Reading feather files in Power BI
Now that we know how to set up our local virtual environment and install the required packages, we can start reading the feather file in Power BI. First act...
Posts by Year
2024
Using Python in Power BI
In the former blog post we set up the virtual environment for Python in Power BI. In this post, I will show you how to use Python in Power BI. To check Be ...
Setting up Python for Power BI
It is possible to use Python in Power BI. This is a great feature because it allows you to use Python scripts to manipulate your data. In this post, I will s...
Setting up a virtual environment in Python
Intro Python knowns the concept of virtual envirnomnets. A virtual environment is a self-contained directory tree that contains a Python installation for a ...
2023
Dot NET Conf 2023 sessions online
This week .NET 8 was released and just like last year accompanied by 3 days of conference filled with great sessions and new announcements. The sessions are ...
Make use of colored braces in Visual Studio
I have always been a fan of extensions that make my life easier. One of those extensions was the Rainbow braces extension by Mads Kristensen. This extension ...
Booth duty at Microsoft Build Netherlands 2023
Just came back from Utrecht Netherlands where I helped out at the Global AI booth at Microsoft Build Netherlands 2023. It was a great experience to talk to p...
Obtained my AI Skills challenge certification
A while ago I wrote about the upcoming AI skills challenge. I’m happy to announce that I’ve completed the challenge and obtained my certification.
Microsoft Learn AI Skills Challenge
In the past AI was a bit of a strange thing for most people and companies. But today AI is everywhere and it is here to stay. Nowadays most people have heard...
MVP award regained
Last year I didn’t get renewed as an MVP. I was disappointed but I understood the decision as many lost it that time due to the culling after the Covid-19 er...
Gave a talk at Team4Talent Netherlands .NET event
I just finished my talk at the Team4Talent Netherlands .NET event. I gave me popular session The stuff you don’t want to write: Documentation. The session wa...
Organized and spoke at Global AI bootcamp Belgian chapter
Today I organized and spoke at the Belgian chapter of the Global AI bootcamp. The event was held at Spoor 18 offices in Mechelen. We had 4 interesting sessio...
2022
Graduated Postgraduate Studies Big Data & Analytics in Business and Management
Today was a great day. I graduated cum laude my postgraduate studies in Big Data & Analytics in Business and Management at KUL university. I’m really hap...
How to disable all those Edge tabs while alt tabbing in Windows
Likely due to some upgrade on my laptop but lately I’ve been seeing way more screens while Alt+Tab ing on Windows. Not annoying but still a load of screens t...
Not renewed as an MVP
Today I got notified that I didn’t make it for another year as an MVP… That left me with a pretty hollow feeling at first as I’ve been an MVP for 16 years no...
Delivered a presentation about what is new in the technical preview of Power Virtual Agents at aMS Delhi
This morning I gave an online presentation at aMS Delhi about Power Virtual Agents - what’s new.
Delivered a talk about what is new in the technical preview of Power Virtual Agents
Yesterday evening I had the pleasure to speak at an in person event in Belgium for the Belgian poweraddicts community.
Delivered my session Power to the Virtual Agents at aMS Berlin
Today I had the pleasure to talk about Power Virtual Agents at aMS Berlin 2022. I got some very nice feedback at the end of the session from the audience who...
First in person azug event since quite some time
This felt so great!
Delivered a presentation at DevDays Europe 2022
Today I had the opportunity to speak at Devdays Europe 2022. Normally it would’ve been in Vilnius, a city I only visited once before and liked a lot, but due...
Using SqlBulkCopy with .NET lists
Recently I was in a situation where I had to quickly inject loads of data into a SQL database. The basic setup of the application:
Registered for MVP summit 2022 edition
That time of year again… the MVP summit. Due to Covid-19 unfortunately again virtual but still great to look forward to. Seeing new technology being presente...
Python script to generate a new Jekyll post with front matter
Even though I stopped blogging for a while due to various reasons I tried to pick up the pace again since beginning of this year. The old blog was hosted on ...
15 years as a Microsoft MVP
I got my blue ring which marks 15 years of being a Microsoft MVP. I’m quite proud of that particular achievement to be honest. I started out as an ASP.NET MV...
Using the switchstartup extension in Visual Studio
Last week I wrote about making use of the Current selection setting to quickly have the startup project set when you’re having the focus on that particular p...
Using the current selected project as startup project in Visual Studio
A feature in Visual Studio which I noticed already being available in VS 2019 before, likely after an update, is the ability to set a project as startup in a...
Happy New Year, Happy 2022
Another year has gone and what a year it has been. Covid-19 still ruled the major headlines, people got vaccinated (or not) and all around the globe people t...
2019
Spoke at Azure Saturday Cologne 2019 yesterday
Yesterday I had the pleasure to speak at Azure Saturday Cologne, Germany about Visual Studio Code. The room was filled with interested people and I went off ...
Using appsettings.json in a .NET Core console application
Most samples one sees about using settings in .NET Core is about setting up an ASP.NET Core application. Very handy but sometimes I simply want to make use o...
I went speaking at Azure Day Poland
Today I was in Poland for the annual Azure Day Poland. A great gathering of (inter)national speakers about Microsoft Azure technology in the beautiful city o...
Got my picture drawn by Reverentgeek
At the MVP summit currently and there’s a talented person which takes your picture and uses his iPad pro and pencil to make a nice looking drawing out of it....
Making use of the tree command in DOS
A couple of weeks ago I was playing around with NServicebus on localhost. The nice thing about it is that it’ll make use of files in different subfolders if ...
Making use of the Idempotent flag when generating scripts with Entity Framework Core
Today I was setting up a new project but was making use of Entity Framework Core. Seems I found an interesting flag -Idempotent to generate SQL statements fr...
Free book a developers guide to building AI applications
I noticed that Microsoft hands out a free ebook about AI and chatbots. It’s an easy read of about 50 pages.
Change the language version of a C# project
The C# team brings out new features in small releases like C# 7.1, 7.2 or 7.3 for example. Now you might notice that when you create a new project that not a...
Must have extensions for Visual Studio
I started a new job at a new client recently and of course I had to install a new laptop provided by the client.
4 stages of production pain
Recently I was in a discussion about (Azure) DevOps, bugs and their severity. Besides being an interesting discussion we came up with the following list:
Using blob storage with Microsoft bot builder version 4
Even though the documentation of Microsoft bot builder version 4 is really good I noticed I couldn’t find a decent explanation on how to replace the default ...
Yesterday a teacher at Azure Low Lands, today a humble student at PowerBI days
Yesterday I went talking about my experiences with chatbots I gained during the last years working at clients and in a second part of the talk how to create ...
Microsoft Professional Program in Data Science with certification
Besides my usual day to day work including Azure, C#, ASP.NET Core, (chat)bots, Cognitive Services, … I’m currently becoming more and more interested in Data...
Object.keys helped me solve a problem
Last week I took a day out of my holiday to help out a colleague. I basically already left the client but didn’t want to leave my follow up in the cold.
2018
I went speaking about Bots at CODECAMP Romania
Yesterday I went to Romania for the first time ever in my life. Reason: I went speaking at the CODECAMP conference Bucharest edition (apparently the first on...
I got reawarded as a Microsoft Azure MVP
I got reawarded as an MVP for my continued volunteering work in the Azure space. Today was a day that all MVP’s in the world got to know if they were renewed...
Viewing the SQL statements Entity Framework produces with interceptors
Recently I was involved in improving the performance and stability of a new, important, application at a client. The usage of Kendo MVC Grid was a great addi...
Global Azure Bootcamp Belgian Edition
Last Saturday was not only beautiful weather in Belgium, actually it was really great weather, but it was also Global Azure Bootcamp. Me and Tom Kerkhove ran...
I went speaking at Azure Day Poland
Today I was presenting in Poland. More specifically in Warsaw at the Microsoft building for Azure Day Poland. It was a well organized event with a great atmo...
Back from the MVP summit
Last week I was visiting the USA for the annual MVP summit. I must say, one of the best editions I attended in year. First of all, it’s always great to see s...
I broke the barrier of 190000 recognition points on the ASP.NET forums
When I started my professional career in the magical .NET world on July 1st 2002, I joined the ASP.NET forums as a member. In the beginning lurking for infor...
I went speaking at Microsoft Tech Summit Frankfurt
Normally I was only going to help out as a proctor during a workshop at Tech Summit. However on Tuesday evening I got a call from Microsoft corp in Redmond i...
I went speaking at Basta conference spring 2018 about serverless on Azure
Today I took the plane to Frankfurt, Germany to talk at Basta spring 2018 about Serverless on Azure.
Increase performance of Visual Studio 2017
Visual Studio 2017 is a great tool and I spend quite a lot of my professional days in it. On its own it’s already a great editor but the power is in extensio...
Use AsNoTracking to speed up Entity Framework performance
I’m curently busy at a large project in the insurance sector. The original architecture implemented the onion architecture and took from the database a lot o...
My presentation about Microsoft Bot Framework at Iglooconf is online
Recently I presented at Iglooconf in Finland. Besides a very well organized conference and 100 attendees we also had around 500 online spectators who followe...
I changed my Twitter handle
For years I’ve been using @KvdM for most things, Twitter, Github, … Due to some 2 factor authentication problems and as Github wasn’t really providing the ne...
2017
I just bought several books about .NET Core via the MEAP program with a discount
Due to the Christmas season and companies know that people already bought a lot of stuff for their loved ones they sometimes lower prices. Manning also does ...
Specified argument was out of the range of valid values 0x800004005
A couple of weeks ago I was going through my preparations and demos about the Microsoft Bot Framework to talk at SharePoint Saturday in Lisbon. As I didn’t u...
How to make Microsoft Edge go full screen on Windows 10
Today I got a new laptop at my current client and unlike former PC’s it now comes with Windows 10 installed. Note that this is a large enterprise hence they’...
CloudBrew 2017 was a blast
On Saturday November 25th 2017 me and my buddies from azug organized our annual CloudBrew event at the Lamot venue in pictoresque Mechelen city. The weather ...
After a year of usage I still love my Surface Book
A year ago I was at the MVP summit gathering with a bunch of international people which I can call friends and likeminded people. Not only a great trip to fi...
I attended the uNite day at Ordina
Last Thursday I was invited to come to the free local conference uNite at Ordina. It was an interesting agenda (see below) and because I used to work there f...
Free Azure learning possibilities on Pluralsight
Cloud computing has been around for quite some years now and is gaining more and more traction. More and more enterprises are also jumping on the bandwagon a...
The recording of my presentation at Techdays NL 2017 is available
In October I gave a presentation about Visual Studio Code during Microsoft Tech Days NL 2017. Well, that session got recorded and is now available on Youtube...
Moving my blog to Jekyll
Since around 2006 I’ve been using dasBlog as my main engine to keep my posts up and running. Since then a lot has changed in the world and I noticed that it ...
I got renewed as an MVP
I’m happy and honored to announce I got awarded as an Azure MVP for the coming year.
