B# .NET Blog : Microsoft

Extraordinary Non-Technical Activities On Saturday

bart — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 03:25:54 GMT

In this post, I’m going to do something out of the ordinary: write a post on a non-technical matter, in the “Personal” and “Microsoft” (big-bucket general stuff kind-a) categories I’ve left unattended for way too long. So, if you’re looking for interesting technical stuff, go look elsewhere this time around (but I promise to be back soon :-)).

So yes, this has been an interesting non-technical start (ignoring the continuation to follow after this post…) of a Saturday over here in Bellevue. To set the scene: a few months ago Dandy and I have been asked by a Belgian community (in the Microsoft-sense) member to write up something on “The Road to Redmond”. Dandy came up with this idea to create a video highlighting several hot-spots in the area. Finally we got around to take care of this request and shoot the moving pictures today. Lots of things interfered with the planning before: camera defects, Best Buy shopping for a new camera, Dandy’s US Open attendance (to see Kim Clijsters win, little did she know she’d become a recurring theme in the video), other weekend activities (occult and otherwise).

It’s kind of funny I’m pretty natural in front of large audiences, but simple video interviews make me behave differently somehow, especially when the spoken language falls back to Dutch instead of the English lingo my brain is in a steady state for. But anyway, we did some great shoots today starting with Belgian-style food and beverages (the latter not for me, as I’m a teetotaler) in downtown Bellevue where the waitress claimed to speak a little French but couldn’t properly pronounce Duchesse De Bourgogne. At least we got Belgian fries with mayonnaise to go with beef stew.

During a short visit to Best Buy to buy a tri-pod, I got a first question by the cashier on my unusual (way too geeky, I admit) T-shirt meant for shameless self-promotion of this blog, something that became a running theme throughout the day as well. Its front – typing for Curry-style System F-omega (different forms of definition can be found in the literature, but I chose one that fits a medium-sized T-shirt) – and back are shown below:

People who saw the filming in progress or got somehow around us can testify I really do wear a yellow T-shirt with the above :-).

Next shots were primarily to show off Dandy’s fancy car for the take-off (almost literally, velocity was getting close enough :-)) to the Space Needle. Though I’ve been here about two years now (and so does Dandy), I hadn’t been up there just yet. Too touristy if you will, but for the occasion I had an excuse. So we got there and went up, disregarding the cloudy weather and rather windy meteorological circumstances. I must say, the view is kind of nice but nothing too fancy to write home about. Kind as I am, I even took a picture of two ladies discovering some digital cameras still have a proper mechanical “take picture now” button. Last time I had a fancy digital camera in my hands, I couldn’t even find the power button, so I felt really good about this little victory near a camera this time. Dandy insisted me on showing them my T-shirt but maybe I did it a little too explicit (though I sincerely don’t believe so, notice my fellow colleague was a few Belgian beers in), so after thanking me for taking the picture and some little giggles (IMO mostly due to the presence of my colleague…) they took off. I know the (App) rule looks frightening enough for people to jump down, so I kept things a bit more hidden while being on the outside up there.

Back on the inside, we met this pretty Tacoma girl who works up there to answer tourist questions, all dressed up in a fabulous “I am Seattle” outfit. Can you believe it she even went to Brussels a while ago, totally jetlagged and looking for some old brewery nearby (can’t think of what that would have been, but nearby on the US scale is, euhm, not small). But hey, that’s better than nothing (unlike people thinking Belgium is the capital of Brussels, though in the limit things get close :-)). Anyway, she did a splendid job in our video interviews and we even made here pronounce Kim Clijsters more or less correctly. And contrast to the folks on the deck, she didn’t look too frightened about my T-shirt and even found my binary watch (standard equipment for a geek) cool.

Down again, we did a bit more hanging around in their souvenir shop (I know touristy things all look the same, but I needed some confirmation), where we shot some crazy scenes doing Plop dances in appropriate garments. Put developers together with IT Pros (yes, another cliché) and you get that sort of thing. Oh well, I don’t mind making my self a bit ridiculous from time to time :-).

Last but not least, we headed over to campus for a few shots around the new Studio buildings, where people were playing cricket on the fields and jogging around in Office T-shirts. All of a sudden, attention for my extraordinary clothing started to drop significantly as people over there are kind of used to this sort of weirdness :-). We did some talking on camera about serious matters this time around, covering subjects on life at Microsoft, the Microsoft culture, etc.

So yes, once a year or so (give or take) I can do non-geeky stuff as well. Though I need a little compensation by wearing appropriate clothing and such :-). People who believe they were part of this crazy plot today, feel free to drop a note in the comments section below this post.

