If you are planning to attend PDC 2008 you will not regret the investment. Check out all the Pre-PDC buzz here.
Now, related to this: good news if you were planning to join the Belgians at PDC drink on Monday 27th of October: U2U has kindly offered to buy us all a drink at the Hard Rock Café in Hollywood. Quite some of the U2U consultants and teachers will be present at PDC, they must know what is coming :-)
As proposed by U2U, meet us at the Hard Rock Café.
Time: 9PM, October 27 2008
Where: Hard Rock Cafe Hollywood
1000 Universal Studios Blvd.
Universal City, CA 91608
See details here: http://www.hardrock.com/locations/cafes3/cafe.aspx?LocationID=63&MIBEnumID=3
Driving directions to café here (click to open):
First of all, what is XNA? If you haven’t read upon this, XNA is a framework and a set of tools that allow you to create games on Windows and even Xbox 360. Check out these resources to get started:
XNA Developer center on MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/xna/default.aspx
Community site at http://creators.xna.com
Official release is now XNA 2.0 but recently the Microsoft XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP was announced. This version has several updates that allow you to more seamlessly integrate and deploy games for the Zune family. Now, I know this product is not on sale in Belgium but if you can get your hands on one you can do really cool stuff with XNA on it.
Interview with MVP and author Riemer Grootjans
Last month I sat down with MVP and author Riemer Grootjans to talk about his new book on XNA. “XNA 2.0: Game Programming Recipes”, by Apress was released in July 2008 so it was about time we interviewed Riemer. Check out the video on Chopsticks, there are some very nice demos from the book in there as well.
By the way, did you know there are four other videos on XNA from an event done last year in Belgium. Check it out: http://www.microsoft.com/belux/msdn/nl/chopsticks/default.aspx?list=tag&id=20
XNA-BUG – User Group event
In addition to Riemer, we have a second XNA MVP in Belgium: Brecht Kets. Together they started up the XNA Belgian User Group. I already announced it on this blog previously but in case you haven’t registered: XNA-BUG is doing a launch event for the user group on November 6th in Ghent. Register here and find out about XNA here in Belgium: www.xnabug.net
Kurt Claeys (http://www.devitect.net) has just been awarded the MVP award in the category “Connected System Developer”. Congratulations Kurt, you deserve to get this recognition!
Kurt is also a certified trainer and has participated as a technical learning guide at the Tech Ed US labs zone. He is also very active in the Belgian community: VISUG presentations, schools, a very active blog, and more.
Go meet Kurt at the Ask The Experts booth at Tech Ed EMEA in Barcelona on November 10th to 14th this year.
Are you looking for more technical information on creating RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) and RDAs (Rich Desktop Applications)? MSDN BeLux is organizing a road show around these technologies. This is your chance to learn about Silverlight, new ASP.NET Ajax features and learn about the .NET Client Profile with WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation).
Hereunder you can find the description of the event, please note that sessions are in different languages: 1 session in English, 2 in Dutch and 2 in French. All sessions take place in October so be quick to register in time.
Français: http://www.microsoft.com/belux/msdn/fr/events/msdnroadshow/default.aspx
Nederlands: http://www.microsoft.com/belux/msdn/nl/events/msdnroadshow/default.aspx
MSDN Road Show: Build Rich Client Experiences with Silverlight 2 and WPF
Delivering rich client experiences to users is becoming an important aspect of new applications.
Join us for the MSDN Road Show to keep in touch with the latest innovations. Learn how you can develop rich applications that deploy to the web and go beyond what you can typically do inside of a browser based application.
We will cover 3 main topics:
- New features in ASP.NET AJAX
- Building a Silverlight 2 application that uses remote services, data binding, templating and styling, both with Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend 2.5
- Windows Presentation Foundation and the .NET Client Profile
See you there!
Yes, we have two new user groups with a launch event on November 6th, 2008 in Ghent! Register at http://www.xnabug.net or http://www.besug.be.
I’m very happy to see the XNA Belgian User Group (XNABUG) doing their launch event together with our very first Belgian Silverlight User Group (BESUG). The launch event will have a demo session by both user groups, and a great chance to meet people doing XNA or Silverlight. No knowledge of either technology is required to attend this event.
XNA BUG has been online with a website and a contest since last year, being led by two XNA MVPs: Brecht Kets and Riemer Grootjans.
