Belgian .NET Community
Belgian .NET Community
Since I joined Microsoft Belux last year I've been thinking about moving my blog to MSDN. But ever since I didn't really saw the added value of moving my blog as both sites are using the same platform:
CommunityServer. But since a couple of weeks I've heard a lot of very positive feedback on the recently deployed 2.0 version of
CommunityServer that powers the
MSDN and
TechNet blogger sites. So far the experience is far better than on DonNetJunkies. Today I finally decided to move my blog to
http://blogs.msdn.com/davbosch/. I want to thank
Donny for hosting my blog since August 2004.
So please subscribe to my new blog on the MSDN blogs:
Thanks for reading my blog and I hope you will continue to do so at http://blogs.msdn.com/davbosch/default.aspx!
I'm snowed under with work for our Belgian Developer & IT-Pro Days 2006, so not a lot of blogging or feed reading lately. But the good news is we're on track with the organization and content of the event. All development related sessions are 100% confirmed. All session abstracts (day 1 & day 2) and most speaker bios can be found on-line. Next thing on the agenda is the review of the slide decks and make them available to the attendees. They should be accessible to the attendees by the end of next week.
In the meantime our Belgian webteam has been working hard on publishing two new articles on the local MSDN site.
The first article is authored by Peter Himschoot and covers "C# 3.0 and LINQ".
Anders Hejlsberg, chief designer of C#, unveiled C#’s newest version at PDC2005. Some of the most notable innovations are extension methods, lambda expressions, anonymous types, type inference, and LINQ (.NET Language Integrated Query). In this article we are going to look at these new features of C#, focusing on LINQ.
The second article is written by Jelle Druyts. Jelle covers "The Command Pattern In Windows Presentation Foundation".
Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly codenamed "Avalon"), or WPF for short, is a brand new Microsoft framework for developing very rich and powerful Windows applications. It will ship as part of Windows Vista, the next major version of Windows that will be released in the coming months, but WPF will also be available on Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003. There is much to be said about Windows Presentation Foundation and its numerous new and enhanced capabilities, but this article will in stead focus on an old trusted friend, who has finally been given a dedicated room in the big house of Windows User Interface development: the "Command" pattern. This design pattern basically abstracts all actions the user can perform in an application into the notion of "commands"; it has been implemented in many different ways on top of various UI frameworks, but now, it has finally made it into the gut of the system itself. Note that this article is based on a public preview of WPF, so it's possible that there are implementation details that will change over time as the product matures into completion.
Both authors will also be speakers at Developer & IT-Pro Days and when you would have questions for them you will be able to find them in the community area during the breaks.
Arlindo Alves recently joined our Belgian DPE team as IT-Pro Evangelist. His first job is definitely a hard one: content owner for the IT-Pro related content on Developer & IT-Pro Days 2006.
To reach out to the Belgian IT-Pro community Arlindo decided to start a blog at http://blogs.technet.com/aralves/default.aspx. Oh, btw it looks he's already enjoying the recent update of CommunityServer, which has quite some fixes I've been told. Even the photo galleries seem to be enabled ...
Anyway, subscribed to the RSS feed!
When talking to developers using Visual Studio 2005 for more than 6 months I got lots of feedback, both positive and negative. When I ask for the negative points - or better, the points that needs improvement - it looks some of them are "just bugs" or open/known issues (TFS related). Now I just came accross this "Servicing" page on MSDN. This page will provide more more information about upcoming and already shipped Visual Studio and .NET Framework software updates. On top of that it will also provide additional background, guidance, and transparency around the servicing process and how it affects you. Check their blog at DDCPX Team Blog and watch this space for availability of the SP1 of Visual Studio 2005 in Q3 of CY2006.
The Servicing page also layouts the roadmap:
The Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 will focus on addressing product issues reported during the first few months the product is in the market. The types of fixes you can expect to find in this service pack follow the same general guidelines we have used previously, with the notable addition of feedback received from customers via the Product Feedback Center, which was introduced first in the Visual Studio 2005 product cycle. Thus, the types of fixes you can expect to find in this service pack are:
- The Hotfixes and General Distribution Release Updates (GDRs) released between RTM and the end of the Service Pack customer beta period.