I got renewed as an MVP
I’m happy and honored to announce I got awarded as an Azure MVP for the coming year.
Free Azure Training Courses
If you would like to keep up date with Microsoft Azure and can spare some hours watching videos this might be something for you:
Free Azure Training courses
If you would like to keep up date with Microsoft Azure and can spare some hours watching videos this might be something for you:
Visual Studio 2017 launch poster
A couple of weeks Visual Studio 2017 was released to the public. If you want to see the announcements and keynotes be sure to navigate to https://channel9.ms...
Visual Studio 2017 launch poster
A couple of weeks Visual Studio 2017 was released to the public. If you want to see the announcements and keynotes be sure to navigate to https://channel9.ms...
Data Amp a new online event from Microsoft on April 19th
If you’re interested in data, analytics and artificial intelligence or just like to see Scott Guthrie talk you likely would like to join Microsoft on April 1...
Visual Studio 2017 is about to land
Are you ready for it?
Spoke at the Basta! Conference in Frankfurt Germany about Visual Studio Code
Last week Thursday I did my first presentation in Germany at the Basta! conference in Frankfurt. I had a fully packed room and had a blast. Being one of the ...
Be careful with 2FA on Github
Years ago I started github.com/KvdM as a place to fiddle around with code and to try to make pull requests from. For reasons I got sidetracked by work a lot ...
Going to speak at Basta! in Germany
2017 already is going to kick off with presentations. Besides Microsoft Cloud Summit I’m also going to speak at the Basta! conference in Frankfurt Germany. T...
2016
Going to speak at MS Cloud Summit in Paris
Do you like Azure Functions or just want to know what all the fuzz is about? Then be sure to check me out speaking about it in Paris during the Microsoft Clo...
Speaking at Microsoft Tech Days Netherlands 2016
It’s not the first time I speak in the Netherlands but I was happy to get asked again by the organizational team to come back this year. Unlike the year befo...
I just spoke at Azure day Poland North 2016
Today I had the pleasure of giving a presentation about Azure Web Jobs at a nice conference in Poland. It was well organized in a good hotel close to Gdynia....
Speaking at Microsoft Tech Days NL 2016
In a couple of weeks there will be again a Microsoft Tech Days in the Netherlands. As last year this edition I will be speaking as well. This time not about ...
Learn gulp.js for free, read an ebook
If you are into web development you know there are a bunch of tools out there to make your life easier while concentrating on the things you want or need to ...
I spoke at Techorama 2016 about Meteor.js
Last week witnessed the gathering of Microsoft loving people in Belgium. There were 19 different nationalities at the venue in Mechelen based Kinepolis cinem...
Something changed in the MVP title
Last week I reported on this very blog that I got renewed again as an MVP. Today I got the official box with the award in it and I noticed that I’m no longer...
I got renewed as an MVP 2016
April 1st is always an exciting day, did I make it again as an MVP for the annual renewal or not? Well, I’m very happy to announce that I made it again. Due ...
2015
Windows 10 Developers Day videos are online
Last October Microsoft held its Windows 10 Developer Day. Hosted in several cities around the world Russia and Belgium had the chance to kick off these globa...
I will be talking about gulp at WebNextConf 2015 next week in Milan Italy
Next Saturday I’ll be speaking at WebNextConf during its second edition. I spoke there in the past about Orchard CMS in 2012 as well.
I made level 15 in Ingress today
Since a couple of years I like to play the game Ingress. It’s been a great ride so far, I got to know many new and interesting people, got to visit a lot of ...
My first pull request got accepted for the Microsoft Azure documentation
While looking through some documentation about Microsoft Azure App Insights I noticed a typo in the documentation. In the past that would mean trying to get ...
Github extensions for Visual Studio 2015 now available
It’s great to see that one of your own workarounds is getting obsolete. This morning I checked social media and noticed that Github put a new extension on th...
Azure App Services
Recently Microsoft showed us something new to the world which I think is very interesting: Azure App Service.
Renewed as an MVP
I got renewed as an MVP for ASP.NET. I’ve been renewed every year since 2007 when I first got the award.
Zooming in and out on a Mac
Recently I was at a user group meeting about Xamarin. During the session several Macbooks were used. One of presenters wanted to zoom in on something on scre...
What is new in ASP.NET 5 – See it at Microsoft Virtual Acadamy
Likely somewhere this year ASP.NET 5, or vNext as it’s been called in the past, will launch. From all we hear each time it’s going to be a major shift again,...
Visual Studio 2015 and Gulp
I’ve been fiddling around lately with Gulp and Bower. 2 tools that go hand in hand to make compelling web applications and… also integrate nicely in the new ...
2014
Want to know where all the cool events are?
If yes then take a look at aka.ms/devbesmart.
Get your free eBook about Xamarin Forms
If you like Charles Petzold’s (/images/who doesn’t) books then you’re in for a treat: Get this free eBook by him both as pdf and as Kindle download.
Cloud apps with Microsoft Azure–free ebook
When you look outside of the window and you notice the weather’s not making you feel to go and sit outside to enjoy it you might as well read a good book. Mi...
ASP.NET MVC 5 application lifecycle
I just came across a good looking overview of the ASP.NET MVC 5 application lifecycle. I thought I’d share it so here you go.
Human javascript free eBook
Thanks to a colleague I got to know about this free eBook: http://read.humanjavascript.com/ch00-foreword.html.
Github and Visual Studio and two factor authentication
At work I mostly make use of the combination of TFS and Visual Studio. I also fiddle around with Git from time to time. As with the latest Visual Studio ther...
dotnetconf 2014 is coming
On June 25th and 26th there’s going to be another dotnetconf. It’s a virtual conference so you can watch it online and get a good overview of what’s hot righ...
Fiddle around
Sometimes you simply want to test out something without opening a new text editor, put basic things together just to make it work. Or you don’t want to creat...
Build 2014 videos online and I need more free time to watch all of these
Last week was Microsoft’s //Build/ 2014 edition. I couldn’t be there in person but luckily for most of us around the globe the sessions got recorded and put ...
I got renewed as an MVP
That time of the year again where you hope you get that email that states yes you made it again. This year it was earlier than usual so it made my day .
What to do on a Saturday: Global Windows Azure Bootcamp presentation and Ingress Recursion
Well, yesterday’s Saturday was different from others. I got up at 5:30 and after breakfast, cleaning up and a shower I drove 120 km to Genk at the Microsoft ...
Visual Studio 2013 launch demo applications
If you’re interested in the Visual Studio 2013 launch demo apps then be sure to take a look here. There are six as we speak and each comes with an interestin...
Designing Evolvable Web APIs with ASP.NET now as a free ebook
If you’re interested to update your knowledge of simply get started with Web API then there are a bunch of decent books already out there. I noticed however ...
Lifecycle of an ASP.NET MVC 5 application
This handy pdf document will show an overview of the lifecycle of an ASP.NET MVC 5 application. Created by Cephas Lin (/images/Microsoft).
Getting Started with Entity Framework 6 Code First using MVC 5 tutorials
On a regular basis Microsoft brings out cool and easy to follow tutorials. I just noticed that the ones about Entity Framework and ASP.NET MVC got updated.
Free ebooks from Microsoft press
During the past years Microsoft press has put some very interesting and nice books on the market. It’s cool to see they are now offering some for free to the...
Cloud Design Patterns on Windows Azure
If you’re busy with cloud architecture it’s always great if you can rely on proven practices. Microsoft releases on a regular basis guidelines and best pract...
Windows Azure Week Deep Dive Live
Or for short WAWDDL .
Are you interested in an aspiring technology career?
If yes then by all means take a look at the following site: Start your career in technology with Microsoft. It gives a starting point on where to begin a car...
RouteConfig part for WCF svc files in MVC to avoid the 404 http status code
Recently we upgraded to Visual Studio 2013 at my client. This morning my colleague came over and had a small problem. Some of the .svc services gave 404 erro...
ng-conf videos available
Angular.js, a powerful javascript based framework, is not only becoming increasingly more popular but now also has its own conference: ng-conf. If you, like ...
2013
One year of playing Ingress
A bit more than a year ago I watched some short Youtube movie. I remember I was for a short vacation at the Belgian coast and reading some things online and ...
Windows Azure Microsoft GFS DataCenter tour
An interesting tour through the Microsoft data centers.
ASP.NET Web API poster
Do you like posters? Do you like ASP.NET Web API? If both questions get answered by yes then check this one out: ASP.NET Web API Poster.
.NET framework SDKs and Targeting packs as well as Microsoft Nuget packages
Did you ever get lost in the myriad of SDKs and Microsoft Nuget packages? If you did then let me tell you a secret: you’re not alone. Luckily Microsoft liste...
TodoMVC
Since several years javascript has become increasingly more popular. Because of that a slew of frameworks and libraries became available and usually there st...
Oracle on Windows Azure
It’s great to see that an awesome platform like Windows Azure is gaining more and more traction along the way. Recently it was announced that Oracle is partn...
Free online ASP.NET MVC 4 training by Microsoft Virtual Academy
You want to know more about ASP.NET MVC (/images/4) and Web API? Well tomorrow you can do just that. Simply join the Microsoft Virtual Academy broadcast and ...
I attended the Antwerp Night Run 2013 edition
Last evening 5 colleagues from ae and me went out for an adventure: to run 9 km in het Rivierenhof without the comfort of lights except the headlights all 57...
Download the .NET universe 2013 poster
Get it while it’s still hot people! You can download the .NET universe 2013 poster here.
Some code beautifiers
As a moderator on forums.asp.net I sometimes see quite unreadable copy pasted code in all shapes and ranges.
Windows Azure Training Kit May 2013 is out
Grab it while it’s hot at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=8396.
New prices for Windows Azure
Soon, actually June 1st Virtual Machines will go GA on Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform. With that the exact prices are finally known. You can take a look ...
Join the Belgian Windows 8 apps race
And win cool prices!
Getting the offline installer for Visual Studio 2012 update 2
By default you only get to download a small file that, once executed, will gather all the needed materials and install it. From home this worked pretty well ...
Visual Studio 2012 update 2 got released
Grab it while it’s still hot at this place.
Building Web Apps with ASP.NET Jump Start Series
Actually I didn’t see at first that there was newly created content on the ASP.NET website hence the reason why I write this post. The series needs a bit mor...
WebMatrix 3 preview
I’ve been giving presentations myself about this little handy tool from Microsoft and I’m happy to see that version 3 saw daylight and that I can finally spe...
That time of year again. I was renewed as an MVP
Yes! I got the email message in my inbox yesterday evening that I got renewed as an MVP. I’m of course very happy to be renewed for the efforts I made during...
ASP.NET MVC hands on labs online
I got word the ASP.NET MVC hands on labs are available online also. So if you want to get to know more or just want to get your hands dirty for the first tim...
MSDN All in One Code Sample Browser is now also available as a Windows 8 app
Since several years Microsoft helpers have created the All in One Code overview filled with samples & search possibilities for those common scenarios the...