The Belgian Silverlight User Group has Frederik Duchi as its driving force. Frederik is a teacher at the PIH in Kortrijk as has worked hard over the Summer to get the site up and all contacts for getting the user group and event going.
I’m looking forward to meeting you all at the event, get it in your agendas and register.
Last week I sat down with Hans Verbeeck, the overall business owner for TechEd EMEA 2008 (IT Professionals and Developers), and content owner for the Developers conference. The interview is now published to the Chopsticks site.
Hans speaks about the top speakers that we should be looking forward to and discusses some new things that will be done this year to give the community a much more special role at the event. And more…
Looking forward to TechEd EMEA 2008? Check out the interview and listen to what he has to say at the end or you could be too late.
We published three new videos produced by the community today.
Two videos by Hans Le Roy
Hans Le Roy has created two screencasts on the new IE8 Beta 2: one intended to give you a quick overview of the new functionalities and one specifically for developers in which Hans explains the new developer tools.
In case you don’t know Hans, he is an MVP on Internet Explorer and has a site and blog with lots of Internet Explorer information.
Note: all the above content is available only in Dutch
New screencast on ASP.NET MVC Framework: Forms
This is Maarten Balliauw’s third screencast on the ASP.NET MVC Framework. After the first two, “Introduction to ASP.NET MVC Framework” and “Test Driven Development with the ASP.NET MVC framework”, this screencast shows you how you can implement form interactions in ASP.NET MVC.
Last week the DPE team at Microsoft launch a new site was launched with articles especially written for flash developers and designers that want to learn about Silverlight: Project Rosetta.
To start there is a collection of 9 lessons that focus on one specific feature and explain the concept including the source code and assets. You will see that the way these lessons explain the concept to take advantage of existing skills and apply these to a new technology, Silverlight in this case.
This is the starting list of sessions (all by Rick Barazza):
Also check out the video introducing the project: Project Rosetta: Essential Edition.
If you have an idea for new articles, do a proposal for new articles in the discussion thread. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for the articles as well.
I’ve been using IE8 Beta 2 for a few weeks now and I’m getting quite used to do actions on text or links by using Accelerators. If you haven’t seen these, accelerators allow you to easily call a service on a link or a piece of selected text. For example, a standard Accelerator is “Map with Live Maps” which shows a map when selecting an address on a page.
One service I use quite regularly is social bookmarking, lately I’ve been using the new MSDN Social Bookmarks one for work related bookmarks. Having IE8 I wanted to replace the bookmarklet from the Favorites toolbar by an accelerator.
BTW, the folks at MSDN just did a nice redesign with all the social info gathered including your community contributions, forums threads etc. Nice job: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com
Now back to the accelerator. For the description that goes with the bookmark I simply select an interesting sentence on a page and use the accelerator (if text is selected).
Creating an Accelerator is very straightforward and easy, you just need to follow the OpenService specification, which is really just an XML file following a predefined schema. For the MSDN Bookmarks I enabled this on text selection, and on a right-click on a page:
Click to install the “Bookmark on MSDN” Accelerator if you are using the IE8 Beta 2.
And if you want to take a look at the few lines of XML needed to build it just download it directly from here.
And if you’re looking for more Accelerators to share your bookmarks check out the gallery.
Resources for creating your own Accelerator:
After receiving this question a few times: “will there be any Belgian event at PDC2008?”, and with the suggestion of my colleague Tom we are planning to have an informal get together with all the Belgians and Luxembourgers attending PDC.
So, if you want to join us there’s one easy way to keep up to date of where we’ll meet and any changes: just add this Facebook event to your events! You will automatically be notified of any last minute updates.
As it stands now, this is the deal:
Date: Monday, October 27, 2008
Time: 8:30pm
Location: Show Off area - at PDC2008 - L.A. Convention Center
It’s in informal get together so we’ll see how it goes. I guess a lot depends on the number of people joining us. Suggestions are welcome on the Facebook event page.
I’ll also be micro-blogging any updates on my twitter account: katriendg.
Thanks Nico and Rogge for getting this rolling, and check out Nico’s very helpful post on getting prepared for PDC.
See you in L.A.!
I’m really glad with this announcement, the TechDays'08 event will take place the 30th of September 2008, in Mondorf-les-Bains in Luxembourg. It’s a free event by the MS Belux team so be quick to register as places are limited. Note: the event is in French only.
