After some time, I’m glad to announce that the official, world-renowned Silverlight Tour is coming to Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK and more countries, organized byOrdina Belgium. The second thing I’m glad about is that I’ll be the instructor for this training!

The most important link for all this: http://bit.ly/SilverlightTour, where you can find all information, registration and prices. Currently, we have an early bird offering ending in a few weeks for the first batch of sessions.

What is Silverlight Tour?

The Silverlight Tour Workshop is a three-day course on Silverlight 4, given all around the world throughout the USA, Asia and South-America. Ordina will organize the training in several European countries starting Q4 2010.

The training divides the content into three distinct areas: Design, Development and the Server-Side. Students should be able to develop Silverlight 4 applications once attending the workshop. The Workshop is structured with a mix of didactic lessons, demonstrations and hands-on labs.

Each student will leave the workshop having created several small Silverlight applications. This variety of learning techniques will ensure that all students become proficient in the technology quickly and in an exciting way.

Key values of Silverlight Tour

• Learning Silverlight from an expert in the technology
• Hands-on labs with Visual Studio and Blend make sure you get to apply your acquired knowledge
• Architect Silverlight applications
• Learn about LOB features such as data access and data binding

Why Silverlight?

Silverlight is Microsoft's approach to building RIA (Rich Internet Applications). The platform has since its introduction, taken the world by storm. Now at its fourth iteration, Silverlight is ready for building Line-Of-Business applications, building on the strong foundation of .NET.

Now is the time to learn Silverlight! Not only is Microsoft investing heavily in the platform, but Silverlight is also the base for Windows Phone 7, Microsoft's new mobile platform. And with WPF as the desktop variant, you can apply your knowledge on the web, on the desktop and on mobile devices.

The Silverlight Tour can help you achieve the knowledge you need to start building Silverlight applications today!

Our offering

The Silverlight Tour comes in 2 flavors, depending on your Silverlight knowledge.

If you don't have any experience with Silverlight yet, the Silverlight 4 Tour workshop is ideal for you. In this 3 day course, we are starting from scratch, teaching you the foundation for your Silverlight endeavours. After this training, you'll feel comfortable with the technology and can start building your own applications.

If you already have some experience with the platform, or you just followed the Silverlight 4 Tour, we advise you the Advanced Silverlight 4 workshop. In this 2 day training, we'll tackle the more advanced concepts such as MVVM, advanced data access and IOC.

We offer the combined course (Silverlight 4 Tour Workshop + Advanced Silverlight 4 workshop) at a reduced price.

Yesterday, I gave a talk for Visug on ASP.NET 3.5 SP1. It was a long evening, with over 2 1/2 hours of content. The talk covered Dynamic Data, Ajax History, Data Services and Entity Framework (talk given by Kurt Claeys).

Below, you can find the presentation. If anyone is interested in the demo's, leave a comment and I'll upload those as well.

Slide deck

I hope you all enjoyed the talk! Remember to register early for our next events!

While the title of this blogpost sounds like the theme song of a British film of a few years back, it's certainly not the most unimportant post of them all...

Microsoft is really gearing up these last days before PDC 08, which will, as you now MUST know, be taking place in Los Angeles next week. Read Snowball.be from October 25th for my personal coverage from the event!

Now, on to the releases...

• Silverlight: Silverlight 2 was released to web on Tuesday of this week. Here's everything you need to get up and running.
• Silverlight 2 SDK: includes SL runtime, Help and Visual Studio 2008 tools
• Blend 2 SP1: will give Blend 2 support for Silverlight 2
• Deepzoom Composer
• Tools for Visual Studio (stand-alone)
  Here are some interesting links you will want to read:
• Scott Guthrie's post
• Tim Heuer's post
• Scott Hanselman's post
  Also worth checking out if you are an Eclipse guy, is Elclipse4SL.org. Eclipse now also supports developing Silverlight applications. Talk about wide adoption!
  