Are you going to the SuperHackathon on March 27th in Belgium?
One day – four locations – on site experts – prizes – fun. That’s basically what’s going to happen on March 27th at four different locations in our cozy Belg...
MVP summit 2013 was a blast
This year I went again to the MVP summit in Redmond and Belle Vue. I had a blast to see so many familiar faces again, get to know many more people and having...
Free SignalR ebook
SignalR went RTW last Monday which is awesome. Which is even more awesome is that at the MVP summit I got to know about a book being published by a fellow MV...
Setting up a chat with PersistentConnection in SignalR 1.0 rc2
Today I was going through a video from BUILD 2012 where Damian Edwards and David Fowler are talking about SignalR. Normally people tend to make use of the Hu...
2012
Is Windows 8 really that simple?
Yes it is. I’ve been using it since August last year and whenever I see Windows 7 or Vista again I go like: huh?
Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 is available
Even only after Microsoft released the latest and greatest version of Visual Studio, the tool most Microsoft focused developers spend most of their time in d...
Orchard CMS videos of Orchard Harvest are online
I couldn’t attend Orchard Harvest myself unfortunately however more and more of the recordings are coming online for us to watch:
Free Windows Azure poster
You like posters? You like Windows Azure? Then this one is for you: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=35473.
Patterns and Practices about multitenancy in Windows Azure
The following document in the Microsoft Patterns & Practices about Windows Azure deals with multitenancy. It ships with a book explaining several importa...
.NET 4.5 is now supported on Windows Azure Web Sites and it’s now also visible in the portal
Last week there was already the news that .NET 4.5, the latest version of the framework at this moment, was deployed on Windows Azure Web Sites. However what...
Windows Azure portal got renewed
I just opened the Preview portal and was welcomed by a small guidance wizard with a quick tour. After that I noticed that there were some new icons and that ...
Taking a walk in Orchard CMS land: my presentation at WebNetConf in Milan Italy
Today I gave a presentation in Milan, Italy at WebNetConf. The atmosphere was great and there was a big audience and almost no no-show which is great.
Node.js Web Application using the Windows Azure Table Service working example
Lately I’ve been fiddling around with node.js and like it a lot. Since I also like Windows Azure a lot I decided to try some of the samples from the site.
Presentation about Windows Azure Web Sites
Yesterday Microsoft celebrated the launch of Windows Server 2012 at a dedicated event. Besides the WS2012 track there was also a great Windows Azure tracks, ...
Find out which version of node.js currently runs on Windows Azure Web Sites
If you’ve already opened the new portal of Windows Azure then you’ll probably have noticed that both the .NET version and PHP version installed on Windows Az...
WebMatrix 2 presentation at PHL Hasselt
Yesterday evening I gave a presentation at Microsoft WebCafe in front of around 120 attendees. The topic I had was WebMatrix 2. Microsoft WebCafe meetings ar...
AZUG event with Brady Gaster about Windows Azure Web Sites
On Monday we already had the pleasure of having Brady over for a nerd dinner in Mechelen and yesterday Brady delivered a great presentation about Windows Azu...
Windows 8 app-a-thon
If you like to create apps for Windows 8 and want to join the community as one big happy group in Belgium then be sure not to miss the next app-a-thon on Sep...
Dublin datacenter
Last Monday I went to see the Microsoft Dublin datacenter together with the the azug posse and the two winners of our Windows Azure Saturday. We all signed a...
WebMatrix 2 got released
I’ve been using this little gem since the first betas a couple of years ago, delivered tons of feedback to Microsoft when they were developing the betas of t...
Windows 8 Visual Studio 2012 Entity Framework 5 and ASP.NET MVC 4 got released
Ok, so today felt a bit like Christmas in summer. In case you didn’t know already Microsoft released it’s much anticipated Windows 8 on MSDN.
A LEGO story
A couple of days ago LEGO turned 80 years old. Watch this short movie, a great one I assure you, on how it all started out.
Harvest, the Orchard conference
If you like Orchard CMS and are free on September 8th and 9th then you might want to go and check out all the sessions being shown at the first Orchard confe...
Free ebooks on Windows Azure and Windows Azure Service Bus
The cloud is everywhere and now also in book format. I just noticed that Microsoft has put a couple of free books available about:
How to setup Orchard CMS on Windows Azure Web Sites with a Windows Azure SQL Database
I noticed on Twitter several people asking for this. However if you know the steps it’s pretty easy. So simply follow along and get the Orchard party started.
Cleaning up after deleting a VM in the new Windows Azure portal
When deleting a VM from your Windows Azure account as you might not need it anymore and you want to cut down on costs you can simply navigate to the portal, ...
10 years on the ASP.NET forums
Today is a bit of a special day for me. I started exactly 10 years ago on a professional level with ASP.NET. I has given me quite an interesting journey and ...
Windows Azure Train The Trainer in Amsterdam
Today, and also tomorrow, I’m attending the Windows Azure Train The Trainer in Amsterdam. This is a Microsoft led gathering of Windows Azure enthusiasts gett...
Windows 8 Summer App-a-thons in Belgium
If you like Windows 8, coding or UX and want to either show off what you created or learn new tricks then be sure to come to the Microsoft Windows 8 Summer A...
Windows Azure videos shown at Tech Ed North America 2012 are all online
As many of you out there I wasn’t able to attend Tech Ed North America 2012 either so I couldn’t go to all the cool sessions showing off about the newly rele...
Community day 2012 recap
It’s becoming a bit of a tradition in Belgium. No I’m not talking about the great beer or the weather this time but about Community day, again like last year...
Meet Windows Azure
Yesterday evening, after giving a course about HTML 5 myself at Ordina, I drove to Microsoft Belgium to watch the announcements about Windows Azure. Scott Gu...
The Microsoft Developer Tools Blog and the Visual Studio 11 Dark Theme got an update
I just noticed that the Developer Tools blog got an update and now try to get things more closely together from one starting screen on. If you want to read m...
Get ready to meet Windows Azure
Do you like to know what’s going on at Microsoft concerning Windows Azure? Even better, would you like to see Scott Guthrie presenting and breathing Windows ...
I moved to Orcsweb for my hosting
Since 2006 my blog was running on the servers of webhost4life and for years I’ve been a happy camper over there. During the last year I started noticing and ...
GitHub for Windows has arrived
Seems it paid off to let Phil Haack move to GitHub. I just noticed that there’s a version 1.0 for download of GitHub for Windows. I quickly installed it and ...
Windows Azure Insider
Today I got the news that I became a Windows Azure Insider. For me that was great news as now I can collaborate with Microsoft and other Insiders about my fi...
I just registered for Community Day 2012
It’s becoming one of those yearly traditions in Belgium: rainy weather, great beers, … and since the last years also the yearly Community Day. This year ther...
SQL Server Compact to the rescue when VS11 Beta doesn’t want to play nicely with LocalDB
Today I was trying to run a sample application for VS11 Beta that I found online: Download Hands-on Lab Source Files. However when trying to run the pages I ...
I just passed the 175000 recognition points border at the ASP.NET forums
I just noticed I passed the 175.000 recognition points border at forums.asp.net. Cool! Does this mean something special? Well not at first glance but it does...
Delivered a WebCamps in the Netherlands
Yesterday I was the main presenter at Microsoft WebCamps in Utrecht, The Netherlands. A total of 122 people attended with a very diverse public. Ranging from...
I attended the first BeCPP user group meeting
It’s been something like 10 years that I didn’t write C++ code myself anymore. When I heard my friend Marc Gregoire started up his own user group BeCPP I dec...
The ASP.NET website got a new element in the menu bar
I just noticed that the ASP.NET website has gotten a small but very interesting upgrade. Until recently it was somewhat hard to find the information about We...
I found my MVP renewal in my mailbox
Woohoo! And another year of being an MVP. I’m glad I made it again and that my contributions to the community get appreciated by that same community and Micr...
All Techdays Belgium 2012 sessions are online for watching
Tech days Belgium 2012 was a jam packed load of interesting sessions. For those who couldn’t attend or, like myself, couldn’t follow the sessions due to havi...
Just installed the update of Webmatrix 2 beta
Just as of today there’s a new update of WebMatrix 2 Beta for download. One of the direct changes that one can see is that WebPages 2 coolness dripped into i...
Goodbye Internet Explorer 6
Today I gave another Webcamps session at Microsoft HQ in Brussels Belgium. A nice bunch of people and I had a small surprise for them later on the day… Micro...
Playing around with the new HTML 5 range input type and CSS 3 column module
In a former post I already presented the new CSS 3 column module and some funky stuff one can do with it.
CSS 3 new column module
More and more CSS 3 technology starts to come natively to modern browsers. One of these that I like is the new column module. This post will highlight some o...
Coffeescript introduction free online book
Today I found out about a freely available online book about Coffeescript.
How to send a mail with an ics appointment as attachment with System.Net.Mail
If you provide a way for your user to make an appointment it’s always a good idea to provide a reminder mechanism for him or her. A nice way to do this is to...
Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit December 2011 update and 30 free books
Just noticed via Twitter that there’s a new December 2011 update available: Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit December 2011 update. This t...
2011
First steps to a newer site
Today I’ve spent some time on getting the first pages right for a new site. Since 2006 I’ve only had a blog but no particular pages handy on my site. Due to ...
The sessions I look forward to at Techdays 2012
The list of sessions of Techdays 2012 is practically at 100% so that makes it easy to start choosing the ones I would like to attend up front .
Get that bit of hard drive back by cleaning the Web Platform Installer cache
With prices of hard drives going up at the moment you might want to reclaim some valuable space on it.
New events overview site for Microsoft Belgium
Recently Microsoft released a new web site where you can see what will be covered by
Learn Windows Azure event
The last months were pretty quiet around ScottGu but yesterday evening, for us Belgian people, there was a great and lengthy streamed event about Windows Azu...
Windows Azure training kit update–December 2011
Recently the 1.6 version of the SDK came out and that usually is followed up by a new version of the training toolkit. You can grab the latest version here.
My Webcamps presentation about HTML5
Today I gave my first Webcamps session at Microsoft Belgium. The agenda for the day was
Presentation about WebMatrix in evening school
Yesterday evening I gave my first presentation in evening school for adults. The topic of the session was an introduction to WebMatrix. The reactions were gr...
My book about Entity Framework Code First has arrived
I got a new book to read: Entity Framework Code First by Julie Lerman.
Orchard CMS Gallery feed has changed after the migration to Azure
Last week Orchard, the new cool CMS system from the Microsoft stables, was migrated to the cloud. More precisely to Windows Azure. That’s of course great new...
I am a MEET member
I got informed that I became a MEET member by my Belgian DPE representative at Microsoft. MEET stands for Microsoft Extended Experts Team.
TechDays 2012
About Microsoft TechDays
My first live meeting is online
Last Tuesday I performed my first live meeting for Microsoft. Topic: Orchard the new CMS in town.
