Snowball - The Blog

Yesterday, I gave a talk for DotNed.nl, the Dutch usergroup at the Ordina offices in Nieuwegein. 55 people attended the sold-out talk, I hope you enjoyed it. Any feedback is of course welcome via mail.

The talk, Building an end-to-end Silverlight application consisted out of 10 topics that we often encounter when building LOB applications:

• 1.SketchFlow
• 2.WCF RIA Services
• 3.Data binding & DataGrid
• 4.MVVM
• 5.MEF
• 6.Commanding & behaviors
• 7.Messaging, navigation & dialogs
• 8.Custom controls & third party controls
• 9.OOB
• 10.Printing

The ZIP file below contains the PPTX and the demos (also of the 2 topics we didn’t cover).

Remember that in 2 weeks, on September 14th, I’ll be again in the Netherlands for 2 sessions for SiXin, the Silverlight usergroup. Registration for this event is free and can be done here.

PPTX & demos

hNext week Thursday (August 26th 2010), I’ll be presenting at DotNed.nl. The presentation is titled Building an end-to-end Silverlight 4 application. As the title says, we’ll be looking at some of the common questions (and of course answers) you’ll have when you are faced with the challenge of building a Line-of-Business application from scratch.

Bring your demo hat today, as we’ll be building an end-to-end, real life Silverlight application during this session! Looking at Silverlight today, we easily see that the platform is getting larger and larger, with more frameworks such as MEF being developed on the side. Advanced features such as COM interop and printing make the Silverlight story complete. In this session, we’ll take a look at how we can use all members of the Silverlight family to build an end-to-end application, based on MVVM principles.

Registration is free but mandatory and can be done on the DotNed.nl site. And since it’s taking place in the Ordina.NL offices, I won’t be feeling all that strange (FYI, I work at Ordina.BE!)

Microsoft just announced that all of us can help deciding which sessions will be delivered at Tech-Ed 2010 Berlin. That's a great way of making sure that the contents is what the public wants!

I've ran through the list and 4 of my proposals made the shortlist (which is good news :)).

• Treasures for the C# developer in Visual Studio 2010
• AJAX Tips and tricks: things you never knew that could be done in ASP.NET Ajax
• Silverlight data access and services not for the faint of heart
• The good, the bad and… well, that’s it: Comparing good and bad practices in Silverlight application development

If you would like me to deliver one of these sessions on the upcoming Tech-Ed, please vote for them at http://europe.msteched.com/sessionpreference . Of course, there are many really other interesting sessions there as well: I'm sure this will be a great conference!

Thanks for voting!

With my book I wrote together with Kevin Dockx, Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook available for a couple of weeks now, I decided to do a small search on reviews. I’ll be honest, I took all I could find right now.

Here’s the ones I found:

Richard Costall:

“Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook is a great publication, and worthy of a place any Silverlight developers bookshelf. The formula of ‘recipes’ works well, with well explained, yet simple examples covering almost everything you’d ask when starting out building business applications in Silverlight. It highlights Silverlight 2 and Silverlight 3 functionality differences, yet is right up to date on Silverlight 4.”

Complete review at: http://www.nxtgenug.net/Article.aspx?ArticleID=368

Vikram Pendse writes:

“My Review Comments : * * * * * (5 Stars)..Simple Amazing book !..Go and Grab your Copy Today !!! :)

Impressed with this Book?..want to have a look at? Ok ! What you see is what you get ! kidding..You can download a sample chapter right away !”

Complete review at http://pendsevikram.blogspot.com/2010/05/microsoft-silverlight-4-data-and.html

Damir Tomicic writes:

“Das Buch ist sehr praktisch geschrieben. Der Leser merkt sofort, dass Gill und Kevin die Ansätze selbst ausprobiert und für die Leser optimiert haben. Die gewählte Sprache ist einfach, die Beispiele auch für Anfänger geeignet. Ein guter Einstieg in das Thema.”

Complete review at: http://tomicic.de/2010/05/05/MicrosoftSilverlight4DataAndServicesCookbookGillcleeren.aspx

Review on Amazon.com

“Good Introduction to the Datagrid, Dataform, and different Services (4/5)”

Complete review at http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Silverlight-Data-Services-Cookbook/product-reviews/1847199844/ref=dp_db_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

Interested in my book as well? It is available from Packt Publishing, Amazon.com, Amazon UK and many other retailers as well! I hope you enjoy it!

Community Day 2010 is coming! Registration is now open.

No less than fourteen Microsoft user groups combine their efforts to organize this unique knowledge-sharing and networking event. With so many new Microsoft product and technology releases, the content of this Community Day will be focusing on Visual Studio 2010, SharePoint 2010, Silverlight 4, Office 2010, SQL Server 2008 R2, OCSR2, and many more!
So don’t miss out on the Community Day and join us on Thursday June 24th in Utopolis, Mechelen. We will bring together more than 300 IT Pro’s and developers.
The Community Day 2010 is brought to you by Azug, Besug, Biwug, IT-Talks Pro-Exchange, SCUG, SQLUG, VBIB, Visug, WinSec, XNA-BUG, CLUG, MyTIC and DotNetHub.

Register now for free at www.communityday.be !

Earlier today, I got confirmation that my first book I wrote (together with Kevin Dockx) has been published and can now be ordered, both in e-book and hard copy. This is the new cover. The book also marks the launch of the new brand of Packt, namely Packt Enterprise.

The e-book version is available from the publisher’s website: https://www.packtpub.com/microsoft-silverlight-4-data-and-services-cookbook/book . On this site, you can also get a discount on the printed version.

You can also buy the book from Amazon of course (which at this moment still lists it as pre-order though). If you shop at Amazon.com, you can get your copy here: http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Silverlight-Data-Services-Cookbook/dp/1847199844. If you rather order at Amazon UK, you can order here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Microsoft-Silverlight-Data-Services-Cookbook/dp/1847199844/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1272289229&sr=8-1.

If you want to get a more in-depth look at what the book has to offer, take a look here: https://www.packtpub.com/microsoft-silverlight-4-data-and-services-cookbook/book#in_detail .

What the book is about:

Silverlight 3 made a big step into Line-Of-Business applications and Silverlight 4 builds further on this. This book is not a general Silverlight 4 overview book; it is uniquely aimed at developers who want to build data-driven applications using Silverlight. It focuses on showing . NET developers how to interact with and handle multiple sources of data in Silverlight business applications and how to solve particular data problems, following a practical hands-on approach, using real-world recipes in a practical cookbook format. The book is aimed at Silverlight 4, however most of the covered features work both in Silverlight 3 and 4.

By following the practical recipes in this book, you will learn the concepts needed to create data-rich business applications—from the basic creation of a Silverlight application, to displaying data using data binding and upgrading your existing applications to use Silverlight.

Who this book is written for:

If you are a .NET developer who wants to build professional data-driven applications with Silverlight, then this book is for you. Basic Silverlight experience and familiarity with accessing data using ADO.NET in regular .NET applications is required.

What you will learn from this book:

• Display and validate data efficiently in Silverlight business applications using data binding
• Use the full power of the important data controls in Silverlight such as the DataGrid and the DataForm
• Discover how your Silverlight business applications can quickly access data residing in a database or even Windows Azure by calling web services using XML, RSS, JSON and more
• Exchange information between Silverlight clients and WCF or ASMX services in your Silverlight business applications
• Add functionality to your Silverlight business applications by harnessing REST and WCF Data Services
• Communicate with well-known REST APIs such as Flickr and Twitter from Silverlight
• Simplify your data-driven business application development with WCF RIA Services

You can also read some sample recipes on the Packt site here: https://www.packtpub.com/article/inserting-updating-deleting-sorting-grouping-displaying-data-grid-silverlight .

I do hope you’ll like the book. If you have any questions on the book, don’t hesitate to mail me at silverlight@snowball.be .

Very often, you need to navigate to a class while coding. Perhaps a class you wrote yourself, perhaps you just want to see the members of a type of the .NET framework.

Visual Studio 2010 has THE ultimate feature for this, namely the Navigate To function. What you do, is hit CTRL + , (yes, indeed the comma) and it will open the Navigate To window, as shown below.

This window follows the same rules as the new IntelliSense: if I’m searching for a property “OverPaid”, I can search by typing Over… or just use OP.

If you have some text already selected in the code editor, the window will perform its search from there.

I just noticed now that Silverlight 4 officially hit RC, that the book I wrote (together with Kevin Dockx) is now featured on Silverlight.net: http://www.silverlight.net/learn/books/ . Really cool to be on that site!!

Remember my post on printing in Silverlight 3, using the WriteableBitmap. This class allowed to export UI elements to an image and print from there. While it was working, it wasn’t a great way of doing things.

Silverlight 4 brings real printing to the table. All printing is done using the PrintDocument class. In it’s PrintPage event, we can specify what content needs to be printed. This can be the entire screen, a control that’s part of the visual tree or even a control that’s generated on the fly. Finally, we use the Print() method to perform the actual printing of the document.