Arrived in Redmond + some hot .NET news

bart — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 17:21:48 GMT

Just to let the community out there know I'm alive and kicking in Redmond now... A while ago I announced to join Microsoft Corporation HQ in Redmond to work on the Windows Presentation Foundation. After a long wait to gain access to the United States under H1B status, I've finally arrived yesterday in my temporary apartment in Bellevue and will start to work on the team next Monday. I'll come back to you with more (interesting) news the next couple of days.

For now, this is something you really need to check out: Scott Guthrie announced the source code for the .NET Framework Libraries will be made public under MS-RL license. This is awesome news for those of you interested to know how things work and to gain a better understanding of the system. In the past we had Rotor (officially called the SSCLI) but the code in there wasn't guaranteed to be an exact match with the code of the framework that was released by Microsoft. Furthermore, the new initiative reaches way beyond Rotor's goals: a bunch more namespaces will be made available, there's an integrated debugging experience if you're using VS2008 (source is grabbed from the MSDN source server directly), etc. It seems you'll be able to read my code in the future (H).

Stay tuned for more exciting news from here!

About Katmai, Astoria, Jasper, Acropolis, Pex and an update on LINQ-to-SharePoint

bart — Thu, 10 May 2007 12:19:51 GMT

Warning: This is meta-blogging post. For deep dive technology stuff, keep an eye on my blog and you'll see much more technical in depth posts sooner or later again.

Yesterday I attended the Visual C++ evening session by Ronald Laeremans in Mechelen - within an hour or so I'll be heading to Mechelen again to deliver an IIS 7.0 session. It's my Karma I guess :-). One great thing about events like the one yesterday is to meet up and catch up with people and colleagues again, resulting in quite geeky conversations (especially when you're organizing C++ events -g-). One of them is David Boschmans who attended Mix07 lately and is keeping himself busy with a bunch of new technologies, including Silverlight and the DLR running Python, Ruby, JavaScript and VBx. Today he has posted a few introduction posts to various new technologies announced at Mix07, including:

Katmai - The next release of SQL Server
Astoria - Data services over regular HTTP (CTP available)
Jasper - Dynamic ADO.NET (CTP available)

As you can see, it's all about data these days. Although LINQ to Entities won't ship in band with Orcas, the teams are working very hard indeed to complete the story and to deliver it to you. Other interesting hot technologies include:

Acropolis - Building smart clients using WPF (go to the TechEd US Session Catalog and search for DEV318)
Pex - Automatic test generation and bug detection/fixing framework, currently in MSR and only available at Microsoft internally (one of the project members is Jonathan De Halleux, another Belgian in Redmond)

If I find some time in the near future, I'll blog about the data vision of Microsoft in more detail in more technical blog posts.

PS: For those of you following the LINQ to SharePoint project on CodePlex, I've checked in the Orcas Beta 1 compatible code in source control (change set 1156). Another release (0.2) will be out there next month, starring:

Revamped SpMetal architecture with a front-end and back-end separation;
Support for more SharePoint field types, including Lookup fields with lazy loading of "linked entities";
A more intelligent query parser and improved support for some query constructs in both C# 3.0 and VB 9.0;
Entity model, as part of the architecture that will support SharePoint list updates in the future;
Overall improvement of stability.

For the moment, prep work is done to deliver a fair amount of automated unit testing and research is in progress to finalize the update-supporting entity architecture. Stay tuned for updates (did you know CodePlex has RSS support?)!

Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP Professional x64 SP2 RTW

bart — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 09:47:33 GMT

The latest Service Pack for Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP Pro x64, SP2, is ready to be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsserver/sp2.mspx. There a lots of enhancements that also have impact on developers:

XmlLite is a library that allows developers to write XML-driven apps that perform faster than the current MSXML/DOM and MSXML/SAX2 implementations.
MMC 3.0 is the next generation of the Microsoft Management Console technology, enabling managed code snap-ins explained on my blog previously (MMC 3.0 - A managed code 'task manager' MMC 3.0 snap-in). It's possible to use Windows Forms to be hosted inside a snap-in; the snap-in model is richer than before; there's the new actions pane; asynchronous execution increases reliability and user experience; etc.
ICALCS will be your next big friend if you deal with ACLs at lot. It's already in Vista.
SQL Server 2005 SP2 performance improvements.

A more complete overview is available over here.

SQL Server 2005 SP2 / Virtual PC 2007

bart — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 19:46:49 GMT

Two hot releases today:

SQL Server 2005 SP2
Virtual PC 2007 (works on Vista)

Enjoy!