My article for SDN about Caching services in Windows Azure was published
Last summer I was asked if I could write an article for SDN, a Dutch organization for IT enthusiasts. First time that I wrote for the magazine they offer but...
SQL Azure and Reporting updates and as a bonus databases can be 150 Gb instead of 50
Great to see that Azure gets better each time. Today I noticed an interesting blog post which stated that SQL Azure databases can become 150Gb in size instea...
Cool HTML5 slide deck about Coffeescript
Be sure to check it out on http://bodil.github.com/coffeescript/.
How to get Intellisense back in standalone javascript files in Visual Studio
Visual Studio is a great tool but not all tooling is well known. I see this question still way too often on the ASP.NET forums so I thought I would blog abou...
Microsoft Mathematics 4.0
Microsoft Mathematics provides a set of mathematical tools that help students get school work done quickly and easily. With Microsoft Mathematics, students c...
Bad summer weather in Belgium
results in increasing my post count on the ASP.NET forums a lot it seems:
Summer course in the cloud
When I look outside I see quite some clouds passing by. Not what you want during summer, especially when rain starts. However there are also fun clouds. They...
Another MSDN summer course
A couple of weeks ago you could already find yourself getting knowledge about Windows Phone 7 Mango and Visual Studio 2010 ALM.
Adobe Edge preview or Adobes new HTML 5 tool on the block
Today Adobe released it’s latest tool in preview mode: Edge.
New summer, new MSDN summer courses
Either you’re melting away like an ice cream put in the oven or you’re being washed away by rains but there’s one certainty since last summer: There are seve...
If you struggle with localized error messages there’s a site on the web that can help you out
You know how it goes, you’re coding “in the zone” and suddenly, poof, some error message. The culprit is that you have a localized version of the error messa...
The Belgian Community day 2011 was a blast
Well organized and in a great location last Thursday the fifth edition of Community day was held. I gave a presentation myself about giving applications a se...
Belgian Community day 2011
Next week, on June 23rd, there’s not only a new edition of the Belgian Community day. It’s also the fifth time it’s being held. A lot of Belgian, and this ye...
Microsoft Belgian Techdays 2011 videos online
It was a great event in Antwerp again and now the sessions can be viewed by everyone:
I got reawarded as an MVP
I just got the great news that I’m renewed as a Microsoft MVP (/images/Most Valuable Professional). I’m of course very happy about and feel honored by it. Wo...
Book review: ASP.NET MVC 2 Cookbook
A couple of weeks ago I found a new shiny book in my mailbox: ASP.NET MVC2 Cookbook by Andrew Siemer and Richard Kimber. Due to a very busy schedule at work ...
Back from the MVP summit 2011 edition
Wow, I can’t believe how fast the days went after getting from Brussels to Seattle and now being back again. This year it was again a warm welcome by Microso...
Update for the ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization Toolkit
Last year the ASP.NET team released a Sprite and Image Optimization Toolkit which allows ASP.NET web sites to be optimized for higher performance where appli...
Belgian Windows Azure contest announced
Your business, your fame. That’s the title of the new Belgian Microsoft contest. It’s a great opportunity for you to learn to work with Azure, put your compa...
Microsoft Webcafe 2 was fun
Yesterday I attended the second edition of Microsoft WebCafe. A social get together with tech people hosted by Microsoft and each time at a different locatio...
First Webcamps in Belgium recordings can be seen online
Last week a Scott Hanselman came to Belgium for the first Webcamps. I could only attend the first 2 hours due to client obligations but I was glad to see qui...
I just hit the 150000 recognition points on the ASP.NET forums
It was lingering for some time but I finally made it across the border of the magical number of 150.000 recognition points over at the ASP.NET forums. I’m gl...
Killing running instances of the Visual Studio webserver with a simple bat file
As (/images/web)developer mainly living inside Visual Studio during the day at work I usually make use of the built in webserver of this IDE, namely Cassini....
Goodbye 2010, hello 2011
People tend to write things down after events and in the mean time like to write down what they hope or expect in the future. I’m no exception on that part s...
2010
Windows Azure trainings kit December 2010 version is released for SDK 1.3
With lots of goodies in it. Feels like Santa’s early this year .
I presented at Feweb10 about Azug
Since several months now I’m one of the board members of Azug, the Belgian Windows Azure User Group. Feweb, the Belgian organisation for web developers/desig...
Windows Azure SDK and Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio (November 2010)
Microsoft released a new SDK and toolset for Windows Azure, currently version 1.3. Be sure to check it out:
Creating a horizontal menu with some simple CSS, a Datalist control and a sitemap in ASP.NET
ASP.NET provides developers with some very handy controls like a Treeview or a Menu control for displaying data coming from a sitemap file. Though a very com...
Silverlight Firestarter on December 2nd
Recently Microsoft presented quite a lot of sessions on PDC10. Unfortunately for a lot of adepts there was one technology missing somewhat: Silverlight. Quit...
Remix10 at Belgium
Today I went to Remix10 in Affligem. Due to some crazy traffic jams I missed a part of the keynote but was in time to see Katrien De Graeve jump in front of ...
Important: ASP.NET Security Vulnerability
A couple of days ago I became aware of the following article: Security Hack Exposes Forms Authentication in ASP.NET. That never sounds good and Microsoft swi...
Windows Phone 7 developer tools released
Just read on the Gu’s blog that the developer tools for Windows Phone 7 got released. That’s great news!
Internet Explorer 9 Beta got released
Play in a more beautiful web, explore Internet explorer 9 Beta. It’s great to see that Microsoft reveals its newest browser to the world.
Visug presentation: WebMatrix
On Wednesday I performed a presentation about WebMatrix and its components: Razor syntax, the WebMatrix IDE, SQL CE and IIS Express. All great products creat...
Creating High Performance Silverlight Applications for Windows Phone
Microsoft released training material on how to create high performing application in Silverlight for their upcoming Phone 7. Check it out.
Remix 10 Belgium edtion here I come
I subscribed today to attend Remix10 on September 28th. Last editions were always very interesting and when I take a look at the overview of what’s already k...
Microsofts MSDN Summer Courses
In Belgium you can never be sure of the weather. It might be great, it might be too hot, it might be too rainy, … You get the picture. Most of the time you s...
ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 released
Today Microsoft released a new version of their MVC project. Still in preview but it looks promising, especially because the new view engine Razor got in it....
Scriptjunkie on MSDN
Sometimes you just stumble upon something new that looks interesting. After a short vacation, too short, I was surfing the web, following twitter, … and ende...
Webmatrix
Scott Guthrie has been blogging several days since last week about new cool things coming out soon: IIS Express, SQL Server Compact Edition & Razor. That...
MSDN has a new look and feel
Just noticed on the US version of the MSDN site that it had a great new look and feel:
8 years on the ASP.NET forums
8 years ago I started to program in .NET professionally. Also on that day I started out as a newcomer on the ASP.NET forums. During those years I was first m...
Community day 2010 was a blast
When I arrived early this morning there were cookies made by Subway. For my non Belgian friends: Subway only started in Belgium last year. The sessions I int...
I’m going to Community day 2010
Tomorrow’s Community day in Belgium. Meaning: a day full of great content provided by all Belgian user groups. I plan on following these courses:
I became 35 today
And another year, a great year, has passed. I’ve been reawarded as MVP, went to the US where I was able to drive around for a week and see the Grand canyon, ...
Silverlight 4 tools and WCF RIA Services are out, so is the training kit
This week the long awaited Silverlight 4 tools for Visual Studio 2010 got released. With it ships version 1 of WCF RIA Services.
I took the Certified Scrum Master course
My company Ordina gave me the opportunity to follow a 2 day course to become a Scrum Master. The course itself was given by Mitch Lacey who gave some great i...
Visual Studio 2010 keybinding cards
If you’re a bit like me you like to have a lot of keyboard shortcuts handy while coding in your favorite IDE, Visual Studio. In the past I blogged about chea...
Being a pimp without Silverlight presentation
Yesterday evening I did my first presentation for the Belgian user group Visug together with Maarten Balliauw. The session was about ASP.NET MVC 2 and jQuery...
jQuery code snippets for Visual Studio 2010
Codeplex is a great resource to find all kinds of things developer related. One of the things I found recently were a bunch of snippets for jQuery to make li...
Moving to Visual Studio 2010 eBook
I just found out about this free eBook which can be found for download here.
Today Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 got released
A long awaited arrival of Visual Studio 2010 came true today as Microsoft shipped the product. This is one version that I installed also during the alpha and...
Had my first foreign speaker experience in Lebanon
Yesterday I had the pleasure to deliver my first international presentation in Lebanon. The talk was about ASP.NET MVC 2 which got recently released topped w...
I got renewed as an MVP for 2010
Today I got the message that my MVP got extended for another year. That’s great news and I’ll make sure to keep up the things that are community related duri...
Silverlight 4 training course at Channel9
The Silverlight 4 Training Course includes a whitepaper explaining all of the new Silverlight 4 RC features, several hands-on-labs that explain the features,...
Windows Phone 7 book
Only yesterday I was viewing the MIX10 keynote at Microsoft Brussels via live stream and today I noticed on twitter that Charles Petzold has already put a pr...
New online Silverlight and Expression learning studio: Toolbox
Microsoft launched .toolbox, a new site dedicated on learning Silverlight and Expression.
Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit - February Release
The Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos. This content is designed to help you learn how to ...
Swiss MSDN team gives away a hands-on lab about Silverlight 4 and WCF RIA Services
From the Swiss MSDN blog:
Whitepaper about building high performance websites
While taking a look at the new Ajax library Microsoft put online I noticed at the bottom of a certain page a link to an interesting whitepaper: Building high...
2009
Scott Guthrie in Belgium
Yesterda I went to Kinepolis in Brussels for what was going to be a great afternoon. Scott Guthrie doesn’t come every year to Belgium, actually it was its se...
Using a hidden field to pass javascript variables to the codebehind of an ASP.NET webform
With a lot of ajax, sometimes too much, being used in modern web applications it usually means that also calculations or data is being kept on the client. Th...
Book review: ASP.NET 3.5 Content Management System Development
Recently I got this book for a review. The book itself is ASP.NET 3.5 Content Management System Development by Packt publishing.
Microsoft Ajax CDN with SSL support
Microsoft’s investing in CDN for a lot of their ajax scripts and also jQuery, we already knew that for a while. Now they also added support for SSL so when y...
Visual Studio 2010: Add an extra context menu item to the document tab
I got this question in one of the new forums over at ASP.NET. I took a bit of time to search and this is the result I came up with:
Getting the name of the table in which a column with specified name appears
Sometimes you need to find out in which tables a certain column name exists. For example when you want to find out where it’s being used as a foreign key. He...
VS2010, ASP.NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0 beta videos
A lot of cool stuff’s coming out soon and there are already beta bits available. With beta bits there are also already videos available to look at and get fa...
In what order does HttpRequest go through the collections?
I found this question on the ASP.NET forums. The member asking this question already knew that the collections were Cookies, Form, Servervariables and Querys...