Let’s take a look at some really easy code to do all this.

The UI code is kept simple intentionally:

    <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White">
        <TextBlock Height="25" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="62,92,0,0" Name="textBlock1" Text="I want to print!" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="194" FontWeight="Bold" FontSize="15" />
        <Button Content="Print" Height="55" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="62,213,0,0" Name="PrintButton" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="216" Click="PrintButton_Click" />
    </Grid>

This looks like the following:

In the click event of the button, we write some printing code.

        private void PrintButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            PrintDocument document = new PrintDocument();
            document.PrintPage += (s, args) =>
                {
                    args.PageVisual = LayoutRoot;
                };

            document.Print();
        }

This will now show a print preferences dialog, in which we can select a printer. The result in this case is the entire UI being printed, because LayoutRoot was specified.

We can also hook into the beginning and ending of the printing process using the StartPrint and EndPrint event. These can be used to execute some code at the start or ending of the printing process.

Today at the PDC09, Microsoft announced Silverlight 4, the 4th version of the RIA platform.

You can get the bits here:

(This list was shamelessly copied from Tim Heuer’s blog post on Silverlight 4)

After a week of way too many bratwurst (which I didn’t eat for the record), I’m home again, from a TechEd in which quite a lot happened. Here’s my view on things.

Berlin, aber ja (yes, that’s about as far as my German goes)

For the first time, TechEd Europe took place in Berlin. When some time ago, I saw the date that Microsoft planned to do its biggest conference on the European continent, I was a bit worried. The conference was to start on the day of the celebrations of the fall of the Berlin wall, now exactly 20 years ago. Because I planned on going by car to the event, I feared quite some traffic problems. However, this turned out to be a great choice. Not only did we attend the technical event, we were able to attend a once-in-a-lifetime evening, witnessing the fall of the 1000 domino blocks, representing the Berlin wall. Despite the rain, it was nice to see this.

The city itself is huge and public transport is great. You can get anywhere within minutes. It has a safe feeling as well, we were walking around quite late and it all seemed quite OK.

Technical content

For the first time (as far as I know that is), Microsoft decided to make TechEd a one-week event. Previous editions were split: one week was for devs, the second week for IT Pros (or vice-versa depending on the year). While this new formula has its advantages (like in: you can now take a peek over the hedge if you know what I mean), it also has its disadvantages in my opinion. In some time slots, I personally felt there were not enough dev-oriented sessions. At TechEd Barcelona 2007, I had to choose between a good session, another good session and often another good session. Being at the event as a pure developer, I missed that this year in some of the time slots sadly. The good news is that some of the sessions were really good though. My top sessions were Jeff Prosise’s Secrets in Silverlight and Stephen Forte’s Agile Estimation.

I personally do hope for a split event again next year, although I doubt it. With a one-week event, the event is probably easier to organize and financially more interesting. In unsure times like these, this is probably a heavy-weighing factor on the decision making, which is understandable.

Speaker Idol

As announced, I took part in Speaker Idol this year. I won the first heat on Monday, which got me a Flip HD camera :) . On Thursday, I didn’t win in the finals, although I got a ticket for free for next year’s event! No pics yet, but I expect them to arrive soon.

A bad Coke bottle

Right after the Speaker Idol finals on Thursday, I got injured. Opening a bottle of Coke (only glass bottles at the event… why??), it broke in my hand. Result:  a deep cut in a finger on my right hand and had to go to first aid. The bottle was probably broken already and upon putting force on it to open it, it broke further. Luckily, the doctors decided it did not need stitching.

Typing is still quite difficult with so much band-aid on my finger, I keep hitting too many keys at the same time.

Ask The Experts

I was also at the Silverlight booth for the Ask The Experts program. While working there, I spent some time with Tim Heuer, Shawn Wildermuth, Emil Stoychev and others. It was really nice to finally meet all of them!

A tech talk or two?

While at the event, I did 2 TechEd Online TechTalks. The first one, in which I was interviewed by my colleague Bart Wullems on building real world applications with Silverlight, is online already at http://www.msteched.com/online/view.aspx?tid=298625e9-142f-4b7f-8018-81615efd51c4 . The second one on multi-touch in Silverlight apps will be online soon.

Pictures?

Of course! Here are all the photos I made while at the event: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gillcleeren/sets/72157622685362577/ 

See you in 2010 again, Berlin!

2009 has to be the year in which most “Microsoft VIPs” have been in Belgium! We already had Brad Abrams, Juval Löwy, Dino Esposito and many more. You thought that was it for this year? So was I…

Until last week, Katrien De Graeve told me and Pieter (my Visug-colleague) she had some news for us… MSDN and Visug will join forces for a Scott Guthrie event. Yes, "ScottGu” aka “TheGu” is coming to Belgium on December 4th. Erase any other appointments, meetings, vacations you have planned on that day (afternoon only), as Scott will give presentations and probably a Q&A session as well.

Location and exact content will  be posted very soon-ish, we know it’s very near, but I expect to that we will have everything set up this week. The event will be free in any case, thanks to Microsoft.

For now, start thinking of questions you may have, you will soon be able to start sending those in. As the event is only two weeks away, we hope many of you will be blogging, tweeting, Facebook’ing, “whatever”ing a lot!

More news soon, right here!

At TechEd Europe 2009, together with my colleague Bart Wullems, I did a TechEd Online TechTalk on Building Real World Silverlight applications. You can watch it here: http://www.msteched.com/online/view.aspx?tid=298625e9-142f-4b7f-8018-81615efd51c4 

A second one on building multitouch applications, together with a fellow Regional Director Daron Yondem, will be online soon.

TechEd 2009 is just a few days away now, starting on Monday November 9th in the Mess Berlin. Coincidentally, the day the event starts, marks the celebrations of the fall of the Berlin wall, now exactly 20 years ago. I’m guessing Microsoft took the “Life without walls” seriously! Authorities expect no less than one million people on the Berlin streets on Monday night. We won’t be alone there, that’s for sure.

I’ll be attending the event and you can come and see me at the following locations/times:

• Tuesday evening during the reception at the Silverlight booth
• Wednesday from 14.45 till 17.30 at the Silverlight booth
• Probably I’ll be at the booth on other times as well
• On Tuesday I’ll be doing a TechEd TechTalk in the fishbowl around 15.00
• I’ll be at the Speaker Idol booth as well, don’t know when yet
• Together with other Regional Directors, I’ll be in the lounge

Of course, I’ll be blogging as much as possible from the event, so watch this space for important updates!

I’ll be doing an MSDN Live Meeting on October 1st on Prism/Composite Application Guidance, starting at 2PM GMT+1. Registration is free and you can still register here: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032424477&EventCategory=2&culture=nl-BE&CountryCode=BE .

Hope to see/LiveMeet you then!

Last week, Silverlight FireStarter was hosted, an in-person and also online event where top speakers like Scott Guthrie, Brad Abrams, Tim Heuer etc talked about all there is to know about Silverlight.

Luckily, all the sessions can now be seen on-demand for free here: http://www.msdnevents.com/firestarter/

A small extra: I just found through Tim Heuer a nice 2-part video on Visual Studio called the Visual Studio Documentary form Channel9:

Welcome to the first installment of the Visual Studio Documentary.This is an hour long documentary that is split into two parts, roughly a half hour each. Welcome to part one, where we take you back to the days of MS-DOS and Alan Cooper who originally sold Visual Basic to Bill Gates back in 1988.  Next week we will feature Part Two but for those that would like to watch it sooner, here is Part Two. In addition, each week we will post a longer and more in-depth stand alone interview from the interviewees that were featured in the documentary.

Links: http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/VisualStudioDocumentary/The-Visual-Studio-Documentary-Part-One/ and http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/VisualStudioDocumentary/The-Visual-Studio-Documentary-Part-Two/

Today, the Belgian edition of Mix, ReMix09, took place in Belgium. With an almost sold out conference, the expectations were high, many people were expecting to learn new things on the tools and technologies that will influence how we work in the coming years. Silverlight, Expression Blend & Design, Surface… were covered in today’s sessions. Some corporate speakers, including Brad Abrams (who joined Visug yesterday for another sold out event) and Adam Kinney.

The event

After a long absence from Kinepolis in Brussels, the troops again gathered in the largest cinema complex in Belgium. Like said in the introduction, the event was almost completely sold out, which was noticeable in the keynote: almost all chairs were taken and at that very point, the highway around Brussels was still completely stuck.

Because of the fact that it’s a cinema complex, the rooms themselves are the best to do presentations in and also to watch them in.

All attendees could get a trial version of Blend, which I noticed were very much wanted.

The speakers

Most of the content today was brought by corporate speakers, giving attendees a deep insight in the technologies that were covered. These included Silverlight, Surface, Blend and ASP.NET MVC. What struck me somehow, is that there where more questions after sessions than normal: Belgian audience is not very communicative, however today, quite some questions were asked.

