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2/28/2008
Near the end of ‘07, a couple of developers got stung by the software factory bug and wanted to actively participate in the community. So we joined forces with some of our colleagues from Professional Services at Compuware Belgium to start a focus group about Software Factories. We’ve managed to gather an enthusiastic team of people with GAT/GAX, DDD and DSL tools experience.
Visit them here: http://intofactories.net/
2/23/2008
Walkthrough of the Web Service Software Factory
Kurt Claeys shows you how to use the Web Service Software Factory in Visual Studio during this 9 minute video. No slides, only a running demo. The Web Service Software Factory (also known as the Service Factory) is an integrated collection of tools, patterns, source code and prescriptive guidance. It is designed to help you quickly and consistently construct WCF and ASMX Web services that adhere to well known architecture and design patterns.
Direct link to video: Walkthrough of the Web Service Software Factory
Silverlight: Downloader and CreateFromXaml
Silverlight is a client-side technology that runs entirely in the browser. Getting content to the client-side as smoothly as possible really improves the user experience. Gill Cleeren created this Chopsticks video as introduction to the 2 main methods that can help you in this process: CreateFromXaml and the Downloader object. In the demo’s, he’ll be using them together to get files synchronously or asynchronously to the browser and dynamically invoke the contents of these files.
Direct link to video: Silverlight- Downloader and CreateFromXaml
Creating a Windows Vista Sidebar gadget using Silverlight 1.0
See how you can create a Windows Vista Sidebar gadget using Silverlight 1.0 applications. During this 25 minute Chopsticks video, Sven Van Oirbeek explains how to create a Silverlight 1.0 application that plays streaming radio over the internet and shows how you can add it to the Windows Sidebar in Windows Vista.
Direct link to video: Creating a Windows Vista Sidebar gadget using Silverlight 1.0
We know it's been mighty quiet on the SkyDrive blog, but we’ve been hard at work on a new version that we’re proud to announce today!
You've made two things clear since our first release: You want more space; and you want SkyDrive where you are. Today we're giving you both. You now have five times the space you had before — that’s 5GB of free online storage for your favorite documents, pictures, and other files. 
SkyDrive is also available now in 38 countries/regions. In addition to Great Britain, India, and the U.S., we’re live in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Finland, France, Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Turkey. 
This release also includes bug fixes and improvements to make the site even faster and more reliable. We’re proud of this release — so proud, in fact, that we’re officially removing the Beta tag! Check out the new version and let us know what you think. We hope you enjoy it! — The SkyDrive team 2/9/2008
From the Windows Vista Team blog:
Service Pack 1 is a very important milestone because it addresses many of the key issues that our customers have identified with Windows Vista over the last year both, directly and through programs like the Customer Experience Improvement Program. With Service Pack 1, we have made great progress in performance, reliability and compatibility. One of the great things about my job is that I get to play with the latest builds of our products -- I've personally been running Windows Vista SP1 pretty exclusively for a few months and I've noticed that my systems run faster and more reliably than they did with the "Gold" release of Windows Vista. To read the full post, click here. 2/3/2008
The XNA Belgian User Group organizes the February 2008 XNA Contest
This contest is open for developers and designers, working on XNA Games. The development and demo can be done on a PC platform or XBOX 360.
The participants can form teams of 2 people working together. Participants have to be 16 years old at the days of the finals, but not older than 36 years (born between February 23, 1972 and February 23, 1992) AND live in Belgium. The contest is based on a ’starter kit’, consisting of a ‘nearly finished’ game, build on top of XNA. The purpose of the contest is to extend this starter kit in the best and most creative way. The starter kit will be made available from February 1 on http://www.xnabug.net/starterkits.htm
Submissions will be judged on creativity, innovation and ‘playability’ of the demo. To judge the submissions, participating teams need to:
- Enroll for the contest by mailing an enrollment form to [BRECHT at XNABUG dot NET]. The enrollment form is available here. The enrollment form has to be received by February 18 midnight. - Prepare 2 ‘posters’ explaining the submission. The posters have to be printed on A3 paper size. These posters will be used during round one on during the finals, February 23. Based on the posters and questions and answers, the jury will select the teams which will present and demo their submission. - Prepare a presentation/demo of 10 minutes and 5 minutes of questions and answers. This demo and presentation will be done February 23 in front of the jury and the audience. It will be executed on the equipment of the participating team. The facility to project on a large screen will be provided by the organization. Judging criteria:
The submissions, posters and presentations/demo’s will be judged by a multidisciplinary team of gaming specialists., active in training, development, design and press. The judging criteria will be: |innovation|, |creativity| and |play, demo|. What can you win:
The winning team will receive an XBOX 360 elite for every participant (up to 2). Every team presenting / demo during the finals will receive an XNA Creators Club account and more.
The finals will take place in the auditoria of Groep T, Campus Vesalius, Vesaliusstraat 13, 3000 Leuven (INFO).