- Any fixes addressing security issues categorized as MSRC "Critical", "Important" or "Moderate".
- Fixes for product reliability and stability issues, including those reported by customers via the Product Feedback Center, and the crashes most frequently reported via Watson.
- Fixes for common "eligible" functional issues reported by customers via the Product Feedback Center. "Eligible" functional issues are those that do not require breaking changes, architectural changes, or Design Change Request (DCR) level feature work, and that do not create unacceptable product quality risk and/or cost of implementation.
- Fixes for the top customer and supportability issues as reported by PSS.
The goal of all of our Service Packs is to increase the overall quality of the existing product features while maintaining a high level of compatibility.
This service pack is currently targeted for final release in Q3 of 2006. A more detailed schedule of external interim milestones (e.g. customer beta period) will be posted when it has been finalized.
When I was still a consultant I was a strong advocate of using unit tests and code coverage to make sure the code, and the application afterwards, reached the appropriate quality level to be deployed. As Team System and Team Foundation Server weren't available - not even in CTP or beta - at that time, I used a number of well-known community-driven tools like NUnit, MBUnit, NCover, NAnt, NDoc, etc.
One of the great add-in's in Visual Studio at that time was NUnitaddin. Jamie Cansdale developed the TestDriven.NET addin. Today Jamie announced the availability of code coverage together with unit testing for all versions of Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite. He bundled NCoverExplorer with TestDriven.NET to view the code coverage results.
So far I haven't tried these tools out, but I assume they play well together and offer you the same kind of unit test/code coverage functionality as you can get with Visual Studio 2005 but for all versions of Visual Studio 2005. So no excuses anymore to not unit test and test the code coverage of your classes!
The official announcement has been made today: To better serve the developer and IT professional communities, Microsoft is evolving its EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) technical events – Tech·Ed Europe and Microsoft IT Forum. Have a look at the announcement here.
“Microsoft Tech Ed 2006: Developers” will be a deep-dive technical event addressing the specific requirements of developers while “Microsoft Tech Ed 2006: IT Forum” will be replacing IT Forum but will retain its focus on IT professionals and their distinctive needs.
The two conferences will for the first time run back-to-back in November 2006, creating Microsoft’s premier technical education platform in the region and a central feature of the IT industry calendar.
"Tech Ed 2006: Developers":
- is a 100% developer focused event. Anyone interested in building software solutions with Microsoft development tools for the professional market should attend this event. The content will be a deep dive into the technology.
- We will also offer some sessions that are more in the IT infrastructure space and this specifically for people in mixed job functions. This will be IT infrastructure content that is relevant for developers.
- There will be specific content for software architects.
"Tech Ed 2006: IT Forum":
- The slightly re-branded IT Forum is the event for IT Professionals focusing on planning, deploying and managing the secure connected enterprise.
- It is the conference for IT administrators, including system, network, database, messaging, web, applications, file/storage, security, desktop configuration, etc.
- We will also offer some sessions that are more in the software development space and this specifically for people in mixed job functions. This will be development content (like scripting) that is relevant for system administrators.
- In addition there will be specific content for infrastructure architects.
Check also out Hans Verbeeck's blog post on this topic. Hans is overall technical content owner for Tech Ed 2006.
On Tuesday February 7th Microsoft Belux organizes an ISV Community Update event. These events are especially setup for Technical Decision Makers of ISVs and are an excellent opportunity to stay up-to-date with the latest technologies of the Microsoft platform.
This time we will be covering the Business Intelligence Capabilities of SQL Server 2005. This will happen in two sessions:
- SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence: Delivering Business Insight
During this session we will provide you with an introduction in BI & an overview of the different components of Microsoft's BI offering. We will deal with the different components of SQL Server 2005 being: Integration Services (ETL-Tool), Analysis Services (Turning Technical information into business information), Reporting Services (reporting environment), Report Builder (End-user reporting tool). We will also dive into the Office portfolio & talk about the BI components that are included within Office System. (Business scorecard manager , Excell, Visio, MapPoint, ...)
- Leveraging Business Intelligence Capabilities within your applications
This session is focused on how to use the BI-Artifacts within your application. We will discuss how to integrate Reporting Services Reports within your (web and/or forms