Snowball - The Blog

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!

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!

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!

To really finish off the TechEd 2007 posts, I have posted some pictures here (the rest can be seen on my Flickr page).

The departure, early monday morning in Zaventem.


Arrival at the conference center.
  

Keynote by Soma
 

Developers, developers, developers...


Exhibition hall and CommNet
  

Ask the Experts booth
  

Breakout sessions


Moehahaha


All my TechEd pics (taken with my TytnII, so not really printable) can be found here: http://flickr.com/photos/gillcleeren/sets/72157603111475967/

Now that I'm back home after a long week at Barcelona (and weekend at EuroDisney), it's time to round up things.

Since I was selected for Ask The Experts back in September, I was really looking forward to attending this event. It was my first TechEd and my first visit to Barcelona, and I must say, it was even better than I hoped for. I wasn't sure what to expect from the Ask The Experts, would I be able to help people, could I get in contact with some interesting people over at Microsoft...? Well, the answer is yes to all of these questions!

The hours I spent at the ATE booth really flew by, making me want to even do an extra shift, because you not only can help people, but you also learn a lot of interesting stuff. People that have their questions answered really are thankful, which gives a warm feeling inside.

When sessions are taking place, it's sometimes not busy at the booths, so you can have a talk on just about every technology with people that know a lot on their field of expertise. And also on my own booth, the Silverlight booth that is, I got to know some things I didn't know yet on Silverlight and WPF.
Now, let's talk sessions. The opening keynote was not really that exciting from a developer's perspective. I had my hopes up for a definitive release date for Visual Studio 2008, but sadly, we only got a confirmation it will be on MSDN "somewhere this month", which is now the official statement of Microsoft.
Some of the other sessions were really exciting, making you want to go home and try out the materials. Some others were a little less, but still very good.

The parties and drinks are really something too. On Tuesday, the influencers drink at a tapas bar brought me in contact with some interesting people too and the country drink on Wednesday brought together the almost 200 Belgian .NET'ters. In a moment of sadness, we remembered our friend David Boschmans, who passed away last August, once again showing that he will not be forgotten.

Overall, TechEd really is a great event for developers. It makes me think again of why I choose to start developing in .net. Hopefully, I'll be there again next year.

I want to conclude by thanking Microsoft for the oppurtunity and Ordina to be there!

Since I was quite busy (and by the end of Thursday, quite tired too), I wasn't able to blog on Thursday and Friday on TechEd in Barcelona.

On Thursday, I had the most busy day over at the Ask The Experts booth, because of the Partner Expedition that took over an hour. People came with some interesting questions, while I was accompanied by Martha Rotter from Microsoft Ireland at the booth.

Remy Pairault (Microsoft) gave us a nice introduction on Silverlight Streaming, the free Live-service where you can host your Silverlight Streaming projects (more on http://silverlight.live.com). He showed the possiblities of the platform and the possible ways to implement it on any website.
Belgium's Tom Mertens had a panel talk on blogging with some of the people that really made blogging what it is today. Unfortunately, I was only able to see a small part of this session.

Friday was the last day of the convention, so we had to take our luggage to the covention center in the morning.
The (closing) keynote on the future of computing, data transfer and storage and networks. While this talk was not really aimed at developers, I admit that it was a really interesting one and a half hour.

Our Iberian flight brought us home safely and on time. However, since I had to go to a company weekend in EuroDisney, we immediately travelled to Paris where we arrived only after 3am. Needless to say that it was a long day!

To start off with, I'll first describe last evening. I was at the influencers party at the TapasBar at the other side of the street. I had the oppurtunity to talk with quite a lot of interesting people there. We were planning on leaving the party, but then I got to talk with 2 people from Iceland on Silverlight, and that discussion took about 2 hours... It was midnight when we left.

Day 3 is the only day I'm on "morning duty", meaning that I was at the Silverlight Ask The Experts booth from 10.00 'till 13.00.
We had some interesting conversations today on Silverlight, we had a nice discussion on Silverlight and its security aspect. Remy, who is on the Silverlight Streamimg team gave a nice demonstration of what you can achieve with the service and its SDK. More on that next week when I have more time!

I also had the oppurtunity to have a private chat with Jesse Liberty (who you should know from his famous books), and it turned out to become a very inspiring conversation.

To show you how good TechEd is for your professional network: I was having lunch with my 2 collegues from Ordina, but they had to leave because their session started. I ended up talking to Jeanne Bischer, who is a program manager for Office and Silverlight development.