For more information:
http://www.xnabug.net
http://www.microsoft.com/xna 1/20/2008
Please feel free to download this free e-book offer, disclosing the upcoming release of Visual Studio 2008. This e-book offer includes sample chapters from Introducing Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX and Introducing Silverlight 1.0, as well as the entire contents of new publication Introducing Microsoft LINQ.
On March 11th Microsoft Belgium & Luxembourg and its partners will celebrate the Launch of Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008. The agenda for the day includes :
- A spectacular Opening Keynote where we present the technical power and business value of the new Microsoft Application Platform.
- Three individual tracks with three sessions each focusing on specific aspects of the three Launch products.
And on March 12th and March 13th we’ll host the TechDays 2008, this year’s edition of our top technical event formerly known as the Developer & IT Pro Days.  As an attendee, you will once again be able to enjoy :
- The TechDays 2008 Opening Keynote
- A choice of 65+ unique technical break-out sessions
- Opportunity to talk one-to-one with Microsoft and Industry experts
- Access to post-event PowerPoint presentations
- Admission to the Sponsor & Exhibition Hall
- Connection to network computers in the Communications Network
- Conference bag filled with conference materials, sponsor information and more
- Lunch and refreshments throughout the conference
- And so much more...
Everyone is welcome, including students. The on-line registration is for March 11 without any cost or charges. More information is available on http://www.microsoft.com/belux/heroeshappenhere/program.aspx Academic participants for March 12 & 13 TechDays 2008 can use the marketing code. To obtain this marketing code, please request it from your academic relations team. The Academic attendee fee is 121 Euro (100 Euro + VAT). 12/19/2007
Scott Guthrie has a series of blogposts on the ASP.NET MVC Framework:
- part 1
- part 2 (URL Routing)
- part 3 (Passing ViewData from Controllers to Views)
- part 4 (Handling Form Edit and Post Scenarios)
Some interesting links:
It must be holiday season at Microsoft Press too. They have just released an e-book on Visual Studio 2008 technologies and are giving it away for free. The e-book includes excerpts from three recent book releases and provides a wealth of information and insights from top experts:
You can see the first chapter of these books for free. When you register, you'll be able to download a lot more content of those books, packaged as an e-book. Enjoy! Original post from Tom at Free MSPress E-Book on LINQ, ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight 11/21/2007
Somasegar's blog reports:
I am thrilled to announce that earlier today we shipped Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5. Over the past few months, I have blogged about some incredible features that the team working on Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 have built. I wanted to share these with you so that you can get a flavor of a few of the several hundred features that are a part of this release. The entire family of Visual Studio products (from the Express Editions to the Professional version to Visual Studio Team Suite) and .NET Framework 3.5 are available for immediate download here. Read full post here. The Express Editions of the Visual Studio 2008 release are all available for download: http://www.microsoft.com/express/download/
You can either install them individually via the web installer or you can download an ISO image of a DVD that contains all of them: 11/14/2007
Bart De Smet and the people at Channel 9 made a very interesting video on LINQ to SharePoint. See it here.
"In this geekSpeak, Bart gives us a tour of a community project called LINQ to Sharepoint, which basically allows a developer to query lists and other things on a Sharepoint server as a data store, without having to resort to calling web services or mastering CAML.
I really love this project because it illustrates the power of LINQ and is a superb example of implemnting a custom LINQ to ... provider. It's also pretty cool to see Bart slip into some on-the-fly LINQ coding in response to the live questions." 11/7/2007 At TechEd 2007 Barcelona and DevConnections Las Vegas, Somasegar announced that Visual Studio 2008 (aka Codenamed "Orcas") and .NET Framework 3.5 will be released by the end of this month. Click here for the official press release. Visual Studio 2008 is the first in the wave of technology we'll be released in the up coming year. Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 are soon to come.
Sandcastle (the blog :)) has an entry with th efull keynote reference: Somasegar's keynote session at TechEd Developers 2007, Barcelona, Spain.
You can read details about his keynote here - http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2007/11/05/teched-developer-in-europe.aspx. Soma made the following announcements: - Release of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET FX 3.5 before the end of November 2007.
- Removing license restrictions with Visual Studio and the Visual Studio SDK to enable customers to use the Visual Studio IDE and build applications that target the platform of your choice.
- Access to the Visual Studio source code for VSIP premier partners to enable you to better design and debug your add-ins to Visual Studio.
- Popfly Explorer add-in to Visual Studio as a Codeplex project.
- CTP for the Microsoft Sync Framework that enables you to build on the offline synchronization capability in Visual Studio 2008.
What's new in Visual Studio 2008 code name 'Orcas' from Teekam Goyal's Blog gives a good overview:
Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 improvements can be classified into following 7 different technology areas: - Develop Smart Client Applications:Visual Studio provides a new set of tools and classes which will enable developers and simplify the integration of their smart client applications with existing or new web based applications. Main development focus areas are:
- Integrated UI Designer Experience: Support for common formats such as XAML and giving designers direct control of Layout, controls and data binding of application user interface. Designers can use tools like Microsoft Expression Suite to create UIs and produce files that developers can directly work with in Visual studio.
- Developers can use Visual Studio Tools for Office to create UI to leverage the look and feel of both Office and SharePoint.
