Meijer on becoming C# Groupleader within the SDN.

Congratulations dude!!!

I had some problems with my blog crashing my application pool. Last night I upgraded from Das Blog 1.8 to version 1.9.6264.0.

It was still up and running this morning so let's hope it helped.

Microsoft MSDN has published a white paper on software factories written by my friend Marcel de Vries. He worked together with Jack Greenfield, pretty cool!

This white paper discusses how software factories and Microsoft Visual Studio Team System can be used together to improve quality, predictability, and productivity. Using Visual Studio Team System data-warehouse and reporting capabilities, the software-factory builder can reliably determine which aspects of product development need improvement and how to modify the software factory to improve them.

This white paper concludes that greater quality, predictability, and productivity can be achieved with a software-factory approach, rather than with traditional one-off development. The concepts and working methods are targeted at an audience of systems integrators and enterprise customers who develop custom software.

Read the paper at: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa925157.aspx

The session schedule for the next SDN meeting, on the 11th of december is available (www.sdn.nl). We have a great line up!

Overzicht sprekers en sessies