What will you get during the day: we have 6 developer sessions planned for you, at the same time there is also an IT-Pro track with again 6 different sessions. Check out the agenda here: http://www.microsoft.com/belux/techdays08/agenda.aspx.
Our Regional Director Gregory Renard is presenting two of the sessions, on Visual Studio 2008 Tips and Tricks and on LINQ. Next to that we have sessions on WCF & WF, Silverlight and WPF.
Hope to see you there, it’s just a few weeks away.
After a deserved break during summer months, the Belgian user groups are getting back at their community events: VISUG and SQL-UG have already planned their sessions for the coming months. Lots of good sessions coming up, take a look at the list below and head out to their site to secure your seat.
VISUG (Visual Studio User Group Belgium)
ALT.NET Overview
Presented by: Yves Goeleven
On: 11/9/2008
Location: Zaventem
Abstract: For the past year the alt.net movement has been stirring up the Microsoft community around the globe. Now it's getting hold of the Belgian community as well.
In this session I would like to present to you what the core values of the alt.net movement are, what principles, concepts and tools we hope to promote and to booth I would like to introduce the brand new 'Dutch alt.net user group'.
ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 special Part 1: MVC Framework
Presented by: Maarten Balliauw
On: 14/10/2008
Location:
Abstract: Visug is dedicating 2 sessions on the release of .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1. This update includes a lot of new stuff that you can learn about in these sessions. The first one is all about the ASP.NET MVC Framework.
Note that the 2 ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 sessions are standalone sessions, you do not need to attend them both!
ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 special Part 2: ASP.NET Dynamic Data, ADO.NET Data Services and AJAX
Presented by: Gill Cleeren
On: 21/10/2008
Location: Brussels
What's new in Visual Studio Team System Code Name "Rosario"
Presented by: Pieter Gheysens
On: 27/11/2008
Location: Heverlee
Abstract: Microsoft Visual Studio Team System code name "Rosario" is the version of Team System that follows Visual Studio Team System 2008.
SQLUG (SQL Server User Group Belgium)
Their next event will host two sessions on September 25th.
Session 1: what's new in SSIS 2008 by Nico Verheire
Abstract: Integrating data with ADO.NET
Scripting with VSTA
Introducing the new lookup transformation (including caching)
Managing change in a data warehouse: how to use Change Data Capture (CDC) and use of the MERGE statement
Dealing with data quality: the Data Profiling Task
Level: 200
Session 2: Deep-dive session about improving SSIS performance given by Geert Vanhove
Abstract: This session will address some problems that might occur when a SSIS solution needs to scale because DB and data volumes to load are getting larger. This session is not only a statement of how you can improve your SSIS performance; the impact of each optimization step is shown in action throughout the demo package that will be the red wire of this presentation...
Level: 300
Date: Thursday September 25, 2008
Location: Kontich
Registration is needed and is open at the SQLUG website.
With the release of IE8 Beta 2 you are likely to start getting more questions and more (power) end users trying this release out. In this post I’ll point out some of the new features of IE8 and then give you the most important pointers for compatibility and development.
IE8 Beta 2 Download link.
IE Blog with the upgrade information on beta 2.
Compatibility
First things first, before checking out the new features of the browser it’s important that your visitors have a good experience browsing your site. Check out my previous post on IE8 compatibility for starters, and in addition to that there is extra information hereunder.
With Beta 2 there is an update to the compatibility settings, here is an overview of the available choices. You can set your compatibility using the header “X-UA-Compatible”, either in the web server as a HTTP header or on the page as a meta tag.
| Compatibility Mode Value | Render Behavior |
| IE=5 | “Quirks” mode |
| IE=7 | ”Standards” mode |
| IE=EmulateIE7 | “Quirks” mode if the page does not contain a DOCType, IE7 Strict mode otherwise |
| IE=8 | Internet Explorer 8 Standards mode |
| IE=edge | Use latest standards that Internet Explorer 8 and any future versions of the browser support. (Not recommended for production sites) |
Also important to note is that your META tag in the page will override the compatibility HTTP header if this one is also used.
Using DOCTYPE for compatibility
Another way of setting the desired layout of your site is using the DOCTYPE. However, setting the above mentioned X-UA-Compatible META tag will override any DOCTYPE setting.