Developer & IT Pro Days 2007 Belgium - Satisfy your technical curiosity

bart — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 13:27:56 GMT

The Developer & IT Pro Days conference has become a yearly get together for lots of technology experts from both Developer and IT Pro audiences. So, I'm very happy to announce the 2007 edition on my blog too. Lots of great stuff is about to be covered out there, so don't miss out this opportunity. An overview:

The main conference will be held in Ghent (ICC) on March 28 and March 29.
!!!New!!! On March 27 there will be a preconference for the first time - AFAIK - in the history of Developer & IT Pro Days. There are two tracks:

MSDN - Jeff Prosise will talk about ASP.NET 2.0, ASP.NET AJAX and WPF/E - really recommended for web developers living on the cutting edge of technologies.
TechNet - IT Pro's will have the opportunity to see Ronald Beekelaar's talk on Virtualization technologies. Time to learn more about Virtual Server, System Center VMM, Longhorn Server's Hypervisor and more.

Registration is open with a 15% early bird discount till February 28th. The prices are outlined on the registration page.
A list of sessions can be found in the Agenda overview. There will be 7 parallel sessions (3 for MSDN + 3 for TechNet + one additional) each time slot, so plenty of choice. The agenda isn't complete yet, so check the website regularly for updates. Since we live in a multi-lingual country and lots of international speakers are coming here to speak, all sessions will be given in English.

Btw, I'm having the honor to present "Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0: End-to-End Overview of Microsoft's New Web Application Server" in the MSDN track on March 28th in the late afternoon (agenda subject to change; precise details on the session and timing will follow later).

Developer & IT Pro Days 2007 - Satisfy your technical curiosity

bart — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 00:30:06 GMT

The Belgian Developer & IT Pro Days 2007 conference is on its way. Notice there will be precons as well. From the website on www.dev-itprodays.be:

Save the Date for Developer & IT Pro Days 2007 in Ghent

Join us on March 28-29, 2007 in Ghent at the International Convention Center Ghent (ICC).
Developer & IT Pro Days 2007 Pricing & Registration
Registration will go live soon.
Registration rate is €299 for both conference days and $399 including pre-conference day.
Conference Agenda

Tuesday 27 March : Pre-Conference Seminars
Wednesday 28 March : Day 1
Thursday 29 March : Day 2

Hot releases: .NET Framework 3.0, Windows SDK, 2007 Office System + VSTO, ASP.NET AJAX, SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition

bart — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 16:01:36 GMT

A big date for Microsoft with the release of a lot of exciting technologies, some of which still in beta or RC, but still. A list:

.NET Framework 3.0 - formerly called WinFX; contains WPF, WCF, WF and WCS. In short: the next-generation platform to build managed code applications. Remember the following sum: .NET Framework 3.0 = .NET Framework 2.0 + WPF + WCF + WF + WCS. Installation only required on XP, 2003 and Longhorn Server betas; it will come out of the box with Windows Vista. Also available today is the Windows SDK, the final version of the Windows SDK for Windows Vista and .NET Framework 3.0. Basically Windows SDK extends Platform SDK. Check out this page as well to get all of the components you need (extensions for Visual Studio 2005 etc).
ASP.NET AJAX Beta 2 - formerly called Atlas; brings Asynchronous Java and XML to the world of ASP.NET. This technology was demonstrated during today's keynote and I have to say it's very cool indeed. I didn't play with it myself yet, but I'll definitely do in the foreseeable futurue to get to know the concept better.
SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition (or Everywhere Edition, or what else it has been called) has reached the RC stage. It offers a low footprint relational database engine based on the SQL Server 2005 core, and can be loaded in memory on all sorts of applications. Check out my getting started post written a few months ago for the previous beta.
2007 Office System - released this week; will be available for download to MSDN Subscribers shortly (as well as the Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office for the 2007 Microsoft Office System - no prizes to win if you can say this product name five times in row).

Other products that are very close to shipping include Windows Vista (finally!) and Windows PowerShell. Windows Vista will become available for MSDN Subscribers shortly after its release too. For those of you who like press releases, click here.

Ready for a new day?

bart — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 21:03:00 GMT

Although the site is online for quite a while, I'd like to point fellow-geeks from Belgium and Luxemburg (free bus transfer to Brussels available) to it: http://www.readyforanewday.be. If you're not attending TechEd, this might be something for you. Attend the launch event for 2007 Office System, Windows Vista, Exchange 2007 and exciting Windows Live stuff on November 9th at Brussels (Heyzel). The closing keynote speaker is Bill Gates. With over 5000 attendees registered already, act now as seats are limited!

Windows Defender RTM

bart — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 20:24:00 GMT

Spyware protection for free. For use on Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 SP1. Requires genuine Windows.

Download it here