Handy firefox plugins for developers part 2
A while ago I already showed several handy plugins I like to use. Of course the world keeps on turning and new plugins are created or I just happen to stumbl...
Installing Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2
I noticed that Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 got out for MSDN subscribers today. It’ll be available for the rest of the world on October 23rd. Also good news: ne...
Windows 7 Training kit for developer’s out
You can grab the good stuff here.
ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 1 is out
Great news for the ASP.NET MVC fans. After a release of MVC 1 earlier this year today the first preview of version 2 has been placed on the download servers.
Some handy tools when working with javascript
Since more and more people are using ajax and as such javascript/ecmascript, you as a developer/designer need tools to make it through the day. Here are some...
Guidance on Differences Between WPF and Silverlight
Since WPF and especially Silverlight, since version 3 recently was released, have similarities it’s nice to have an overview of what both technologies have t...
Silverlight 3 is out
Going on vacation to Greece without pc or internet connection (/images/but in very good company) is nice but you always find when coming home that new cool t...
Where to download the AJAX Control toolkit that targets .NET 2.0?
Strange but true but this is a question that I notice a lot on forums.asp.net. Normally the latest and most up to date version can be found at http://ajaxcon...
ASP.NET AJAX Control toolkit Modalpopupextender control
I’ve seen questions about this control over and over again on the forums and decided to write something about it. The most common questions seem to be these:
Exporting embedded resources from the .NET framework with .NET Reflector
The first time I encountered .NET Reflector was at Techdays Belgium in 2003 during a session. I got interested in this valuable tool and used it ever since f...
Book review: ASP.NET MVC Quickly
I recently read the book ASP.NET MVC Quickly from Maarten Balliauw, published by PACKT Publishing. It’s been one of those few books that I read from cover to...
Visual studio 2010 and .NET framework 4.0 Beta 1 shipped
Just noticed that Visual studio 2010 and .NET framework 4.0 Beta 1 shipped. This is great news as that means that people can download it and play around with...
New version of the ASP.NET AJAX Control toolkit
Just saw on Twitter that there’s a new version of the ASP.NET AJAX Control toolkit available on codeplex. There are 3 new controls available:
Glimmer got out
Just read on twitter that Glimmer got out today.
New Belgian Community Day coming up
Last year it was only a half day but apparently this year it’s going to be a full blown day of content by several of Belgian user groups. Keep June 25th rese...
Illustrated C# 2008 as a free eBook download available
Grab your copy here.
SQL Server 2008 Service pack 1 available for download
Taken from the download site:
Breached the 100.000 recognition points barrier on forums.asp.net
Wow, it seems I’ve been busy lately. First becoming an ASP Insider, then got my MVP renewed and today I breached as the first person ever the mythical barrie...
I got my MVP renewal for 2009!!
Got the mail today with the great news that I’m renewed as an MVP for the year 2009. I must say, a week after hearing that I became an ASP Insider this is al...
I’ve become an ASP Insider
I got the message from Microsoft that I’ve been added to the ASP Insiders crew. This is a great reward from Microsoft towards certain people. Like Scott Guth...
ASP.NET MVC Training kit
Just found on twitter about the release of the ASP.NET MVC Training kit.
Silverlight and deepzoom. Delivering content
What can you do to compete with something that’s already established for years like Adobe Flash? Deliver something decent yourself but most importantly have ...
ASP.NET MVC Sample projects
I was browsing on the new pages for ASP.NET MVC on www.asp.net and noticed that besides Storefront and Nerddinner there was another tutorial guide available:...
Discovering Internet Explorer Developer Tools
In case you didn’t know it yet, Microsoft released version 8 of their browser. It ships now with some handy built in developer tools. I found out about this ...
Just installed IE8
Grab it here: www.microsoft.com/ie8. Better security included, faster rendering on pages and more standards based.
ASP.NET MVC 1 seems to be out
Noticed it a couple of hours ago on the forums that someone was able to download the bits and just noticed that the download link itself was available: http:...
IIS tutorials for ASP.NET
Just noticed that there are several new videos under the learn section at “_blank”>www.asp.net. This time about IIS for ASP.NET. Be sure to check them out...
CSS Color palette
Following people on Twitter can not only be fun but also rewarding. Dana Coffey recently twitted about a tool that can be very handy: Color Palette Generator...
Blu – a cool WPF application
During the last year I’ve seen several really cool looking WPF applications. But actually mostly demo material. Well today I installed blu. It’s a fancy litt...
Handy Firefox plugins for web developers
Web developer or designers don’t only need to check their creations in Firefox but they mostly also love the browser for the simple fact that there are a ton...
Techdays 2009 Belgium
Aaaah, something to look forward to. The yearly Microsoft local techdays will be in Antwerp this year. Good for me as that city’s way nearer than all the oth...
IETester tool
A while ago someone from the testing came asking that a certain feature really didn’t look good in IE6. Since I’m on Vista with IE7 myself and didn’t want to...
Making mockups for your analysis
During my years as a software engineer I encountered on several occasions during a presentation of mockups that the client thought it was the real deal alrea...
Cool ASP.NET Page Life Cycle diagram
In 2006 I put on my blog a diagram about the ASP.NET Page Life Cycle which I found once on the internet, saved a copy of it but later on couldn’t find anywhe...
Performance tips for web development
With all the web 2.0 buzz that started a couple of years ago javascript gets used more and more in modern websites and –applications. Most of the time everyo...
Compressing and obfuscating javascript and css files with YUICompressor in Visual Studio
Though external javascript and css files can be cached by a browser the initial download can still be quite large. For example the minified jQuery library co...
ASP.NET MVC RC is available
Just read the news on Scott Guthrie’s blog that ASP.NET MVC RC got released today. That’s good news as this means that the final version will probably ship s...
My grandfather passed away
Today I got to hear that my grandfather passed away. He almost made it to the age of 92, a very respectable age, especially if you know that he still drove w...
2008
.NET 4.0 framework poster
Cool! In the past Microsoft already released similar posters but this time you can also Deepzoom to view it. Looks great.
jQuery Visual Studio documentation files
I just noticed that on the site of jQuery there’s now also a download available for having a much better intellisense experience. It’s actually a big js file...
New .NET logo
At the PDC a new logo for .NET was introduced:
10000 posts on the forums. I must be doing something right
Just noticed that I just wrote my 10.000th post on the ASP.NET forums. Cool! Well I hope many people enjoyed my replies and possible answers during those yea...
Patrick Tisseghem passed away
Oh man, I just found out about this sad news. The following news statement is taken from the site of U2U, the company that he cofounded:
ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit only for 3.5 anymore?
Last week I had to help someone out on the ASP.NET that was asking the question that he couldn’t find the 2.0 bits anymore of the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolki...
Google Chrome marketing
During my studies of becoming an engineer I found marketing one of my most interesting side courses. During the last years I tried to follow blogs like the o...
Training kit for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .NET 3.5 SP1
I just found out about the new training kit thanks to the blog of Guy Bernstein. While I’m downloading this kit I’m also downloading the latest MSDN library ...
Visual Studio 2008 SP1 is out
Well, just after last week SQL Server 2008 was released, SP1 for Visual Studio 2008 came out today. Normally a service pack only contains some patches but th...
Ibiza music free podcast
Last week I bought several new songs on iTunes and suddenly I noticed in the store a link to a free podcast by MASASHI OSAKU. If you’re into it you can subsc...
SQL Server 2008 in RTM
Yes, you read it correctly, SQL Server 2008 hit the RTM status. You can download a trial here or the real stuff at the MSDN subscription pages.
Book review: ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls Essentials
Some time ago I received this book for reviewing and now I finally got the time to completely finish reading it. The nice thing about the book is that it cov...
Domain Driven Design: free eBook
The most complicated aspect of large software projects is not the implementation, it is the real world domain that the software serves. Domain Driven Design ...
Community day was a blast
On June 26th, community day 2008 was held in Keerbergen. Last year I couldn’t make it so I really wanted to go this year. It was all thanks to the sponsors t...
Downloaded FireFox 3 for Windows and Internet Explorer 8 Beta
Yesterday I already downloaded FireFox 3 on my MacBook Pro and today on my PC. In the meantime I also downloaded and installed IE8 Beta. Both are working jus...
Firefox 3 download day
I just tried to download Firefox 3 from their official site. However that seems to be down. Luckily one of my US buddies, Kevin Jones, knew another site wher...
How nerdy are you?
Just found out about this site: (/images/>). It’s a site to popularize jobs in IT in Belgium amongst youngsters so it’s only available in Dutch and French...
TFS branching and merging session
Last week I attended an interesting presentation about version control with Team Foundation Server. Yves Goeleven presented about the different patterns when...
New AJAX Control Toolkit Tutorials
Wow, someone has been busy. There just appeared 46 brand new AJAX Control Toolkit tutorials. They’re nice and short to show specific topics and needs. Nicely...
Microsoft communities gets updated
I used this site already before but then it only showed just plain links to blog articles or channel 9 videos. When I just took a look it was completely rest...
Kaxaml
Just found out about this little tool that seemed interesting to me: Kaxaml, a lightweight xamlpad alike tool. Apparently it’s also free which is always a ni...
Hello Secure World
Just found out about this site about security: Hellosecureworld. Take a look at it. It’s in Silverlight (/images/always a good reason to check something out)...
Community day 2008 in Belgium on June 26th
In case you’re still unaware of it, Community day is going to be held on June 26th. This is a free day with interesting technical content provided by the com...
Patient Journey Demonstrator
Wow, this is a cool application. Be sure to check it out and have Silverlight installed. Funny thing for me is that I worked in a team in 2001 that was also ...
New version for Live search
I just noticed at home that the look & feel of live search has changed. Steve Balmer recently stated that Microsoft is updating its whole live experience...
We arrived in Seattle for the MVP summit
This morning I got up quite early to check my baggage a last time and drive to the rail station. There I met up with 2 other Belgian MVP’s: Gill & Ilse. ...
Getting ready for the MVP Summit 2008 edition
Tomorrow I’m heading for Seattle for the annual MVP summit. I just got renewed so I’m quite happy to be there as a full blown MVP. This is also the first tim...
Meet and greet with Tim Sneath
Tim Sneath, a well known evangelist of Microsoft was in Belgium yesterday. I got invited for a meet and greet with him by Microsoft Belgium. The first part w...
I won a HTC Dual Touch
I got the message that I won a HTC Dual Touch thanks to a contest of one of the sponsors (/images/www.ausy.be)) on last Visug event. It’s a nice phone with a...
Visug seminar: Juwal Lowy: WCF beyond the endpoints
Last Thursday I attended a Visug seminar about WCF. This session was presented by Juwal Lowy, a dedicated and well known employee of IDesign. The session was...
I got my MVP renewal for 2008!
I just noticed this message in my inbox:
I’ll be attending MIX Essentials Belgium
Join the conversation and explore how you can create next-generation Web experiences. Now, for the first time in Belgium, the MIX essentials conference bring...