  Regarding installation, I personally recommend uninstalling Beta 1 and Beta 2 tools and runtime. By doing so, I had no issue on 3 PCs with the installation.
• ASP.NET MVC Beta
  While I haven't spend much time with the MVC framework (one can't do it all, can he...), the framework is moving along fine and moved officially to beta status.
  You can find more information here. Just like always, TheGu has posted all you need to build your first app with the MVC framework.
• Microsoft Web Application Installer
  Developed to get you up and running with the most free web platforms in no time, the Microsoft Web Application Installer allows you to set up these applications with just a few clicks. Not only ASP.NET apps, no sir! It includes Drupal, PHPBB and Wordpress in addition to .NET apps like DotNetNuke.
  
  Using the Web Application Installer, you don't have to configure IIS, SQL Server and all the rest.
  Get the beta here.

This should get you through the weekend!

Together with the release of Visual Studio 2008 SP1, Microsoft also released an update of the Silverlight tools. The previous version is not supported anymore.

The new version can be downloaded here.

From the Microsoft.com page:
This package is an add-on to provide tooling for Microsoft Silverlight 2 Beta 2. It can be installed either on top of Visual Studio 2008 RTM or Visual Studio 2008 SP1, and it provides a Silverlight project system for developing Silverlight applications using C# or Visual Basic.

As promised last week with the release of SQL Server 2008, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (SP1) on Monday August 11th.

At the time of writing, I can't find it on the MSDN site, but it is on the MSDN Subscriptions website, so it's just a matter of time before it appears publicly.
The Service Pack is about 800MB large, the updated MSDN Library about 2.2GB!

Update:  Here's the public download link.

Is the release of SP1 a big deal? Yes, it surely is.
Below is a list containing a few of the new/improved features:

• ASP.NET Dynamic Data
• ASP.NET AJAX Back/Forward Button History Support
• Visual Studio Support for Classic ASP Intellisense and Debugging
• ASP.NET Routing Engine (System.Web.Routing)
• Visual Web Developer Express Edition support for Class Library and Web Application Projects
• New .NET Framework Setup Bootstrapper for Client Applications
• New Windows Forms Controls like the vector shape, Printing, and the DataRepeater
• WPF Performance Improvements (handy for my current WPF project that contains High Definition video!!)
• VS 2008 for WPF Improvements
• SQL 2008 Support
• ADO.NET Entity Framework and Linq to Entities
• ADO.NET Data Services
• Several improvements to C# as well as Visual Basic
• Many improvements on Team Foundation Server

More information here.

All the links you need:

• Express Editions
• Team Foundation Server SP1
• Visual Studio 2008 SP1
• Visual Studio 2008 Preparation Pack Tool
• .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1
• Silverlight Tools for VS2008 SP1

Yesterday, I gave my talk on ASP.NET 3.5 - AJAX - LINQ - Silverlight for Visug. Here is the slide deck of that talk:

http://www.codeflakes.net/blog/file.axd?file=ASP_NET35_AJAX_LINQ_Silverlight.pptx

Today, I gave students at the "De Nayer Instituut" in Mechelen an introduction to Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5.

As you can expect from this title, it's a very high level introduction to the new aspects of Visual Studio 2008 and .net 3.5. More specifically, there are some slides on the following:

• language enhancements (anonymous methods, automatic properties, lambda expressions...)
• LINQ
• the new features of the web designer (javascript debugging, CSS support...)
• WPF, WCF and WF
• Office 2007 development (ribbon designer...).

I thought it would be a good idea to post them here. Feel free to use the deck for your own presentations. If you do, maybe add a comment so I know they have been of good use!

Visual Studio 2008 Intro.ppt

I just got the news that my first 2 Chopsticks video's are online.

In the first video, I give a general overview of Silverlight 1.0 development, complete with 2 demo's.

