Tech Ed Europe has been moved back to the 6th of November and will be held in Barcelona instead of Amsterdam.

Great! Barcelona is a great place to visit.

I've been wondering whether the following would be possibe:

In .NET 1.1 create a class library with form A.
Compile and copy the assembly to a .NET 2.0 machine.
In .NET 2.0 create a form B that inherits from form A.
Run form A in .NET 2.0.

This works, no problems.

In .NET 1.1 create a winapp with form A which has a button that triggers the following code:

object temp = Activator.CreateObjectFrom( "Test.dll", "Test.FormB" ).Unwrap();
Form f = (Form) temp;
f.Show();

Compile and copy the assembly to a .NET 2.0 machine.
In .NET 2.0 create a class library with form B.
Compile the assembly.
Start the winapp, click the button, et voila, the .NET 1.1 assembly will start the .NET 2.0 form.

Also works without problems

Just giving all this a try has taken away quite a bit of doubt about whether this would work or not and means that in a GUI .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0 work together quite nicely.

My friend Arie Leeuwensteijn at Microsoft organizes the Dutch Developer Days. He's got the schedule all done and it looks pretty impressive. It's a two day event and it looks like it'll be big, because it is in the RAI in Amsterdam. This is the same location where TechEd Europe will be held this year.

View the schedule at: http://www.microsoft.com/netherlands/msdn/devdays/default.aspx

Arie has a blog too, have a look: http://blogs.microsoft.nl/blog_arie_leeuwesteijn/

Microsoft has released the January CTP of WinFX which includes a Go-Live license for WCF and WinWF. This release has no changes for WPF and a Go-Live license is not included for that technology. Download includes WinFX Runtime Components, WinFX SDK, Visual Studio Extensions for Workflow, and Visual Studio "Orcas" CTP Development tools for WinFX.

Info about this stuff on MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/winfx/getthebeta/golive/default.aspx

Or go straight to the download on MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getthebeta/default.aspx

Follow this link to view the recent episode of MSDN TV where they discuss LINQ for VB.NET.

Overview
Visual Basic 9.0 will offer radical improvements in its ability to work with data in all its forms: as objects, as XML, and as relational data. Paul Vick and Amanda Silver discuss the latest Customer Tech Preview of the next version of Visual Basic to hit the Web. It includes support for DLinq (language integrated query over relational data) and expanded editor support for query statements and integrated XML.

Just came across a deadlink on www.theserverside.net refering to a post by Kevin Jones about Embedded Resources in ASP.NET. Couldn't find the item on Kevin's blog, but a Google search brought me to http://haacked.com/archive/2005/04/29/2879.aspx which explains it pretty well.

Embedding Javascript in your assembly resource seems a great way to avoid deployment issues.

Just a couple of links to stuff that's in beta right now:

WinFX, XAML and SDK
ASP.NET ATLAS
C# and LINQ
VB.NET and LINQ

I'm finally catching up on some reading that I've been meaning to do.

Right now I'm reading 'Programming Windows Presentation Foundation' by Chris Sells & Ian Griffiths. Good read and I hope to finish it on my next flight

Also spend some time this morning reading an article by Ted Neward on MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dndotnet/html/linqcomparisons.asp) which gives food for thought on LINQ and the whole OR-mapping issue.

I just received a mail from my friend Lucas pointing out that some products are getting close to the end of the Microsoft Support Lifecycle.

The mainstream support for the 2000 editions of several products is ending in the near future, as detailed in the following table (for more information on Support Lifecycle, visit www.microsoft.com/lifecycle).

With generic in C# 2.0 life just become so much easier. Today I was impressed by the ease with which you can now sort a list of T.

Code below shows how with one method you can now implement a sort. This used to be much more complex!

public class Person
{
    public Person(string name)
    {
        this.Name = name;
    }

    public string Name;
}

class Demo
{
    public List GetAllPersons()
    {
        List result = new List();
        result.Add(new Person("Mark"));
        result.Add(new Person("Dennis"));
        result.Add(new Person("Duncan"));
        result.Add(new Person("Jeremy"));
        result.Sort(SortByName);
        return result;
    }

    public static int SortByName( Person x, Person y )
    {
        return x.Name.CompareTo(y.Name);
    }
}

I was reading my way through the Internet and came across some interesting stuff about Smart Client Architecture. It seems that the definition of a Smart Client is not so clear. On the Microsoft site it says:

Smart client (n) Definition: Smart clients are easily deployed and managed client applications that provide an adaptive, responsive and rich interactive experience by leveraging local resources and intelligently connecting to distributed data sources.

But then it shows the following picture:

As you can see there are two features that are unique to a Smart Client:
a) Online/Offline support
b) Device Adaptability
Without these features a Smart Client is really nothing more than either a Thick or Thin Client.

Personally I feel that from an architectural point of view offline/online support is much more important than device adaptability. Therefore I think that the definition for a Smart Client should read:

Smart client (n) Definition: Smart clients are easily deployed and managed client applications that provide an adaptive, responsive and rich interactive experience in both an online and offline scenario, by leveraging local resources and intelligently connecting to distributed data sources.

More interesting reading on: The ServerSide.NET and Clemens Vaster's Blog.

I always wondered how some sites managed to get their little logo in my list of Favourites. Turns out it is really quite easy, just add a favicon.ico file to the root of your website. Internet Explorer will pick it up automagically.

If you happen to have a different browser you can try:

<link rel="icon" href="favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon">
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon">

Found it on Matthias Benkmann's website: http://www.winterdrache.de/freeware/png2ico/favicon.html

I've recently moved to the United States. To Lincoln, Maine to be exact. I've started a new company called Develop-One and with the start of a new company I think it also time for a new blog. I'll still run my old blog as a more personal account of my life in Maine, but anything to do with .NET, C#, Windows Vista, LINQ, WWF, WCF, WPF and every other technology that keeps me occupied in my life as a developer I will post about on this weblog.

Happy reading.

- Mark