A couple of new sites from Microsoft: TaskMarket and Expression
It seems Microsoft recently put up a couple of new sites that might be of interest to you:
Silverlight Essential Training
I just found out about this one: Silverlight Essential Training. Extra video material for free. Man, I really need a couple of weeks off soon to dive into th...
Windows Vista SP1 released
Finally the cat’s out of the bag: Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista has been released. MSDN subscribers could already download and install it. I tried a coupl...
Silverlight 2 poster for developers
Just noticed this one on the blog of Brad Abrams: Silverlight 2 Developer Poster. Always nice to have such very visual representation of the possibilities of...
Ask the expert at Techdays Belgium 2008
Today I was one of the people that stood on the “Ask the expert” booth at Techdays Belgium 2008. It was the first time I did this and I really enjoyed it. If...
MIX08 Sessions
You can already start downloading the MIX08 sessions. I just finished watching the keynote and boy am I looking forward to Silverlight 2 final edition. Also ...
Problem opening chm file under Windows Vista
I downloaded the documentation of the new Silverlight 2 Beta 1. When I tried to open it, after a successful download was this:
ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 and Silverlight 2.0
It’s MIX and that always means great stuff coming to web developers. This year it’s the ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 and Silverlight 2. Great times are ahead of us.
Get random number humor
This is something that can make me laugh:
Visual Studio 2008 and themes for better
Since a couple of weeks I changed my IDE at work from Visual Studio 2005 to Visual Studio 2008 Team System for developers. We still target the .NET 2.0 frame...
An early look on Silverlight 2
Scott Guthrie has written an exhaustive series of articles of the upcoming Silverlight 2. I guess this is the version the majority of developers is waiting f...
ASP.NET wiki
Just launched on the ASP.NET website: the ASP.NET wiki. Take a look at it and see if you can contribute. Also take a look at the publishing guidelines.
Visual Studio Gallery
Just found out throught this link that Microsoft launched a new website dedicated to Visual Studio plugins. You can take a look at it here. Grz, Kris.
Learning ASP.NET security
Just read that Scott Mitchel has started another series on ASP.NET articles. This time he’ll be covering security in ASP.NET. Be sure to check it out: Securi...
Nice point of view on corporate IT spending and its impact on Web 2.0
Just noticed this article: Belt-Tightening In Corporate IT Spending Will be Good For Web 2.0. With all those heavy loaded words of recession, rising prices, ...
Are you a hero?
Because Heroes happen {here}.
Several of my friends became MVP
Always nice to start the year like this. 2 of my friends I know of became MVP recently:
2007
DJ Tiësto podcasts on Radio 538
If you like DJ Tiësto and the type of music he presents you can grab free podcasts at Radio 538. If you have iTunes installed on your computer...
LINQ cheat sheet
Milan Negovan did it again. After several cheat sheets about ASP.NET AJAX he has now created a cheat sheet about LINQ.
Hooked on LINQ wiki
Just received this by email from my collegue Jean-Christophe at my current client BICS. Apparently one of my MVP colleagues set up a wiki for LINQ related te...
Announcing the 1ste Silverlight challenge
I noticed on Gill’s blog that there’s an interesting contest.
101 LINQ to SQL samples
I just found out about these samples:
ASP.NET Pro magazine December issue is out
I got notified that the latest issue’s out. It’s nice to see that magazines are also offering their material online for free. Of course it comes with adds bu...
Some new video material on Visual Studio 2008, .NET 3.5 and LINQ
Not so long ago I blogged about new video material on ASP.NET 3.5 and LINQ. Since I didn’t have much time lately to keep up with my blogreading I just found ...
Numbers and AJAX Slider article
I found a couple of fine links:
Can you still follow up with Microsoft?
Ok, it seems this year has been the year of new technologies from Microsoft and yet new stuff’s coming out. I found this blog post from Julie Lerman that had...
Linqpad
If you want to learn a bit more about LINQ and don’t directly want to use Visual Studio 2008, you can use this free tool: LINQPad. I just did a quick test ru...
Visual studio daily tips and tricks
Our every day IDE of choice, Visual Studio, is a nice tool. I already know quite a lot of keyboard shortcuts and how to handle the IDE myself but this blog h...
Developer Highway Code book
*To build software that meets your security objectives, you must integrate security activities into your software development lifecycle. This handbook captur...
Problems with aspnet_regsql (ASP.NET SQL Server Setup Wizard)
Setting up a new environment sometimes gets you into troubles. On my new laptop I didn’t want to install SQL Server Express but only the developer edition of...
First iTunes store experience
Well, I’ve got an iPod and thanks to my ADSL provider I also got 10 free songs to download on iTunes. Good combination right? Well, in the overwhelming scree...
Demo succeeded
This day we had a successful demo of our ongoing effort to create a great application for our current client BICS. No crashes at all (/images/is that a good ...
MSDN evening: Visual Studio 2008
Yesterday evening I and several colleagues attended the MSDN evening about Visual Studio 2008. It was most of the time an introduction of the possibilities o...
Silverlight 1.1 tools for Visual Studio 2008
Actually I wasn’t expecting this one for a couple of weeks but I just read on the blog of Scott Guthrie that they just released it.
PnPGuidance
Just found out about this site, http://www.pnpguidance.net/. Seemed interesting and I justed wanted to share the goods.
Installed Visual Studio 2008
Yesterday evening I started the installer but it really got stuck. Bummer. But luckily there’s a thriving forum to ask questions. The answer I got was to fir...
Rebooting your iPod
Several months ago I purchased an iPod nano (/images/former version) and all of a sudden today it just hung. I have no indication what caused it. Luckily a c...
Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Training Kit
Another nice give away from Microsoft: Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Training Kit.
Visual Studio 2008
Just signed in to MSDN subscriptions and apparently the Beta 2 after Visual Studio 2008 dissapeared. I know what I’ll be downloading evening.
Windows Live Writer out of beta
Yep, you read that right: Windows Live Writer is out of beta. I’ve been using it for quite a while, since the betas, and found it a decent blog writer. One t...
New books arrived today
A couple of weeks ago I decided to buy these 2 books at Amazon. They arrived today by mail though the initial mail from Amazon stated that the expected date ...
.NET 3.5 namespaces poster
Just found out about this one thanks to this blogpost. You can download the full size poster as a pdf right here.
Windows Vista Ultimate on a MacBook Pro with bootcamp
I just installed succesfully Vista Ultimate on my MacBook Pro with the bootcamp utility. Quite easy to setup actually. You just need to keep in handy your Vi...
Silverlight MSDN event
Yesterday evening I attended an MSDN event in Utopolis Mechelen dedicated to Silverlight. Not a really deep dive technical session and you could tell by seei...
Installed MAC OS X Leopard
Like the title says, I bought Leopard and installed it on my MacBook Pro. Works like a charm. 1 thing I already like is the new stack possibility. I’m eager ...
Silverlight on MAC OSX
I was just working on my new macBook pro reading my blog news when I stumbled upon this news: Popfly beta by Somasegar. I had the Silverlight plugin already ...
Community effort on the ASP.NET forums
Well, it seems I just hit the “magic” border of moderating 10.000 posts since December 18th 2006. A nice achievement but the most important part of it is tha...
Community support
Since I see a lot of questions in the ASP.NET forums that make me believe that people don’t always seem to find the information they’re after I thought I poi...
LEAP course
Yesterday I went to the first of 5 sessions for my LEAP course. Taken from the website: LEAP (/images/Lead Enterprise Architect Program) is meant at complem...
Microsoft Office Live eBook on Build a Web site That Sells 1.0
Yep, a free eBook to download. I have yet to read it myself but already took a quick glance at it. You can download it here.
Writing a log entry from my new macBook pro
Yes, you’re reading correctly, I’ve bought a brand new macBook pro today. It’s quite a new experience for me as I grew up with MS-DOS and Windows. But so far...
ASP.NET Starter Kits news
Always nice to see a working example when learning something new. I just noticed that the list of starter kits has grown. Be sure to check them out. It seems...
Using Access instead of SQL server for your ASP.NET Application Services
Standard out of the box ASP.NET 2.0 uses SQL Server Express for the Application Services (/images/Membership, Roles, …). However sometimes you don’t want it ...
C# 3.0 and LINQ Hands On Labs
C#3.0 and LINQ offer new and compelling features to developers. You can get to know both better by taking a look at these hands on labs provided by Microsoft:
Silverlight presentation on September 20th
VISUG offers a presentation, given by my buddy Gill Cleeren, on Silverlight. I’ll be attending it and I hope to see several of my other friends there as well...
Starter kits and Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2
You just got to love this, when you download a starter kit, and run the .vsi file it doesn’t only get into the available templates of Visual Studio 2005 but ...
Tafiti
Like Silverlight? Like search? Like them combined? If so be sure to check out the new Tafiti search engine. I especially liked the treeview option where you ...
Microsoft codenames
Always fun to know what those names stand/stood for and what they became when the product got actually released. Take a look here: Microsoft codenames.
Very sad news for the Belgian .NET community
I just read the sad news about the death of a great .NET community person: David Boschmans. I knew David as being a great and nice guy that took the time to ...
Channel 8
Hi,
www.asp.net got a refresh
A site that I visit frequently just got a repaint job. It looks nice I must say. Be sure to check it out at http://www.asp.net/. If you should have any sugge...
Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 is here
Just saw it on the download pages: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa700831.aspx.
Windows Server 2008 Developer Training Kit (Beta 3)
Taken from the download site:
Powershell analyser
Currently it’s still in Beta phase but it sure does look promising to me after seeing this demo video: http://www.powershellanalyzer.com/demos/psaintrowmv.ht...
Excel keyboard shortcuts
Since I was doing a lot of work with Excel this day and got tired of using my mouse constantly I looked up, and found, a nice keyboard shortcut overview: htt...
Celebrating my lustrum on the ASP.NET forums
Today I’m celebrating my lustrum on the ASP.NET forums. That also means that I started developing with .NET 5 years ago officially. I learned a lot in those ...
Nibbles & Nuggets
One of the nice things when you gather with a bunch of tech minded people like yourself (/images/MicrosoftVIPCommunityOffsite2007.aspx)) is that you get to k...
Microsoft VIP Community Offsite 2007
Since I became an MVP I also got into the VIP pool of people. This was my first time but it was nice to see some other Belgian MVP’s but also others that mad...
Woohoo I’m 32!!
Yes, another year older for this guy. For IT minded people I’m going from 11111 to 100000 by the way. And for people that whish to know: I was indeed born on...
Community Day 2007
Several Belgian user groups, BIWUG, VISUG, SQLUG, IT-Talks, and Pro-Exchange, will be having a community day on juni 28th. If you’re living in Belgium, eager...
PDF versions of ASP.NETPro magazine for download
Find the latest 3 issues here as a pdf document: http://www.aspnetpro.com/PDF/asp_PDF_3Mags.asp.
Keeping your ASP.NET webform’s position on postback
I see that question appearing on the ASP.NET forums over and over again so I decided to dedicate a post on the subject. There are, depending on the .NET fram...