The keynote was delivered by Katrien De Graeve and Luc Van De Velde. It was clear, to the point and had a nice flow of ideas in it. Good work, guys!

The technologies

Two things really amazed me today. First, when Luc asked during the keynote, how many people attended last year’s Mix Essentials, only an estimated 5-10% raised their hand. I can’t think of an explanation for this though…

The other thing is the following: the people that attended the conference, had very little knowledge of the Silverlight and Blend tools. OK, you can think: that’s why they came to the conference, right?! True, but still, I would have expected that more people would have experimented with the Silverlight tools.

The pictures

I took my camera with me today (for once I actually didn’t forget to do so…) and here are some of the pictures. The full album can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gillcleeren/sets/72157622483133184/

View Full Album

Ordina@ReMix

A nice video testimonial for Ordina was shown in the keynote where I talk about WPF projects we have done in the past few months. The video will be added soon here!

Brad Abrams, program manager at Microsoft, took time from his busy schedule he has to pay a visit to Visug. This session, hosted at Ordina in Mechelen, was attended by over a 100 people. This only shows that Belgian community keeps on growing and growing!

Brad posted his slides here or here. Thanks to Microsoft, the session is also recorded, I’ll post here when the session is online.

Here are some pictures:

I’m a big fan of OneNote, ever since it was released. However, since I’m working on several PCs every day, I need my stuff synchronized between my machines all the time. OneNote lacks in this area, since it does not support any web sync out-of-the-box.

This resulted in me checking out EverNote, a free tool, comparable to OneNote. While it looks good, I still loved OneNote more (possible because I’m used to it), but EverNote has one big advantage: it stores my notes online, and so I have my notes with me on every machine.

Still willing to use OneNote, I tried a different approach, using the power of the cloud. I thought, why not store my notebooks in Live Mesh, the free synchronization tool from Microsoft that on top offers another 5GB of free storage “in the cloud”. So I tried it and it works great. Simply create a notebook in OneNote, store it in a Mesh folder (or upgrade it’s current folder to a Live Mesh folder), do this on all your PCs and you have the best of two worlds: the goodness of OneNote and the sync features of EverNote.

Yesterday was install day for me: had upgraded almost all my machines to Windows 7 RTM. The experience was simply amazing. Here are some of the things that amazed me the most.

Setup experience
Now fully supported is installing from a USB key. I used a cheap 8GB USB stick but it can be done with any type above 4GB. For the instructions on making an USB install, look here. There's also a small tool available that does it for you here. Small note on the latter: it takes in my opinion longer to create the install with this tool. It did fail once also, the install files it extracted were corrupt, causing my install to fail.

Why would you install from a USB drive? It's faster (quite noticeable) and doesn't cost you a DVD.

Acer Aspire One loves Windows 7 too
About half a year ago, I bought an Acer Aspire One (160GB). Out-of-the-box, it had Windows XP installed, which ran fine... at least, I thought. The machine only had 1GB of RAM, so installing Windows Vista was out of the question. I used my USB install stick, plugged it in, the setup started... and less than 30 minutes later, Windows 7 was running on the small machine.
And how! This machine never went faster. It's amazing what extra performance I get from the low specs this machine has. It's fast, simple as that.
Conclusion: Windows 7 runs great on netbooks!

Up next, the old laptop with the old printer...
Everyone knows this kind of laptop. It's rather old (about 3-4 years), it still runs but it's slow. Of course, it has some old hardware attached to it. In my case, it was me (with my Windows 7 USB install stick again) against an Acer TravelMate 2420 (1GB of RAM) with a HP LaserJet 1018.

The machine had Vista installed, but it was slow. This was typically a machine that caused people to say that Vista was slow: the hardware specs simply weren't enough. Exactly the fact that many people installed Vista on too old hardware was a major component in all negative comments on Vista.

Now, Windows 7, let's try it, shall we? It took 32 minutes to install to desktop. Not bad! Then, I looked at how it worked, even with Office and anti-virus installed. This was my "Windows 7 WOW moment". The difference was amazing. (Note: the old install had nothing more than Office, FireFox and AV software, so no comment on "it was slow because of all what was on there").

My mother who often works on this machine said the machine never worked so fast. But she asked if I could install her printer (the HP LaserJet 1018) on there. I was like "Uh-Oh"... HP and new drivers, I wonder if it will work. In Vista, the printer "sometimes" worked.

So I plugged it in, Windows 7 tried installing it but failed :(. Seconds after, a message came that it found the driver. I was like "yeah, it's going to take me to www.hp.com or something". The message said: download the Vista driver and it'll be installed in compatibility mode for Windows XP SP2. So I clicked, I immediately arrived on the correct page, I downloaded the driver and Windows 7 took it from there. It got the printer working flawlessly! Another WOW moment.

Conclusion
After a day of getting acquainted with the RTM bits, I can't help but being super enthusiastic. It's a truly great operating system, that will quickly help forget the negativity around Windows Vista (though I'm still convinced that many of those comments were untrue as well, it was cool to be negative on Vista...). It's here now (if you're MSDN/TechNet/Beta tester...) or in October for the general public. This will put Microsoft OS back where they belong and is a bad dream for competing operating systems.

I just showed you Sobees… If that is not enough Silverlight showcase for your taste, don’t fear, there’s more! On the Microsoft case study site, available via www.microsoft.com/casestudies, no less than 8 new showcases with Silverlight have been added. These include the following;\

• Digital Minds Ltd; Financial Site Transforms Online Investing with Interactive Tools
• Yahoo! JAPAN: Yahoo! JAPAN Finds Unique Solution for Multiplatform Online Video
• TDK-Lambda: Electronics Manufacturer Reinvigorates BI Application with New Interface
• netlinkblue: Rich Media Platform Delivers Powerful Results for Fans of New Cricket League
• National Instruments: Cross-Platform Plug-In Powers Rich Internet Applications for Scientists and Engineers
• NASA: NASA Provides Interactive, 3-D Views of the Next Mars Rover to the Public
• ninemsn: Australian Web Site Gives Visitors a “Wow” Experience with Rich Media Platform
• Signposter.com: Advertising Company Doubles Customer Base in Six Months with Mapping Solution
• Kimberly-Clark: Kimberly-Clark Migrates Consumer Site to New Web Platform for High Value, Lower Cost
• Continental Airlines: Continental Airlines Modernizes Call Center Application with Web-Based Technology

However you put it, the adoption rate of Silverlight is increasing and it is increasing rapidly. The fact that so many large customers are choosing Silverlight for their mission-critical sites and applications confirms their trust in the technology as well.

A few days back, someone was asking me about the install base of Silverlight and whether or not I see this as a problem. There are 2 things I can say to that:

• The install base is increasing every day.
• Large companies switching to Silverlight will increase the install base, which in turn will increase the number of companies choosing for Silverlight, which in turn… You get the picture.

Now that Silverlight 3 is released, a bunch of great applications using the functionalities of the platform are starting to pop up. One of them is the new Twitter client from Sobees, available via www.sobees.com. Created entirely in Silverlight, this offline application allows you to view the tweets from the people you are following, as well as searches within Twitter. At this point, Facebook is not yet supported, but it coming soon.

The user interface is pretty impressive, keeping in mind it’s only an alpha release at this moment. It’s scattered with nice touches, one of them being the characters-left countdown, shown when adding a new Tweet.

Developers might be thinking; how was this created? As you may know, some time ago, Twitter closed their borders in terms of cross domain access. Their crossdomain.xml file is pretty strict (not to say completely locked down). The consequence of this move is that client-side platforms like Silverlight, can’t connect with the platform directly, because of cross domain restrictions, active in Silverlight. The solution for this problem is normally building an extra service on your own domain, let this service connect with the external service and let Silverlight connect with your own service. Services don’t mind the cross domain policies in place.

Sobees did more or less the same, otherwise their client could not connect with Twitter. They are using Azure as their service platform: the Sobees client connects with Azure that in turn connects with Twitter. It is in the end a large mashup using Twitter, Azure and Silverlight 3.

Next to the Sobees Silverlight application, they also have bDule, a desktop variant of the Twitter client, created entirely in WPF.

All the goodness can be downloaded via www.sobees.com and www.sobees.com/bdule , of course all free of charge!

This “Silverlight 3 Launch Video” on Channel 9 really made my evening, it’s hilarious!
Why is Dan Fernandez crawling around on a concrete floor with a blonde wig while White Snake plays in the background?  That's a great question and I wish I had a logical answer but I don't so I will just give you the truth.  It has to do with Silverlight, Expression and couple's therapy.  I hope you enjoy and good luck.
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/History/Silverlight-3-and-Expression-3-Launch-Video-well-sort-of-/

Yesterday, we had the Flemish and European elections took place here in Belgium (in case you aren't familiar with Belgian/Flemish government, take a look here. Note: it's quite complicated!).