Like I feared, my wallet could not remain closed, as I bought 2 books today, Silverlight 1.0 and Professional XNA development, both printed by Wrox.

And what about today's sessions, you might wonder? This morning, I had some spare time to visit the session on async programming in ASP.NET, given by Stefan Schackow. You might have already seen him in Belgium as a speaker on Belgian events. His sessions are always very to the point, and today it was no exception.

I just returned from the session on Server Communication with Silverlight and ASP.NET AJAX. Quite a good session, but the code was a bit too small to read from where I was sitting.

That's about it for today, I'm off to see Silverlight and IronPython/IronRuby, followesd by a level 400 session on deep ASP.net. After that, we're off to the country drink.

See you tomorrow!

One of the big announcements at the opening keynote here at TechE was Popfly Explorer.
There is a little video available here: http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-gb&vid=0c8a2fd4-6085-4abc-8c56-6fa087b81e5a .

With Popfly Explorer you can unleash the power of Visual Studio upon your Popfly creations with Popfly Explorer. Popfly Explorer is a plug-in for Visual Studio that lets you:

• Effortlessly create and host a Popfly web site
• Access your Visual Studio solutions from anywhere
• Share Visual Studio solutions with friends
• Add mash-ups to your web pages

If you want to download the PopFly Explorer, go here.

For instructions on how to use it, go to Steven Wilssens blog.

Happy coding!

To start today's post, I'll begin with what we did last evening. Around 9, we left the convention center, and went looking for a good restaurant. We found one in the harbor, where they served some very good steaks.

Now, steaks are of course not that interesting for you... So what about today?
I started today with a session on WPF 3D, given by Dennis Vroegop. The session was a good introduction on how to start programming in 3D for the Windows Presentation Foundation. The longer, the more, 3D will be finding its way into desktop programs, and using WPF for that is the right choice. Also, more and more tools like 3DStudio Max will have a way of exporting 3D grahics to XAML.

The second session I went to see was on integrating WF with ASP.NET. Since I'm a novice in workflow, this session, given by Paul Andrews taught me quite a lot. He did not cover how to create workflows (which was a good thing), but he went into deep detail on the integration part. Great session in my opinion.

Now, I just finished my first hours on the Ask The Experts booth, and I must say, it's really great. I had quite some interesting questions on Silverlight, varying from what Silverlight really is to deep questions on security in Silverlight.
Since this got us all puzzled, we got in some help, and found out a possible solution. I'm going to do some more research on that tomorrow morning, and I'll devote an article on this next week.

One question that we could not answer was the following: does Silverlight 1.1 also run on Mac PowerPC? We THINK at the momemt there is no support yet, but it might be added in the future...

That about wraps it up for today, apart from the fact that I had the oppurtunity to talk with some very interesting people, including Ian Griffiths.

I'm off to today's last session on the ADO.NET entity framework.

Until tomorrow, Day 3!

The sessions of day 1 are finished, I have just eaten a little something...
Here's a little overview of today...
We arrived nicely on time here in Barcelona, after registration, we made it in time for the opening keynote, given by Somqsegar.
I already went to my Silverlight booth over at Ask The Experts, but today, I did not have to work there yet...

The 2 following sessions were very satisfying. Daniel Moth gave a very nice overview of what's new in VS2008, and even after using it for several months now, I learned a lot of extra things.
The second session was on LINQ, the same session as was given on DevDays 2007 in Gent. Still a nice session though!

The city of Barcelona itself looks nice, but kinda dirty at first sight.
Now I'm going for a bite somewhere, as I'm quite hungry.

PS; this was written from a damn qwerty keyboard, so there might be some typo's in this post...

Until tomorrow! I'll be posting on my first experiences at the  ATE booth!

TechEd 2007 Barcelona is almost upon us!

Next monday, I'll be leaving with the 7am flight to Barcelona, where you can find me at the "Ask the Experts" booth, I'll be answering questions on Silverlight .

I'm not sure if I will be able to blog from there, but you'll see a lot of coverage after the event here.

Hope to see you there!

I got one hell of a great email this afternoon! I'm selected for the "Ask The Expert" program at TechEd 2007 at Barcelona! That means, yes, that I will be there!

From November 5th 'till November 9th, I'll be talking the Español . No, just kidding. I'll be at the Ask The Experts booth, answering questions from people who come up to the booth.

2 of my collegues from Ordina will be at TechEd too by the way, Sven Cipido and Kurt Claeys.

So, see you in Barcelona! Que?