Selection in a GridView Control in a different way
Normally you have the possibility to choose Enable Selection in the Smart tag of a GridView control. This results in an extra column in front of the GridView...
Creating more community feeling on the ASP.NET
Since recently the ASP.NET forums got an upgrade to the new Community Server 2007 there’s also the possibility to show your Fans and Friends. Not really much...
Create Membership tables in another database than the standard aspnetdb.mdf
When you start creating a new ASP.NET 2.0 site with Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Web Developer Express (/images/VWD) and want to start using it you’ll notice...
PopFly invitation
I just received my PopFly invitation. I hope to find some free time the next weeks to play around with it. In case you don’t know what PopFly is, check out m...
Rudi Vranckx presentation
Yesterday evening I attended a presentation by the Flemish conflict reporter Rudi Vranckx who’s the guy that has massive knowledge about the Middle East. He ...
MSDN revamped
In case you didn’t notice it, the MSDN site got revamped. Actually I like the new look & feel. If you’re tired of seeing the treeview on the left you can...
Jump around!
And this time I don’t mean the song by House of pain (/images/upon which I also danced when I was way younger :-)).
Popfly demo
I only blogged about Popfly yesterday and today I noticed a link to a demo. This stuff rocks!! Honestly I hope to get an invitation from Microsoft soon that ...
Free book on Windows PowerShell
I didn’t had much time to play around with PowerShell myself but I noticed yesterday evening that Gill posted about a free eBook on the topic.
PopFly
Just read this on the blog of Somasegar:
MSDN Evening: Securing ASP.NET AJAX enabled web applications, lessons from the field
I’m already subscribed for that event and if you would like to come to you can go to this page: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=10...
Setting up classic ASP on Windows Vista and IIS7
Since I’m going to be doing some months of development with classic ASP on my Windows Vista Enterprise machine I had to set it up specifically. So this is no...
Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite Edition
Thanks to my MVP status I got a free MSDN subscription that’s packed with Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite. The installation however still lacked the Database P...
Mashup with ASP.NET AJAX article by Allesandro Gallo
One of my fellow MVPs created a nice article on how to make a Mash-it Up with ASP.NET AJAX: Using a proxy to access remote APIs. Enjoy the read!
Using a comma delimited string with id’s as input parameter for a SQL query
I just recently found out about a custom Split function for SQL Server 2000/2005 while I was reading this article: Designing Reports with SQL Server Reportin...
Silverlight on Channel9
One of my personal favorite channels, besides those on tv of course, is Channel 9: a dedicated media platform that developers that work with Microsoft techno...
I’m going to work at another company: QFrame
Well, another company is actually lying a bit. I got the same boss, the same collegues, …
Dynamic datacontrols
If you’re an ASP.NET developer like me you’re going to love this one: Dynamic Datacontrols.
Silverlight forums
The Silverlight forums, where I’ll also be playing a moderation role, just went live. Go check them out! Of course there’s not only the forums but also a get...
Setting or looking up keyboard shortcuts in Visual Studio
As a moderator on the ASP.NET I often see a request for a certain keyboard shortcut to do a specific thing. Since I like shortcuts myself and use them very o...
Windows Live Gallery update
I just read this news: Windows Live Gallery goes 2.0.
EnableGlobalization property on the ScriptManager
Last week I needed a calendar control to input dates into a textbox, in Belgian notation, so I decided to give the Calendar extender control in the ASP.NET A...
I bought a Logitech Alto
Since I shifted to another project/client I’m constantly using my laptop so I decided to “upgrade” my user experience while developing by making it easier to...
WPF/e becomes Silverlight
Somasegar blogged about it. Finally the new name of WPF/e is known and it’s Silverlight. I still have to get used to the new name but think it’s better this ...
BlogEngine.NET
I’m using dasBlog for nearly a year now and am quite pleased with it. Since recently Mads Kristensen decided to get his hands dirty and create a new blogengi...
Developer posters for 2007 Office System
Thanks to Bart Wessel’s blog I found out about the existence of these posters:
Code convertors
I just found out that Telerik’s creating a code conversion tool: http://converter.telerik.com/. It looks pretty slick with AJAX integration. No wonder becaus...
Another cool feature in Outlook 2007
I blogged about the nice feature of Conversation in a former post but I just found out, thanks to Joe Stagner (/images/the guy behind the learning videos at ...
WPF/e games
Soon, at MIX 07, WPF/e will be renamed as we were told last week by Jeff Prosise at Dev Days Belgium. Would be great because all too often people think it’s ...
Woohoo, I’m an MVP!!
I just received this email from Microsoft:
Nice feature in Outlook: Arrange by conversation
Sometimes you just find out new stuff by accident. This one also falls in that category. Because I’m moderator on the ASP.NET forums I also get quite some em...
Dev & IT pro days Belgium 2007 second day
Today I attended the second, actually third day if you include the pre-conference, and it was fun to see so many people I haven’t seen in a long time.
Dev & IT pro day pre conference with Jeff Prosise
I already knew Jeff’s a great speaker after I saw him deliver a session last year at TechEd in Barcelona. Today I had the pleasure to see him at work again a...
Powergadgets
A couple of weeks ago I was looking at creating Windows Vista Sidebar Gadgets based upon the tutorial at MIX university. If you’re interested in that and Pow...
Buck Rogers in the 25th century
Aah, pure youth sentiment. I bought a couple of weeks ago the first season, and watched it of course, of Buck Rogers in the 25th century. The graphics look p...
Dev Days 2007, here I come
I received a VIP access for Dev Days 2007 which will start on March 27th. And thanks to my boss, I’m also able to attend it. So thanks everyone for the oppor...
Microsoft Visual Studio Express Editions Beginner Developer Learning Center
Microsoft provides since recently a new learning center for the beginning developer. Totally dedicated to the freely available Expression editions of Visual ...
Developer & IT pro days 2007
I’m just announcing the upcoming Microsoft Developer & IT pro days. This year there’s also a preconference day entirely dedicated to ASP.NET AJAX and WPF...
Predictive Fetch Pattern with ASP.NET AJAX
Joe Stagner is doing it again. After quite a lot video material on ASP.NET AJAX he just started doing one about AJAX patterns. For the moment there’s only on...
SonicFileFinder
Wow, the news just keeps coming today. I found out about this little tool SonicFileFinder.
.NET String formatting cheat sheet
I found out about the existance of this cheat sheet. .NET String format cheat sheet.
Some handy short cuts for Windows Vista
I like keyboard shortcuts a lot and use them wherever I can, especially while developing with Visual Studio 2005, so here are some handy shortcuts for Window...
Web 2.0 is Us/ing Us
Nice movie I just found.
Study at the university
No, this isn’t some spam about getting your degree from university for $… This blog post is about the MIX university where you can get handson labs about WPF...
Running VPC on Windows Vista
For a course I’m going to follow, starting tomorrow, I needed VPC to run on my laptop. Unfortunately my old VPC software didn’t run but one can obtain the be...
Keyboard shortcuts for Visual Studio 2005
I found out about these thanks to Gabriel.
Windows Vista Enterprise edition
I just installed Windows Vista Enterprise edition. The graphics card of my laptop only got a score of 1.9 so I’m not into Aero. My hard drive however, a bran...
EBC badminton championship
Yesterday the EBC badminton club, of which I’m a member and former board member, organised its annual championship. Normally I would rank very low because I,...
Scott Guthrie’s presentation in Belgium
Yesterday evening I had the pleasure to attend the presentations by Scott Guthrie. It was very interesting to see what’s coming up in the new version of Visu...
ASP.NET AJAX presentation
Yesterday evening I gave a presentation about ASP.NET AJAX. About 30 attendees came to see some small demos about the UpdatePanel, giving precedence to certa...
ASP.NET AJAX gone RTM
Woohoo!!
Scott Guthrie’s coming to Belgium
VISUG and Microsoft Belux collaborated to get the “father of ASP.NET” to our fine country. He’ll be giving 2 presentation:
Anti-Cross Site Scripting Library
Microsoft recently release the new version of their Anti-Cross Site Scripting (/images/XSS) Library, currently at version 1.5. You can download and find more...
First experiments with ASP.NET AJAX
Though I’m already quite familiar with ASP.NET I’m just now starting to experiment with ASP.NET AJAX for real. I did some testing with the early alpha’s abou...
DNNWiki
Hi,
Happy 2007!!
May this year be the one where your dreams/wishes come true and that you can share them with the ones you love. May you find happiness in your jobs and if yo...
2006
Installed Office 2007 Enterprise
Yes, I finally installed Office 2007. It looks great and the new ribbon does need some “getting used to” but I’ll manage. The only thing that drove me a bit ...
Vista cursors
Ok, if you like the new Vista Aero cursors but don’t have Vista installed yet you can download them here. Just unzip the file in the c:\windows\cursors\ loca...
VISUG Geek Dinner
Yesterday evening VISUG, a .NET related Belgian user group in which I participate, organised a geek dinner in Antwerp. 12 participants showed up and we had a...
Clouseau in het dubbel
Yesterday evening I attended with several of my friends the concert of Clouseau, a famous Flemish band. The concert itself was great with a terrific atmosphe...
Visug meeting: Exception and logging
Yesterday I attended the meeting of Visug, a Belgian user group of which I’m a member, with as meetings subject Exception handling and logging. It wasn’t a t...
MSDN Technical Evening: Introducting VSTO 2005 Second Edition
Yesterday evening I attended an MSDN Technical Evening about VSTO 2005 Second Edition presented by Patrick Tisseghem of the company U2U. Although it’s been a...
Flemish championship badminton
Today I went to see the A & B ranked badminton competitors in the Flemish Badminton Championship with my badminton partner Guy, who’s also a friend of mi...
ZoomIt
Yesterday I attended a workshop about WPF, WCF & WF given at Ordina. One of the presenters used a little tool that I saw Ingo Rammer use also a couple of...
MSDN got a new breadcrumb navigation bar
I noticed yesterday that MSDN has got a new breadcrumb navigation bar. What I like about it is that one can hover over a previous “crumb” and get related inf...
Windows Live Mail Desktop
I just installed the latest tool from the Live division on my laptop: Windows Live Mail Desktop. I got 10 invitations at the moment so anyone interested of g...
TechEd 2006: second day
Well, after a couple of hours a sleep, I went out with some of the collegues (/images/but didn’t make it as late as some others ;-)), I decided to attend the...
TechEd 2006: The first day of sessions
Our first day is over so I guess it’s about time to write something about it.
Setting the correct framework version when playing around with custom macros for dasBlog
The last couple of weeks I got several questions about my article on creating custom macros for dasBlog. The biggest problem seems to be that most people run...
TechEd 2006: arrival
My collegue and I arrived in Barcelona after a flight of about 2 hours. The registration went smoothly and I’m really looking forward to the sessions that’ll...
How To: Running the built in webserver of Visual Studio 2005 yourself
The freely available tool WebMatrix, which I used on my old pc to develop ASP.NET pages several years ago, came with a built in webserver, code named Cassini...