I'm not planning on turning my blog into a place for political statements, absolutely not. However, Microsoft technology took a prominent place in these elections. VTM, the Flemish commercial TV station, used Microsoft Surface technology to show the results.

The presenter used several items that were recognized by the Surface's internal camera's to switch between the results of the parties (seen around her left hand in the below screenshot).

When placing the tagged item on the surface, the results for the selected party are shown.

Also, a lot of dragging was implemented in the application. By clicking on a header, she could show more details on the results.

With this example, Surface has (as far as I know, I never watch TV...) made its debut on Belgian television. And it made quite an impression on people as well... My girlfriend came asking me if I knew what this "thing was they were using to drag stuff around" on TV :)

Update: here's the MSN Soapbox video:

My “ASP.NET Ajax Tips and tricks” session was scheduled in the last timeslot at DevDays Netherlands. However, after following 2 or 3 exhausting days of sessions, a lot of people came to my talk still! Thanks for that!!

I must say, I’ve never had so many people ask me for my demos, so I guess they must have been good . Feel free to send me a mail with any comments you may have regarding the contents or the talk itself. It’s always good to get feedback.

These were the topics covered in the talk (I did have to skip the NoBot control because of time constraints):

•Creating a custom extender in ASP.NET Ajax
•Managing the history client and server side
•Using ASP.NET authentication in Ajax
•Adding controls dynamically using Ajax UpdatePanel
•Localization in ASP.NET Ajax
•No bots on my site!
•Slide that data!
•Animations in Ajax

As promised, here is all the content I covered:
Slides
Demos

As announced earlier, Community Day 2009 is coming! Mark Thursday 25th June in your calendar, as it’s the day you can get a full day of free training and sessions, all courtesy of the Belgian User Groups.

This third edition is a big step for us. For the first time, we are doing an entire day (whereas the 2 previous editions were half a day). We also moved to a new location, as the previous one became too small: we are now in Utopolis in Mechelen.

Since yesterday evening, I finished the website, it’s now live at www.communityday.be . Registration is again free, including food and drinks, BUT seats are limited, so register in time if you want to be sure you can be there!

Please blog/twitter/Facebook about the event. Below is some “blog bling” you can use for that!

I hope to see you all on June 25th!

A few weeks back, JetBrains released version 4.5 of ReSharper, probably the most popular and most widely-used plug-in for Visual Studio. All of the features included in the product, can be found here.

I have to admit, while I liked the plug-in earlier already, I've been always a bit afraid of the performance implications it brings along. Since it does background compiling, it is putting more load on your machine, mostly in memory usage. This also resulted in longer loading times for projects. I remember when loading a DotNetNuke website, it took quite long to load the project.

The main goal of the 4.5 release was performance and memory usage. In the newsletter that announced the release, you could read the following:
" As announced, the new version features major improvements in performance and memory usage. After all, what is a productivity tool for if not for being agile, robust and responsive?"

I was eagerly awaiting this version, mainly because of this improvements, so I installed it immediately. I'm currently doing a project where I work on a VPC (Virtual PC image), so that would be a good test.

Since then, I'm really blown away by it. It has great performance now, you only notice a small delay when loading or creating a project. Once running, there's no noticeable difference anymore between running with or without ReSharper. The memory usage of the devenv.exe process is still higher than without Resharper, but again, it went down since previous releases.

My development machine is also the one I use most of the time to do presentations and demo's. I do disable Resharper when giving presentations, since it may confuse attendees when seeing other IntelliSense. Also, like I said, creating an application is a tad slower still, so for demo purposes, that's not a good thing.

Some people argued that running Visual Studio without Resharper was not what a professional developer should do. My only argument against that, up until now, was the performance hit you suffered. Since that is now also gone, I don't see a reason why you should not have it in your toolbox.

More info on the product can be found at www.jetbrains.com.

PS: I'm not sponsored by JetBrains to write this review, it's my personal opinion.

Silverlight adoption is growing everyday, both the install base and the number of large customers making the switch to Silverlight. This weekend, another one made the plunge into the Silverlight world: www.IPLT20.com , the official website of the Indian Premier League of cricket. Cricket may not be big here in Belgium where I live, but it is enjoyed by people in more than 120 countries around the world, including India, Pakistan, South Africa, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom and even the US. In India, it's even the most watched sport on television.

Since they are using Silverlight, they can offer their many visitors a much richer experience, including interactive statistics and scoreboard display, ball-by-ball commentary, match highlights simultaneously available using picture-in-picture, and a rich, immersive photo gallery using deep zoom.

The site offers access to more than 500 hours of live and on-demand video, has 50.2 million page views in six weeks and expects to to reach 400 million page views, 10 million unique users and 45 million visits during the upcoming season.

I’m preparing some demo’s on ASP.NET caching. One of them includes SQL Server Cache Notifications (with SQL Server 2005).

For this to work, the first thing you need to do is enabling the Service Broker on the database. This can be done using the SET ENABLE_BROKER command.

   1: ALTER DATABASE Northwind SET ENABLE_BROKER

This command seemed to be taking way too much time (I left it running several minutes, but it still didn’t do anything). I then stopped the database service and retried. The command completed in just seconds.

The reason appears to be the following: this command wants to create an exclusive lock on the database. However, if you still have open connections, it cannot create this lock and it thus waits and waits… and hangs.

Stopping the service closes all connections and makes it possible to create the broker.

Dear readers, I’m proud to announce officially Community Day 2009, the third edition of a full day of community driven content on Microsoft technologies. The event will take place on Thursday June 25th 2009.

For the first time, the event will be a full day of free sessions. Also new is the location: we have moved to Mechelen.

In the coming weeks, you’ll be able to subscribe on the Community day website (which is at this point not yet updated, but I’m getting to it…).

Spread the word! Community Day 2009 is coming!

Microsoft today officially announced Tech Ed 2009 Europe. The event will take place from November 9 until November 13. The event will target both developers and IT Pros in the same week, so only 1 week for both events. Also, the event will not be in Barcelona anymore; this time, Berlin will be the city we’ll be visiting.

Tech·Ed Europe 2009 will once again be focused into a single week for both communities. The change in format back to a combined event is based on feedback from both our developer and IT professional audiences who in this time of economic uncertainty prefer a single week activity. For 16 years, Tech·Ed Europe has provided our customers the best technical education event in the industry and we look forward to continuing to deliver the great content, education and connection opportunities.

Tech•Ed 2009 Europe

Nov 9-13, 2009

Messe Convention Center

Berlin, Germany

24 hours of free technical content, that’s exactly what Microsoft Virtual Techdays is. The event will start worldwide on April 1st and is free for all.

You can still register at http://www.msfttechdays.com/public/home.aspx .

I’ll be hosting 4 sessions, so drop by if you have a chance!

Now that Mix is over, it’s time to write a rather large post on the event that took place last week in Las Vegas for the 4th time. The 5th edition is already announced (Mix10 I guess), it will take place March 15-17, in Las Vegas at Mandalay Bay (up until now, Mix has always been at the Venetian).

Was Mix09 a good edition, compared to previous ones? Absolutely! At Mix06, the first year the conference was held, the main focus was on ASP.NET Ajax, which allowed “at that time” writing richer and more compelling user experiences. Mix07 was of course marked by the announcement of Silverlight 1.0 beta and 1.1 alpha (which would later become Silverlight 2). A year later, at Mix08, Silverlight 2 officially reached beta status. And this year, Silverlight 3 arrived in beta. Silverlight 3 is looking at a release date later this year.

However, not only Silverlight was the star of the show: the second day of the event was marked by the RTW of IE8, the all-new version of the popular browser. After a long road, the new browser is here and it contains a number of interesting new features, which I’ll cover later in this post.

Mix09: the event. Now on DVD!
If you didn’t have the time, money… to attend the event in real life, don’t fear. All sessions are recorded by Microsoft AND are available for free on the Mix09 website. If you want to get your modem hot from all the downloading, head over to http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09 for all videos of the event. Note that you should plan to take some days off work to see them all, there’s more than 120 videos online. Check out Mike Swanson’s blog for a complete list of the sessions, a batch file to download all sessions and a batch renamer for all content (http://blogs.msdn.com/mswanson)

Also, many speakers have uploaded their demos to their blogs, so be sure to check them out.

Silverlight 2 + 1 = Silverlight 3

Star of the show was of course Silverlight 3. The released version is a beta, not yet feature complete, meaning that some parts of the software that will be in the final version aren't there yet at this point. All the necessary tools and SDKs are available, you can find the link below. A very important note: if you are developing Silverlight 2 applications, you should not install this release on your production machine, because it makes your setup a Silverlight 3 config. Currently, Silverlight 3 apps are incompatible with Silverlight 2. A virtual machine might be the best option here. 