Resources
Developer Tools
Developer tools are shipped with the browser, these allow you to debug Javascript, HTML and CSS (view styles, trace, edit styles), change the rendering engine so that you can easily test your layout mode, use a Javascript profiler and even save your edits in CSS and HTML.
To call up the Developer Tools window, press F12 or click the 
icon.
For example, I can trace CSS styles:
Using the Layout tool I can visually see the distance between the selected object and the parent, the padding, border and margins.
New features
IE8 introduces a lot of new features in different domains, be it in standards support, CSS 2.1 (and some CSS3), privacy, security, performance improvements in JScript, W3C HTML5 local store, etc. I’m pointing out a few of them:
Web Slices
Web Slices allow a user to subscribe to a specific section of a page. For example there is one I like to use which shows me the updated statuses of my Facebook friends.
Developing Web Slices: web slices are implemented using some specific CSS classes that do nothing in other browsers. You can now even have controls inside the WebSlice like Silverlight or Flash. To see some samples, check out a lab on MSDN code gallery: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/ieteched08labs/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=1187
Accelerators
Just that you know, these were called Activities in IE8 beta 1 and have now been renamed to Accelerators.
Accelerators are great for enabling users to execute an a certain action right from out on the page. For example, translating a sentence, mapping an address, blogging a quote, all from a contextual menu that is displayed when you select some text or a link. They’re implemented using the OpenService Format.
Non-administrator ActiveX installation
This might be of most interest at enterprise level, IE8 lets you install ActiveX controls without Administator privileges, on a per-user basis. IE8 also lets the user allow specific ActiveX controls to be enabled only on individual sites, preventing that a control would run on any other than the chosen site.
Mutable DOM prototypes
This is a great feature that allows you to rewrite any DOM method so that for example a certain built-in method returns the same result as in another browser. This is something I was looking for since some time!
So now, go out and install IE8 Beta 2 (I know you’ve been waiting for it), test your site, add compat if needed and then start using all the new goodies.
After the famous “10 minutes with your RD” by Regional Director Gregory Renard, I decided to get started with my own short screencast series on Chopsticks as well. I’m naming these “10 minutes with your DE”.
My first screencast is now online, I ended up with more than 10 minutes, 13:40 to be exact… bear with me for my first cast, I’ll try keeping to the timing better as I evolve with my screen recording abilities :)
10 minutes with your DE - # 1: Data Access Technologies with .NET Framework 3.5 SP1
With the Service Pack 1 release for Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5, new data access technologies are available to us. In this screencast I talk about ADO.NET, ADO.NET Entity Framework, ADO.NET Data Services and more.
Update: You can download the PowerPoint presentation here:
Being a developer using Expression Blend 2 (or 2.5 Preview) for implementing basic design of Silverlight or WPF applications, I’ve collected a list of my favorite shortcuts and tips to using the interface. At first it’s a whole new interface you need to get used. These are my personal most used shortcuts.
Ctrl + mouse wheel - Zooming in and out and the interface zoom level
The quickest way to zoom in and out in the design view is by pressing the CTRL key and using the mouse wheel to zoom in and out.
You can also use the zoom pane at the bottom left of the central pane.
F6 - Switch between Design and Animation workspace
In other words, switch between the normal workspace in which the interaction and timeline editing is shown on the left, and the timeline view at the bottom. All you need to do is press F6 to switch between the views.
F4 - View artboard only (remove left and right panels)
If you need more space to work on the artboard area (central area), you can use F4 to make the work panels disappear.
Notice that the Properties window’s elements are still available as fly-out menus in the right:
Ctrl + 0 – Fit to screen
Zooms the control to fit to screen (work area, depending on what space is available).
Ctrl + 1 - Actual size
Zooms the control to its actual size.
Set design-time width and height
In case you want your Silverlight control to automatically adjust to the screen size you need to set Width and Height to Auto. However, for working in Blend it is easier if you can set a “working” width and height. You can do this by dragging the design-time height icons:
Design-time width and height only have effect in Blend. Note the XAML that is used for this:
<UserControl ... xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008"
mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignWidth="292.261" d:DesignHeight="362.262">...
Do you have more shortcuts or tips for the Blend interface? Leave me a comment and maybe I can do a follow-up post with all the tips from the community.
Note: design “SpaceCute” copyright LostGarden.com, by Dan Cook.