ASP.NET AJAX stuff
You can listen to the podcast from Hanselminutes.com. Podcast 37 is an interview with Scott Guthrie.
Free chapter from Charles Petzold’s book Applications = Code + Markup
While I was reading through all the subscribed blog feeds that I keep track of (/images/indeed too much to read, too little time available) I found out that ...
Paper, glue, origami, fun
When I was still a kid I enjoyed creating stuff from paper or carton. A bit of glue and scissors and lots of fun. Also origami was something I enjoyed and it...
Setting the Width of a Control
Setting the Width property of a control in ASP.NET is mostly done in the properties pane or by declaratively setting it in the markup. However sometimes you ...
Inline Search for Internet Explorer
I installed IE7 last week and really enjoy it. This morning I took a look at the on10 site of Microsoft and saw the video about addons for IE. I like the inl...
Exporting and importing Visual Studio 2005 settings
I develop on several different pc’s like the one that’s provided by the customer, my laptop, … I’m one of those people that likes their custom added keyboard...
Maximum number of characters displayed in each column
I was unaware of this at first, which gave me some frowns on my face when I found out the hard way, but results in SQL Server Management studio are truncated...
IE7 Released
I’ve been using IE7 since the betas and really liked the new version. Especially the tabbed pages and the overview that you can take of all open windows on 1...
Comparing Dreamweaver and Visual Studio
Just noticed on the blog of Microsoft watch that there’s a a comparison made, by Microsoft, for their own Visual Studio to Dreamweaver (/images/former Macrom...
Article about State machine workflows in Microsoft WF
Just saw on the Belgian MSDN site that Kurt Claeys, a member of VISUG like me, wrote an article about State machine workflows in Windows Workflow Foundation....
AUDI R8
Currently I drive an Audi A4 and am very satisfied of that car. Luckely because I drive about 1000 - 1200 km / week for my work.
Another renaming for Atlas
Hmm, I hope the marketing guys of Microsoft aren’t going to keep renaming Atlas. I already found it hard enough to not speak about Atlas anymore but of Micro...
Four flavours in the Windows Vista UI
Thanks to Microsoft Watch, I found this blogpost that shows the different flavours of the Vista UI.
.NET Framework 3.0 Development MSDN event
Yesterday I visited the .NET Framework 3.0 Development event provided by Microsoft. It was a great introduction to the new upcoming technologies: WPF, Cardsp...
A new feedreader
I guess I’m one of those people who like to experiment with new tools. For my feedreading I used google feedreader, RSS bandit, omea reader and yesterday eve...
Upgraded to dasBlog 1.9
Yesterday evening I upgraded my blog from 1.8 to 1.9.
dasBlog 1.9 is out
My morning just got better: dasBlog 1.9 is out. You can already guess what I’ll be looking at the coming weekend :-).
Internet Explorer 7 Release Candidate
I installed the latest bits of the Release Candidate recently and really like it. Another great thing to find out is that javascript seems to be much faster ...
Atlas renamed
I’m probably one of the last blogging about this but Atlas, the AJAX framework by Microsft, is going to be renamed. Also other good news: they’ll do their be...
CSS Friendly Adapters Beta 2 released
Just found this on the blog of Brian Goldfarb. Get the goods here.
Video material about Atlas
Unfortunately I don’t understand Portugese. The reason why? There are a bunch of video downloads available right here.
Microsoft pre-release .NET framework 3.0 Release Candidate
You can find the downloadmanager here.
Attributes.Add()
People that use ASP.NET know that it’s very easy to use the Properties pane in visual studio to quickly set some properties on a server control. By default a...
Internet Explorer 7 RC1
Just got back from vacation and look what Microsoft provides: Internet Explorer 7 RC1. Get it while it’s hot.
Always show solution in visual studio 2005
For some projects I like to start with a blank solution and add several projects to it like a class library, web project, … Since I installed Visual Studio 2...
Use parenthesis when using the null coalescing operator, operator precedence alert…
I’ve written already some articles in the past about the null coalescing operator (/images/1) but recently my colleague found some “strange” behavior when us...
Windows Media Player 11 Beta
Just installed the Beta version of Windows Media Player 11. The new and upcoming version. I like it a lot until now, especially the new button style of Vista...
My article on creating custom macros for dasBlog is featured on the dasBlog.info site
I got contacted recently by Scott Hanselman, to ask if they could reproduce my recent article on creating custom macros for dasBlog. I agreed and so here it ...
VB.NET & C# comparison cheat sheets
Because developing with the .NET framework gives you the freedom to use multiple languages it can be a bit of a hassle to choose between them. VB.NET and C# ...
Photosynth
Sometimes you can still get amazed by new programs although we’re used of seeing a lot of wow applications already. Microsoft research lab recently introduce...
Some interesting links for the .NET 3.0 framework
I got these via Tom Mertens’ blog:
How do I videos, now also some Atlas videos available
Learning new technologies is always some part fun, some excitement but also can cause some frustration when something doesn’t work like you would expect it. ...
Determine which build of Vista and .NET 3.0 Development tools are right for you
Just found this on Tom Archer’s blog. At the moment it can be quite confusing to keep up with all the CTP’s, releases and which month’s version should I use?...
Boten Anna
Just to good to let it go: Boten Anna. Check out the subtitles of the song…
Setting properties on a User Control declaratively
Most people that have even limited experience with ASP.NET know that you can set the properties of a server control quite easily in the Properties pane of vs...
IIS7: some video material
IIS7 hasn’t shipped yet but will be available in Vista and Longhorn server. It provides better ways to extend it and configure it. There’s also already some ...
Windows Desktop Search
I finally gave Windows Desktop Search a try. It still needs to index quite some files but I already like it a lot. Since I have a lot of documents containing...
Team System Widgets
I just found out about this site. It’s an overview of free/payware widgets/addins: Team System Widgets.
Virtual PC is free
You read that right: it’s free. Take a look at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtualpc/. You’ll find on this page the great news, whitepapers, … Also the...
ASP.NET 2.0 page life cycle
When ASP.NET 2.0 was still out of reach for most people I already found on the internet a great looking diagram I downloaded in the past. All credits go to t...
By the Community, For the Community
I found out about this new page on ASP.NET, thanks to PeteL and Brian Goldfarb: By the Community, For the Community.
Creating custom macros for dasBlog
dasBlog is a decent blogging engine originally created by Clemens Vasters. A nice thing that not many people seem to be aware of is that you can easily exten...
Latest code of dasBlog installed (1.8.6127.3)
I just installed the latest binaries of dasBlog. If you like to know how to get the latest source code yourself I like to point out to this excellent post: R...
Visual Team System 2005 course
Today, in the afternoon, I went to the first part, the next one’s tomorrow, about Visual Team System 2005 an event by VISUG of which I’m a member. Thanks to ...
Atlas videos
There are already several nice videos on Atlas available today:
Atlas goes M2.2 or June CTP
Dynamic updatepanels, bugfixes, …
Internet explorer 7 Beta 3
Get it while it’s hot: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=4C1A8FBE-FB6A-47AC-867D-BB1F17E477EE&displaylang=en.
Testing upon Nullable types in C# 2.0
Most people that use C# are quite familiar with the if() expression and the (/images/?:) conditional/ternary operator. In C# 2.0, the Visual C# team introduc...
Adding a dynamic control to a placeholder control and wire up the event.
Most controls are just drag & dropped on a webform or handcoded by a developer in the source view of the document. Although these controls can display dy...
Using VB.NET and C# in the same ASP.NET 2.0 project
You know that your collegue has created a class with interesting method that you like to reuse in your ASP.NET 2.0 web project but your project is in C#. Ins...
Office 2007 MSDN evening chapter
Last thursday I attended a session presented by Jan Tielens in Mechelen on the subject of Office 2007. The session was dedicated for developers and because ...
Windows Live Messenger
After months of using the Beta variant of this new incarnation of messenger, and with a rechristianed name that makes it a part of the whole new Live product...
Tracking items in solution explorer
I like it when I’m in very large solutions with a lot of projects that my Solution Explorer of vs.net highlights the currently opened file instead of searchi...
Showing line numbers in Visual Studio.NET
A lot of people, myself included, like to see the line numbers on each line while coding. I find it easer to remember where my code is but also to use the ct...
Be sure to put in some default value when testing with Nullable types in .NET 2.0
Nullable types in .NET 2.0 are a great asset for many developers. I use them all the time in my current project. However there are some things that you shoul...
del.icio.us/KvdM
I’m probably very late with this but finally decided to join del.icio.us so finally people can also see what I like to read or am interested in.
New site dedicated to .NET Framework 3.0
I just found out about the existence of this newly dedicated site: netfx3. After blogging already about the renamed WinFX to .NET 3.0 framework name it seems...
Working with Data in ASP.NET 2.0 by Scott Mitchell
Just saw that Scott Mitchell, of 4guysfromrolla fame, announced that he’s busy writing tutorials about working with data in ASP.NET 2.0. You can find the tut...
Hear Ye! Hear Ye! .NET 3.0 framework coming out
Just read .NET Framework 3.0 at Somasegar’s blog.
MSDN Wiki
Just found out Microsoft started with a Wiki: MSDN Wiki. They’ll hope to get more examples form the community and by thus more information for other people. ...
Bought some new books from Microsoft Press
Thanks to the newly added service by Microsoft in Belgium, I was told that this service was already longer available for other countries, called MSDN Connect...
2007 Office system, some resources for developers and people interested in taking a first look at the new UI.
Most people are getting aware of the new upcoming version of Office. There are already several resources available and I thought I’d list some:
Store wars
Anyone who knows me, knows that I like Star Wars. I was quite amused when I found out about this little flash movie: Store Wars.
Autonumbering ASP.NET grid controls.
I read this kind of questions multiple times on the $blank(/images/forums.asp.net,ASP.NET forums). Most of the time it’s suggested that one can use one of th...
How popular was/is your name in Belgium?
While reading through the blogs I’m subscribed to, for the ones interested I use RSSBandit, I found these interesting links(/images/1) on the blog of Smetty’...
Failed to generate a user instance of SQL Server due to a failure in starting the process for the user instance. The connection will be closed.
Like most ASP.NET developers I also first installed SQL Express 2005 together with visual studio.net 2005. After a while however I decided to get it off my d...
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition with Advanced Services
Microsoft launched the download site for SQL Express with advanced services.
Dealing with the maximum upload size of ASP.NET
A lot of sites allow people to upload a file like pictures, word documents, … or even videos. ASP.NET provides an easy way to do this(/images/1).
Microsoft has launched several new sites
Just found out about this one: http://www.seewindowsvista.com/. It has some smooth looking videos available organised into 4 categories:
SQL Prompt: Intellisense for SQL Server
I’ve read some good feedback on this tool before and also installed it at work where I use SQL Server 2005 Management studio on a daily basis. Once you get ...
Hello, world!
Hi,