Out-of-browser

One of, if not the biggest feature of this new release is out-of-browser support. It allows you to place your application directly on the customer's machine, enabling an off-line experience that's the same as the online experience. All this becomes possible without any additional download of runtime or the need to write applications in a different way. Any Silverlight application that is out-of-browser enabled, can now be easily found on the user’s desktop or start menu, and launched with a single click. Also, it can test if the network is connected, update itself and also has access to Isolated Storage. The API for this is very easy, I'll be writing an article on this soon.

Is this any different from Adobe Air, which enables an offline experience as well? Yes it is. Air needs a separate runtime which is about 20mb in size and provides access to the entire hard drive of their customer’s computer, which can be a significant barrier if the customer does not have complete trust.

Also, the adoption rate for Air is well below the rate for Silverlight. So far, Silverlight has an install base of about 300 million, since its launch about 5 months ago. Microsoft estimates that about 400.000 developers and designers are currently using Silverlight already.

Silverlight for Eclipse

Up until now, the Silverlight tools were mainly aimed at Visual Studio developers. Microsoft now also has a Silverlight plugin for Eclipse, called Eclipse Tools For Silverlight (Eclipse4SL). This way, Mac developers can join in in developing Silverlight applications as well. The current version is a CTP.

Expression Blend 3

While not only targeting Silverlight, the release of Expression Blend 3 is great news for Silverlight developers and designers, offering full compatibility and support for Silverlight 3 effects, along with integration with Visual Studio 2010 and WPF. One of my favorite features is the Photoshop and Illustrator import, enabling smooth integration with workflows already in place. During the import process, designers have the freedom to view and import Photoshop files layer by layer. Layers can be easily regrouped and elements retain their original formats, layers, layer positions, editable text and vectors.

Another great feature in Blend 3 is SketchFlow, a way for rapid application prototyping. Using SketchFlow, designers can rapidly map out and experiment with the UI flow of a concept with SketchFlow. Built-in ‘sketchy’ styles enable customers to concentrate on an overall concept of a solution rather than focusing too early on the detail.

Important feature you may ask for enterprise? Absolutely! Business application experts can use SketchFlow to rapidly explore different UI flows and scenarios for their line of business applications without any technical knowledge of the underlying delivery platform. These ideas can be easily presented via the SketchFlow player which provides the ability to not only interact with prototypes, but also enabling the user to provide in-context feedback using the built annotation capability.

To download all the tools for Silverlight development, go to http://silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight3/default.aspx.

Microsoft Web Platform

Let's first take a look at what is really meant with this new term, the Microsoft Web Platform. The MWP is the software of choice when building Web solutions or applications for businesses, large or small. If you’re looking to create your company’s global Web presence, building applications for your small business or launching a new Web site, Microsoft has the solutions for you.

The platform includes several components, including the Web Platform Installer and the Web Application Gallery.

The Web Platform Installer Includes:

• Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.1 on Windows XP SP3
• IIS 6.0 on Windows Server 2003 SP2
• IIS 7.0 on Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008
• SQL Server 2008 Express
• .NET Framework 3.5 SP1
• Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition
• IIS Extensions including:
  • IIS 7 Media Services 3.0
  • IIS7 Administration Pack
  • Database Manager for IIS7
  • WebDav 7.5
  • FTP 7.5
  • FastCGI for PHP support on IIS6
  • URL Rewriter
  • IIS 7 Application Routing
  • Web Deployment Tool for IIS
• ASP.NET and features such as ASP.NET MVC
• Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio
• The Community Version of PHP v5.2.9

The Windows Web Application Gallery is a collection of the most popular Open Source and community Web applications that run on Windows. It provides a simple streamlined way for users to explore, discover, and install ASP.NET, PHP, and other types of web applications and solutions on the Windows Platform.

More information and all the downloads can be found at: Microsoft Web Platform 

Azure Services Platform

While the Azure platform was announced in November last year at PDC, a number of updates to the platform have been released. This shows that Microsoft is committed to delivering a comprehensive cloud platform.

The following updates were done on Azure:

• Windows Azure: An update to the Windows Azure service delivers advancements in interoperability,  flexiblity, geo-specification, and the ability take existing IP to the cloud. 
• Applications written in 3^rd party programming languages such as PHP can be deployed and run on the Windows Azure infrastructure with FastCGI support, providing an easy to use, scalable cloud runtime and storage environment while giving developers the power to choose their preferred programming language. For .NET developers, Full Trust is now available so all aspects of the .NET Framework can be utilized, including invoking native and legacy code components and giving existing code investments new life in the cloud.  Over the next few weeks Geolocation will be available, enabling customers to specify the datacenter location for applications and storage to optimize for lower network latency and comply with location-based regulatory and legal requirements. 
• SQL Services: SQL Data Services (SDS) recently announced an accelerated roadmap to provide a cloud database as part of the Azure Services Platform. 
  • In this updated roadmap, SDS will deliver a fully relational database service in the market to provide customers with the ability to use existing investments in on-premises SQL Server T-SQL development and use a full relational data model in the cloud.  This approach enables greater developer agility and faster time to market by supporting the use of existing applications, tools and knowledge, and featuring distributed, cloud based functionality that will work with other online services or with existing on-premises solutions.  The public availability of these updated service features will be mid-2009 and commercially available later this year.
• .NET Services: .NET Services makes further enhancements to embrace web standards, interoperability, and provide connectivity on-premises with the cloud, and disparate groups with each other across network boundaries.  These services allow customers to easily federate data and messages with its Service Bus and Access Control services.  By supporting REST, ATOM, JSON, SOAP and HTTP web standards, web developers using any programming language can use the service to connect, collaborate, and create federated applications.
• Live Services: To accommodate increasing popularity and demand, Live Services was announced at PDC 2008 as an open Community Technology Preview, where any developer can start utilizing the web services and incorporate them into socially-aware applications connecting to 460 million Windows Live users.  We will announce Live Services updates in the future, but have nothing specific to announce at MIX ‘09.

More info on Azure can be found at Azure Services Platform

Windows Mobile 6.5

An updated version of Windows Mobile was also shown at Mix. The most remarkable features are the new version of Internet Explorer Mobile, the addition of Widgets and Windows Marketplace for Mobile.

Internet Explorer 8

Finally, Internet Explorer 8 was also released. Internet Explorer 8 takes a big step forward in browser innovation for the way people use the web today. Internet Explorer 8 makes it easier to visit sites you’ve been to before with the new Smart Address Bar and enhanced Favorites Bar, works with your search provider to suggest likely searches based on what you type into the Enhanced Instant Search Box, groups tabs to match the way you browse the web and gives you Accelerators and Web Slices to keep you closer to the sites and services you use every day.

IE8 is also safer than ever. Specifically, Internet Explorer 8 improves upon our protection against social engineering “phishing” attacks with the new SmartScreen Filter, which helps protect against malware sites and downloads. Internet Explorer 8’s new Cross-Site Scripting filter helps protect users against Cross-Site Scripting Type-1 reflection attacks, one of the most common attacks against Web sites. 

It's also more reliable than ever. It includes a new Compatibility View mode to help ensure that users can access all the sites they use today without display or functionality issues. Additionally, the new architecture of Internet Explorer 8 helps ensure that a single tab crashing does not cause users to lose their whole browser session, and crash recovery restores the crashed site and content

Internet Explorer 8 is available on Windows XP SP2 and SP3, Windows Server 2003 SP2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista (RTM), SP1 and SP2.

To download IE8, go to www.microsoft.com/ie8.

Now that Techdays, Mix09 and many other interesting conferences are behind us, it’s time to kick up the pace and organize a great number of Visug sessions. I’ve almost finished uploading all sessions, except for 2: my own one on ASP.NET caching (I still need to create the abstract) and another one presented by an international speaker (again!). I’ll keep you posted on the latter.

Here’s a list of all upcoming sessions so far announced:

Back 2 Basics: LINQ
Presented by: Kurt Claeys on: 15/4/2009
Registration: http://visug.be/Eventdetails/tabid/95/EventId/6/Default.aspx

Back 2 Basics: ASP.NET caching
Presented by: Gill Cleeren on: 29/4/2009
Registration: http://visug.be/Eventdetails/tabid/95/EventId/3/Default.aspx

Mocking
Presented by: Maarten Balliauw on: Thursday, May 07, 2009
Registration: http://visug.be/Eventdetails/tabid/95/EventId/4/Default.aspx

Back 2 Basics: Integrating Membership, Role Management and Profiles into Web Applications
Presented by: Pieter Gheysens on: 27/5/2009
Registration: http://visug.be/Eventdetails/tabid/95/EventId/9/Default.aspx

Domain Driven Design
Presented by: Yves Goeleven on: 18/6/2009
Registration: http://visug.be/Eventdetails/tabid/95/EventId/7/Default.aspx

IronRuby: The .NET developer should not fear the dynamic language
Presented by: Ivan Porto Carrero on: 30/6/2009
Registration: http://visug.be/Eventdetails/tabid/95/EventId/5/Default.aspx

ORMs: Entity Framework vs NHibernate
Presented by: Kurt Claeys & Davy Brion on: 10/9/2009
Registration: http://visug.be/Eventdetails/tabid/95/EventId/8/Default.aspx

If you are interested in doing a session for Visug, please contact us! Send us a mail via board@visug.be .