- Improved ClickOnce Application Deployment: Support for Firefox as browser and location independent signing and customer branding. Also, it is possible to deploy applications using clickonce thru authenticated proxy servers and enables developers to distribute their applications to multiple end user companies from central location.
- Office 2007 UI style support for Native C++ applications: Includes Ribbon bar, Ribbon Status Bar, and Mini-Toolbar.
- Client Application-level Services: Client applications can use the same user profile and login services as web applications.
- Occasionally connected data access using Microsoft Synchronization Services for ADO.NET.
- Integrated support for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition
- Leverage SOA and WCF in mobile applications
- Create Microsoft Office Applications: Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) is now fully integrated into Visual Studio 2008 professional edition. Visual Studio enables developers to customize Microsoft Office Applications such as Excel, Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, Visio, InfoPath and Project to take further advantage of Office 2007 System. Some advantages are:
- Target the breadth of the new Office 2007 System: Customizations can be done both at application and document level.
- Visual Studio simplifies the task of developing SharePoint Server workflow projects and provide access to back end data stores and enterprise applications such as SAP, CRM and ERP.
- Microsoft Office Based UI workflow solutions.
- Full support for ClickOnce deployment of all Office customizations and applications.
- Build Windows Vista Applications:Enables to incorporate Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) features into both Windows Forms applications and new applications. Key improvements in this area are:
- Build rich experience applications quickly and easily. Tools include designer and XAML Editor, project templates, debugging support, deployment support etc.
- Developers can move their applications easily to new Windows Vista like look and feel.
- Improved interoperability and performance between native and managed code.
- Handle Data More Productively:ADO.NET integrates with Language Integrated Query (LINQ) to provide a consistent programmatic approach and perform data access with new data design surfaces. Support for occasionaly connected deisgn pattern to simplify the development task for those application types is included.
- Developers can now use data access logic using .NET language such as VB.NET or C# instead of using SQL or XPath queries.
- Deep support for incorporating .NET language integrated query into web applications.
- Enable New Web Experiences:
- Tools to build robust and more interactive 'AJAX-Style' applications for better user experience.
- Configure service end points using the same tools and code, regardless of wired protocol (HTTP, TCP/IP) to transmit messages and test the service without code.
- Easility consume Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Services.
- Service implementation integrated with workflow design.
- Better Developer Experience:
- Target different .NET Framework platforms. Not tightly bound to any target platform.
- Improvements in windows forms designer: simplification of design time error list and better feedback mechanism, Ignore and Continue feature, better designer performance, etc.
- Improve Application Lifecycle Management: With this release, the new capabilities include:
- Integrate Database professionals into development life cycle by providing support for source control, testing and test data generation, rename factoring, and a deployment solution that includes visual diff/merge and deployment script generation.
- Extend Visual Studio's Unit Testing Capabilities.
- Load testing for enterprise: Simplified load testing interface and multiple machine graph view that brings together test results, performance and health of machines under test.
- Enable Perforamance Tuning and Diagnistics of enterprise application thru testing thru visual studio test tools. Ability to run prifiling during tests and collect traces.
For latest information on Visual Studio 2008, check out Visual Studio Web Site.
F# is an official .NET language now, posted on Channel8
Soma had the news today. F# is an official .NET language now! Functional programming becomes a first citizen in .NET :-)
Soma wrote: One of the really promising current projects from MSR is the F# programming language, spearheaded by Don Syme. F# stems from the functional programming tradition (hence the ‘F’) and has strong roots in the ML family of languages, though also draws from C#, LINQ and Haskell. F# is designed from the outset to be a first class citizen on .NET. This means that F# runs on the CLR, embraces object-oriented programming, and has features to ensure a smooth integration with the .NET Framework. I am a big fan of technology transfer between a research organization and a product development organization so that we can “productize” the great research ideas and deliver to customers in a timely manner. This is one of the best things that has happened at Microsoft ever since we created Microsoft Research over 15 years ago. Here is another great example of technology transfer at work. We will be partnering with Don Syme and others in Microsoft Research to fully integrate the F# language into Visual Studio and continue innovating and evolving F#. In my mind, F# is another first-class programming language on the CLR.
This is really great news! Functional programming is very elegant and has a lot of benefits compared to other approaches. There are also some negative aspects: mostly people complain about the speed that functional languages offer. But the best thing about F# is that the team says that programs written in their language are as fast as programs written in C#.
You get functional and dynamic benefits with the same speed as if they would have been written in C#. Isn't it cool?
In this paper on http://windowsclient.net, David Chappell discusses WPFs unified presentation platform and how it helps designers and developers collaborate more closely to create rich, immersive Windows user interfaces. Discover how the common programming model for standalone and browser user interface applications works in tandem with Windows Forms, Silverlight, and ASP.NET AJAX as well Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend, Web, Design, and Media.
size: 4.26MB
format: docx Note: If you haven't got Microsoft Office 2007, you can still read docx-files by installing the "Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats", which you can download here (size: 27.5MB, format: exe). Please read the system requirements and installation instructions on the download-site carefully.
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