Last week, Microsoft organized the Belgian edition of the Techdays, for the first time in Antwerp. After reading (Twitter, blogs…) and hearing quite a lot of feedback, the event was a success.

For me personally, it was also an exciting week: for the first time in my career, I was doing a keynote. I presented the Silverlight part of this talk, together with 2 other Regional Directors from Belgium: Peter Himschoot took the WPF part and Grégory Renard handled the Surface. Also, Katrien De Graeve (Microsoft) showed Windows 7 and Azure, while Hans Verbeeck (also Microsoft) glued all bits and pieces into a nice session.

In this article, you’ll get an overview of the demo we created for the keynote, called “Silverlight on the bike”.

The scenario

Hans, when not behind his laptop, loves to ride his bike. While on his bike, he wears a small device from Garmin that monitors his heart rate and also retrieves the entire route that he followed via GPS. When combining these 2 bits of information, you can see where the heartbeat went higher (because of a slope for example).

Garmin must like developers, because they expose this data as XML. Pure clean XML that any developer can read out. This data was the start for our scenario: plot out the route that Hans did on his bike on a map, show the heartbeat on a graph, throw in some pictures he took along the road and expose all this in a familiar looking interface in the browser.

The demo also needed to run as a standalone application as well as on the surface. Because of the portability of the code between Silverlight and WPF (Surface applications are WPF as well), a large amount of code could simply be copied from one platform to another.

And here’s how we created it…

While the demo contains too much code to explain here, I’ll go over some of the most interesting parts that really make Silverlight shine.

Step 1: Design is everything (sort of…)

The first thing we did was going to a designer and explain him the needs of our application. A request from our side was of course that he needed to create the interface in Blend. So he came up with a design, completely in XAML, as shown below.

A cool thing when working with Silverlight is a nice workflow between designers working in Blend and developers working in Visual Studio. Since designers work with the same files as developers, there’s no need to cut and paste the work that the designer did: he can make changes while developers are creating their code and these changes will be incorporated without any hassle.

Step 2: Get me that data

Design is one thing, coding is another. Our application is built around data (remember the XML file from the Garmin device), so the first problem that needs solving is getting that data into the application. Silverlight 2 supports several ways to connect with data: WCF, webservices, reading remote files… For the sake of simplicity, we are going to use the latter: we’ll drop the XML file in the web application. Silverlight now needs to connect with the file using the WebClient, a class that’s also available in the full version of the .NET framework.

Whenever Silverlight needs to go out fetching data, it will do so asynchronously. If it would perform this action synchronously, the browser would hang while data flows from server to client or vice-versa.

Codesnippet 1 shows the code needed for the data access and the result is shown.

   1: WebClient client = new WebClient();

   2:             Uri address = new Uri("http://localhost:" + HtmlPage.Document.DocumentUri.Port + "/" + fileName, UriKind.Absolute);

   3:             client.OpenReadCompleted += client_OpenReadCompleted;

   4:             client.OpenReadAsync(address);

CodeSnippet 1

Step 3: Let’s parse XML (still yuck?)

Now that we are able to connect with the data, we need to do something with it, we only have it in a string at this point. We need to parse the XML and create objects that represent the data in memory. Parsing XML using the “traditional” way, using XmlDocument classes and the like, is not my favorite part of my development life. This API is quite difficult and often requires XPath knowledge to access the correct data.

Since .NET 3.5 (in fact also in 3.0 as beta), LINQ and LINQ to XML were introduced and the great thing is that these are also included in Silverlight. Using the LINQ to XML API, we can very easily parse the XML and create objects representing the data. Codesnippet 2 shows the XML, codesnippet 3 shows the type that we’ll be creating. In Codesnippet 4, the code to parse the XML and to create a generic list of TrackPoint instances is shown.

   1: <Trackpoint>

   2:             <Time>2009-02-14T14:13:10Z</Time>

   3:             <Position>

   4:               <LatitudeDegrees>51.3509752</LatitudeDegrees>

   5:               <LongitudeDegrees>4.6816549</LongitudeDegrees>

   6:             </Position>

   7:             <AltitudeMeters>20.3249512</AltitudeMeters>

   8:             <DistanceMeters>0.0343911</DistanceMeters>

   9:             <HeartRateBpm >

  10:               <Value>111</Value>

  11:             </HeartRateBpm>

  12:             <SensorState>Absent</SensorState>

  13:           </Trackpoint>

  14:           <Trackpoint>

  15:             <Time>2009-02-14T14:13:11Z</Time>

  16:             <Position>

  17:               <LatitudeDegrees>51.3509765</LatitudeDegrees>

  18:               <LongitudeDegrees>4.6816523</LongitudeDegrees>

  19:             </Position>

  20:             <AltitudeMeters>20.3249512</AltitudeMeters>

  21:             <DistanceMeters>0.0000000</DistanceMeters>

  22:             <HeartRateBpm >

  23:               <Value>110</Value>

  24:             </HeartRateBpm>

  25:             <SensorState>Absent</SensorState>

  26:           </Trackpoint>

  27:           <Trackpoint>

Codesnippet 2

   1: public class TrackPoint

   2:     {

   3:  

   4:         private DateTime _time;

   5:  

   6:         public DateTime Time

   7:         {

   8:             get { return _time; }

   9:             set { _time = value; }

  10:         }

  11:  

  12:         private Point _position;

  13:  

  14:         public Point Position

  15:         {

  16:             get { return _position; }

  17:             set { _position = value; }

  18:         }

  19:  

  20:  

  21:         public double X

  22:         {

  23:             get { return _position.X; }

  24:             set { _position.X = value; }

  25:         }

  26:  

  27:         public double Y

  28:         {

  29:             get { return _position.Y; }

  30:             set { _position.Y = value; }

  31:         }

  32:  

  33:         private int _cadence;

  34:  

  35:         public int Cadence

  36:         {

  37:             get { return _cadence; }

  38:             set { _cadence = value; }

  39:         }

  40:  

  41:         private double _distance;

  42:  

  43:         public double Distance

  44:         {

  45:             get { return _distance; }

  46:             set { _distance = value; }

  47:         }

  48:     } 

Codesnippet 3

   1: public List<TrackPoint> Load(Stream filename)

   2:         {

   3:             XElement doc = XElement.Load(filename);

   4:             List<XElement> tps = doc.Descendants("Trackpoint").ToList<XElement>();

   5:  

   6:             TrackPoint tp = null;

   7:  

   8:             foreach (XElement point in tps)

   9:             {

  10:                 try

  11:                 {

  12:                     tp = new TrackPoint();

  13:                     tp.Position = new Point(double.Parse(point.Descendants("LatitudeDegrees").First().Value) / 10000000,

  14:                                                          double.Parse(point.Descendants("LongitudeDegrees").First().Value) / 10000000);

  15:                     tp.Distance = double.Parse(point.Descendants("DistanceMeters").First().Value) / 10000000;

  16:  

  17:                     if (tp.Distance > _totalDistance)

  18:                         _totalDistance = tp.Distance;

  19:  

  20:                     tp.Cadence = int.Parse(point.Descendants("HeartRateBpm").First().Value);

  21:  

  22:                     _trackPoints.Add(tp);

  23:                 }

  24:                 catch (Exception)

  25:                 {

  26:                         

  27:                    

  28:                 }

  29:             }

  30:             return _trackPoints;

  31:         }

Codesnippet 4

Step 4: Design: OK! Data: OK! UI: To Do!

Now we have the data from the device ready on the client-side within our Silverlight application as a generic list. We can now go ahead and add the UI elements to the interface.

Up first is a ribbon. We want to create a user interface that feels familiar to a user of the application. A great way to achieve this, is using a ribbon known from Office 2007. Currently, Silverlight does not contain a ribbon out-of-the-box yet, but there are some custom-built ones available. For the sake of simplicity, I created a usercontrol containing the ribbon instantiation. This keeps my Page.xaml code cleaner. Codesnippet 5 contains the code for the ribbon and codesnippet 6 contains the usercontrol that we’ll put on the page.

   1: <rbn:Ribbon.QuickLaunchButtons>

   2:                 <rbn:RibbonButton SmallImageSource="Images/Save.png" />

   3:                 <rbn:RibbonButton SmallImageSource="Images/Undo.png"  />

   4:                 <rbn:RibbonButton SmallImageSource="Images/Repeat.png" />

   5:             </rbn:Ribbon.QuickLaunchButtons>

   6:  

   7:             <!-- Tabs -->

   8:  

   9:             <!-- Home -->

  10:             <rbn:RibbonTab Title="Home">

  11:                 <rbn:RibbonTabGroup Title="Actions">

  12:                     <rbn:RibbonButton Text="New data" LargeImageSource="Images/addxml.png" />

  13:                     <rbn:RibbonButton Text="Change data" LargeImageSource="Images/addxml.png" ButtonClick="RibbonButton_ButtonClick" />

  14:                     <rbn:RibbonButton Text="Images" LargeImageSource="Images/addimages.png" />

  15:                 </rbn:RibbonTabGroup>

  16:                 

  17:                 <rbn:RibbonTabGroup Title="Reporting">

  18:                     <rbn:RibbonButton Text="New report" LargeImageSource="Images/addreport.png" />

  19:                     <rbn:RibbonButton Text="View reports" LargeImageSource="Images/addreport.png" />

  20:                 </rbn:RibbonTabGroup>

  21:             </rbn:RibbonTab>

  22:  

  23:             <!-- Help -->

  24:             <rbn:RibbonTab Title="Help">

  25:                 <rbn:RibbonTabGroup Title="Help">

  26:                     <rbn:RibbonButton Text="About" LargeImageSource="Images/about.png" />

  27:                     <rbn:RibbonButton Text="Help" LargeImageSource="Images/help2.png" />

  28:                 </rbn:RibbonTabGroup>

  29:  

  30:             </rbn:RibbonTab>

  31:  

  32:         </rbn:Ribbon>

Codesnippet 5

   1: <!-- Ribbon -->

   2:             <usercontrols:RibbonControl Grid.Row="0" Grid.Column="0" 

   3:                           x:Name="mainRibbon" VerticalAlignment="Top"></usercontrols:RibbonControl>

Codesnippet 6

Next, we’ll add a Telerik Coverflow control that will enable us to flip through the images. Telerik as well as Infragistics (and many other vendors) have been busy creating controls suites, giving you many more controls to work with. Codesnippet 7 shows the code for this control.

   1: <telerikNavigation:RadCoverFlow x:Name="coverFlow" CameraY="-80" ItemMaxHeight="100" 

   2:                                             SelectedIndex="5"  VerticalAlignment="Top" CenterOffsetY="15">

   3:                                     <Image Source="Pictures/1.jpg" />

   4:                                     <Image Source="Pictures/2.jpg" />

   5:                                     <Image Source="Pictures/3.jpg" />

   6:                                     <Image Source="Pictures/4.jpg" />

   7:                                     <Image Source="Pictures/5.jpg" />

   8:                                 </telerikNavigation:RadCoverFlow>

One of the main goals of the application is of course the display of the map that will also display the route that Hans did on his bike. A perfect candidate for this is Virtual Earth. On Codeplex, a project called DeepEarth, allows us to display Virtual Earth maps inside a Silverlight application. It also includes all the necessary stuff to show paths, icons etc and allows for easy zooming and panning. We’ll use this control to display the route.

Of course, we need to convert our data for the map to use. This is very simple code shown in codesnippet 8. What we’re doing here is simply converting our generic list of Trackpoints to a list of points the DeepEarth control can work with. Codesnippet 9 shows the code for displaying the map.

   1: private void AddPolygon()

   2:         {

   3:             ConfigShapeLayer();

   4:             var points = new List<Point> { new Point(0, 0), new Point(20, 0), new Point(20, 20), new Point(0, 20) };

   5:             var polygon = new DeepEarth.Geometry.Polygon { Points = points };

   6:             shapeLayer.Add(polygon);

   7:         }

Codesnippet 8

   1: <DeepEarth:Map x:Name="map" >

   2:                                     <DeepControls:NavControl>

   3:                                         <DeepControls:MapSourceControl SelectedSource="Hybrid">

   4:                                             <DeepVE:TileLayer MapMode="Aerial" />

   5:                                             <DeepVE:TileLayer MapMode="Hybrid"/>

   6:                                             <DeepVE:TileLayer MapMode="Road" />

   7:                                         </DeepControls:MapSourceControl>

   8:                                     </DeepControls:NavControl>

   9:                                     <DeepControls:CoordControl/>

  10:                                 </DeepEarth:Map>

Finally, we need to display the heartbeat, also based on the data in the generic list. We can do this in several ways (for example using the controls from the Silverlight toolkit), but here, I choose to use a listbox. Displaying a heartbeat in a listbox might not sound that normal, as we are used to having the listbox show a list of text items. However, using Silverlight, we can completely restyle the listbox using the data template (Codesnippet 10). The data template allows for complete restyling of the items as well as the listbox’ display area. The item is replaced with an ellipse, absolutely positioned from the top and the display area is replaced with a drawing canvas. (To see the entire code, download the sample). The result is shown below.

   1: <DataTemplate>

   2:                                         <Canvas Canvas.Left="10" Canvas.Top="10">

   3:                                             <Ellipse Fill="Blue"

   4:                                          Tag="{Binding}"

   5:                                          Width="10"

   6:                                          Height="10"

   7:                                          Stroke="Black"

   8:                                          StrokeThickness=".5"

   9:                                          MouseLeftButtonDown="Ellipse_MouseLeftButtonDown"

  10:                                          MouseEnter="Ellipse_MouseEnter"

  11:                                          MouseLeave="Ellipse_MouseLeave"

  12:                                          >

  13:                                             </Ellipse>

  14:                                         </Canvas>

  15:                                     </DataTemplate>

Codesnippet 10

The final application

The following image shows the complete application running in the browser. You can download the entire source package by clicking here (Note that I left in all the source code for the other projects like DeepEarth. This way it’s easier for you to experiment with the demo).

(Due to the Virtual Earth webservice being down, the map is not displaying, as can be seen on the screenshot)

Download the code here.

While doing my sessions @Techdays Belgium, I used for the first time a little application called Snippet Manager to drag code snippets into my code. It's not something I created myself, it's created by Karen Corby (Microsoft).

You can download it here.

From March 10 - 12, TechDays 2009 Belgium took place, for the first time in Metropolis Antwerp.

I've delivered quite some sessions, including part of the keynote. A lot of people asked me to share the slides as well as the demos, so here are all the items you need to complete your knowledge on both databinding in WPF as well as skinning controls in Silverlight.

WPF Databinding Deep Dive
Databinding always sounds a bit intimidating. It’s the concept of attaching objects to a user interface and letting the technology take care of what to display where. WPF has a lot of capabilities in store to make databinding really easy and to help you build data-driven applications a lot faster. In this session, we’ll tackle everything that databinding offers us, from the fundamentals concepts to the advanced topics. With a lot of demos woven into the session, you’ll walk away with the knowledge you need to more efficiently use WPF.
Slide deck - Demos

Under the hood in Silverlight's controls skinning framework
While Silverlight offers us a lot of controls to build business applications, you might feel the urge to change them even more to suffice the needs of your application. A round button perhaps? Or a non-rectangular textbox? It’s all possible with the Silverlight skinning framework. In this session, you’ll see how to overhaul the look of your controls as well as create your own from scratch.
Slide deck - Demos

I hope you enjoyed the sessions, any feedback is welcome.

As you can read by now, I'll be hosting 2 sessions at TechDays 09!
Here they are:

Under the hood in Silverlight's controls skinning framework
While Silverlight offers us a lot of controls to build business applications, you might feel the urge to change them even more to suffice the needs of your application. A round button perhaps? Or a non-rectangular textbox? It’s all possible with the Silverlight skinning framework. In this session, you’ll see how to overhaul the look of your controls as well as create your own from scratch.

WPF Databinding Deep Dive
Databinding always sounds a bit intimidating. It’s the concept of attaching objects to a user interface and letting the technology take care of what to display where.
WPF has a lot of capabilities in store to make databinding really easy and to help you build data-driven applications a lot faster. In this session, we’ll tackle everything that databinding offers us, from the fundamentals concepts to the advanced topics. With a lot of demos woven into the session, you’ll walk away with the knowledge you need to more efficiently use WPF.

I hope you'll be attending my sessions!

For the past weeks, I've been busy preparing my sessions for the upcoming Techdays here in Belgium. Techdays is the event every .net developer and IT Pro in Belgium should attend. You'll have the choice of over 60 sessions over a period of 3 days.

You’ll get a deep-dive on existing and future technologies of Microsoft:

• Discoveries: Windows 7, Windows Azure, Cloud Computing, C# 4.0
• Architecture and development: Visual Studio, Silverlight, SharePoint, web applications, …
• Infrastructure and enterprise applications: SQL Server, WCF, Windows Server, virtualization, System Center, security, …
• Personal and collective efficiency: Data access, desktop management, Unified Communications, remote office operations, SharePoint,…

But also:

• Get your hands on a Microsoft Surface
• Interact with the Microsoft partner network and the Microsoft linked applications and services
• Discover our certification offerings
• Share impressions with your peers and meet with internationally renowned professionals

Registration is available at www.techdays.be so hurry up if you want to be part of the event!

Note that for the first time, the event will take place in Metropolis, Antwerp!

Finally! It took us some more time then originally planned, but it is finally here: the all-new Visug website. You can reach it via www.visug.be of course.

While there are some new features as well (head over to the new included blog on the visug site), more will be added in the coming months. One of the new features that is now already in place, is an included RSS feed (http://www.visug.be/Blog/tabid/98/rssid/1/Default.aspx). We will use this feed to announce new events and site updates.

I hope you like it, it cost me quite some hours in the past few weeks to get it right!

I just noticed that 2 more webcasts of me have been put online on MSDN Chopsticks.

Today, I got the confirmation that I am now a member of the Ineta Speaker Bureau Europe. (http://europe.ineta.org/).
The INETA Europe Speaker Bureau provides usergroup leaders top notch speakers for their key events. The speakers are provided at no cost to the usergroup.

That means that if you run a usergroup, you can now request me at no cost to come speak at your events!

A nice little touch is that together with myself, my collegue and friend Kurt Claeys was also added to the bureau! Congrats!

If I'm not mistaking, about a week ago, we stepped into yet another new year. 2009 already... For me personally, a year with some "important" changes, as I'll be 30 years old this year (in fact, in little over a week - January 16th - I won't be 2.9, I'll become 3.0).

Not only for me it's a big year. Worldwide, we are feeling the impact that the financial crisis is bringing. More and more companies are firing employees or aren't investing as much anymore as they used to. In IT, my business of course (and probably yours as well since you're reading this blogpost), up until now, the impact isn't that big - yet. At least, where I'm living (Belgium - Europe). Companies will urge people to be as efficient as possible. Every bit helps in getting more done in less time and thus for less money. I'm anxious to see where we'll be in a year from now - hopefully the situation will be better by that time.

Microsoft also faces a busy year. It's a release year, with big new releases of Visual Studio, C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET... coming up in the developer tools and languages. But also a new version of Windows, Windows 7 is on the horizon (with a first public beta coming out any minute now hopefully). And least we forget Office 14. Note the fact that Microsoft is skipping V13.0.

Windows 7 will be the successor of the much troubled Vista. While the beta isn't really here yet, a version was leaked on torrent networks, which was for once perhaps a good thing. The first reports of this unsupported version were really positive: it proves, even already in this version, to be a stable product that is faster than Vista. While I personally never had much troubles with Vista, it has never been a public favorite. Microsoft is really planning on not making the same mistakes with 7 and it looks like a promising product. µ

Office 14 didn't really get all that much attention yet. At PDC, Microsoft showed the first version of the web-based (Silverlight) versions of the products. While this will prove helpful for everyone working with Office, it's particularly interesting to see whether this will help people in under-developed countries in accessing more technology.

For developers, 2009 will be one of the most exciting years. First, as mentioned, Visual Studio 2010 is coming up. This new version of the IDE will be the biggest overhaul the product has ever known. Making developers love Visual Studio again is the driving goal for 2010. Multi-monitor support, a WPF interface, a faster environment...All of these make it hard to wait for the new release to arrive.

A new version of C#, version 4.0 as well as VB.NET, VB10, will see the daylight. I have been playing and writing on C# 4.0 already and it has some interesting developments, mainly around dynamic programming. The changes however aren't as big as the introduction of version 3. ASP.NET will also be upped a version number, also towards 4.0. If you followed the PDC, you might have seen that the amount of sessions on ASP.NET was really small. ASP.NET has matured, and the changes in this version are mainly focused on integration with other technologies, for example JQuery.

Silverlight however, will keep on growing. While the adoption isn't where it should be yet (at 100% ), it's getting there. Customers are getting to know it, more and more developers build interest into it. At Mix, some exciting new stuff should be announced related to Silverlight to keep us all busy! If you need investing in a learning a new technology, take a look at Silverlight for sure.

WPF, another still recent technology, will keep on rising hopefully. The adoption of this platform is still too low, mainly because it's higher learning curve. Microsoft has done good things with it since it's release like improving its performance, but more is needed I reckon.

Finally, another thing that will really take off this year is the whole Cloud-thing. Windows Azure, announced at PDC also, is the platform for hosting applications in the cloud.
Azure will have many advantages. Take for example a small startup, who need investing in infrastructure - up until now that is. The requirements are often unknown up front and making wrong decisions can be costly. Azure is the solution here since it scales perfectly to match the needs of the startup.
On the other side, there's still a change of mindset needed in this space. While you stay in control of your apps, you aren't really in control, you're handing over your applications to Microsoft (and not only apps, but also storage...). It will be interesting to see how fast people will be migrating to the new platform.

I hope this piece gave you some insights in the upcoming stuff in the new year. Please comment if you don't agree with my opinions! 

For an article I'm writing on C# 4.0, I really need the Visual Studio 2010 CTP (September release). However, as you may have experienced today, January 1st, the CTP is expiring: Visual Studio 2010's "trial period" has expired. The CTP is only available as a Virtual PC image, and a VPC image by default will take the date settings from the host OS.

Now, I found there's a settings in the *.vmc (Virtual Machine configuration) file that disables the synchronization between the host and the guest OS. By activating this setting, the VPC's time will only advance when it's powered on. When extracting the VPC the first time, the time is set to October 10th 2008, giving you all the time you need to play with the VPC.

Here's how to apply the setting. Open the *.vmc file and look for the <mouse> tag.
<mouse>
     <allow type="boolean">true</allow>
</mouse>
<video>
     <user_selected>
     .....

Between the </mouse> and <user_selected>, add the following tag:

<components>
     <host_time_sync>
          <enabled type="boolean">false</enabled>
     </host_time_sync>
</components>

Now, boot the VPC and it will now stop syncing the two clocks.

I'm happy to announce that we are having Regional Director Juval Löwy again for a Visug event. I just posted the event on the old Visug site (we are almost done with the new one, just hold on...).

The event will take place on Thursday January 15th in Utopolis Mechelen. We have about 250 seats available and we expect them to sell out quickly!

Abstract of the session:

The .NET services bus is part of the new Microsoft Cloud Computing Windows Azure initiative, and arguably, it is the most accessible, ready to use, powerful, and needed piece.

The service bus allows clients to connects to services across any machine, network, firewall, NAT, routers, load balancers, virtualization, IP and DNS as if they were part of the same local network, and doing all that without compromising on the programming model or security. The service bus also supports callbacks, event publishing, authentication and authorization and doing all that in a WCF-friendly manner.

This session will present the service bus programming model, how to configure and administer service bus solutions, working with the dedicated relay bindings including the available communication modes, relying on authentication in the cloud for local services and the various authentication options, and how to provide for end-to-end security through the relay service.

You will also see some advanced WCF programming techniques, original helper classes, productivity-enhancing utilities and tools, as well as discussion of design best practices and pitfalls.

So, register fast, it is free like always!

The first one on styling Silverlight controls:

The second one on creating custom Silverlight controls:

Part 3 is not yet ready...

I hope you enjoy them!

I just finished adding a bunch of new events on the Visug website. Here's an overview!

• What's new in Visual Studio Team System Code Name "Rosario"
  27th November 2008 by Pieter Gheysens (Compuware)
  Abstract:
  Microsoft Visual Studio Team System code name "Rosario" is the version of Team System that follows Visual Studio Team System 2008. It is an integrated Application Life-cycle Management (ALM) solution comprising tools, processes, and guidance. Team System "Rosario" can be seen as a major release and will bring lots of new features in the areas of Project Management, Architecture, Version Control, Build, ... Come and enjoy a sneak preview of what will be shipped in the next version of Visiual Studio Team System.
  
• Resharper and Design Principles  
  16th December by Hadi Hariri
  Abstract:
  As systems grow in size it becomes hard to keep the simplicity.
  Testing becomes harder and understanding the code comes close to impossible. This session explains concepts that allow you make robust applications that are not only testable but maintainable. Concepts such as separation of concerns interface segregation, dependency injection and inversion of control are all covered with ample examples of IoC Containers as well as an introduction to mock objects and how to replace dependencies with them during tests.
  
• Christmas Geek Dinner
  18th December 2008
  Abstract... Not a real abstract but anyway...:
  For the third time already, we are planning our annual Christmas Geek Dinner. An evening full of fun, networking, good food and the real christmas spirit among fellow Visug-people... What more could you ask Santa for?

  This year, we selected Wok & Tandoor (Antwerp). It's an "all-you-can-eat", Chinese/Indian restaurant, located near the "Vlaamse/Waalse kaai".

  Seats are limited! Each participant pays for own food!

• WCF and entities
  22nd December 2008 by Kurt Claeys (Ordina)
  Abstract:
  Using the ADO.NET Entity Framework in a WCF SOA architecture. About the objectcontext, disconnected entities and entities as datatransferobjects in serviceoperations.