In the second one, I'm explaining all you need to know on the Silverlight downloader object and the CreateFromXaml method.

You can see many more interesting Chopsticks video's here.

The posters with the .net 3.5 Framework Namespaces have been updated. You can download the new versions in different formats by clicking on the links below.

Full XPS
Split XPS
PDF
Tiled PDF

Just after the ADO.net Entity Framework went into Beta 3, Scott Guthrie's team released the first CTP ASP.NET 3.5 extensions, which contain the MVC Framework (Model View Controller), ASP.NET AJAX Improvements, ASP.NET Silverlight Support, ADO.NET Data Services and ASP.NET Dynamic Data Support.

I have just finished installing it, since I'm really looking forward to the MVC framework. However, I'm not really sure as what to expect, since it really brings a new way of developing ASP.NET applications into play.

The installation gave me this strange but very honest error...

But, it ended up installing everything correctly, the extensions are showing up inside of the Project Template window.

I'm hoping to find some time to start exploring the new Silverlight controls...

All of this candy can be downloaded here.
Video's on using the MVC and other stuff included in this release can be found here.

Earlier this month, Microsoft posted the first "blueprint" of a series that will help developers more easily build Software plus Services (S+S) applications. The project was released as a project on CodePlex, the open-source community from Microsoft.

This first blueprint is intended for developing S+S applications with Outlook 2007. Microsoft plans to offer blueprints for other office business applications, e-commerce, media/community and mobility.

The Outlook + Services Blueprint download -- available as a single file or two files -- includes the S+S framework, source code, Outlook Plus Services add-in library, workflow and other guidance. The blueprint is designed to help developers expose data and integrate services into Outlook 2007. It requires Outlook 2007, SQL Server Express 2005 and Visual Studio 2005.

Within the S+S framework, developers open up an Outlook + Services Visual Studio project and learn how to extend the e-mail app based on the guidance provided in Overview, Workflow and Detail tabs (a step-by-step walk-through). Microsoft expects to distribute a "more sophisticated" developer example, dubbed "My eBay," which features eBay Web services, a custom ribbon interface and HTML from an eBay page, in short order.

Source: reddevnews.

Microsoft released a new preview of the ADO.net Entity Framework, this time Beta 3. The ADO.NET Entity Framework is the latest Microsoft technology to support the RTM versions of .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008. Beta 3 is the followup to Beta 2, which was released last August.

ADO.NET 2.0 data providers that have committed to support the ADO.NET Entity Framework include Core Lab, DataDirect Technologies, IBM, MySQL, and Sybase. Oracle is not ready yet, but will be added in the near future.

Together with the announcement, MS also announced the agreement with 3rd party database vendors for supporting the new framework.

New in this version are mainly some new features, bug fixes and major performance enhancements. "We've got faster view generation, some simpler generated SQL, we've taken a lot of feedback from customers in some of these areas," said Elisa Flasko, program manager for the Data Programmability team at Microsoft.

"The changes have mostly been around the mapping and in the Entity Data Model of the Entity Framework itself," Flasko said. "As far the LINQ to Entities implementation, it has mostly been fit and finish." Users can, however, now do compiled LINQ query for better performance.

If you already used the Beta 2, it's advised to go through the breaking changes list here.

Want to get started? Go here for the plugins.

Dan Fernandez posted an overview of 15 great features you'll love with the new Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions.
His list encompasses integration of LINQ, free ebooks, WPF designer support... and of course, the fact that the Express editions are completely free.
Did you know there's even an ISO you can download with all express editions included? It's a 900MB download that, when installed, gives you the complete express suite. All for free!

Dan's list can be found here.

And here's a list of direct links to download the express editions.

Also, you can download the XNA game studio 2.0 (beta), which installs as an add-on for Visual Studio. Yes, again, all for free... More information here.

Start downloading, I'd say!

Finally, we can present the RTM version of the Visual Studio 2008 RTM Training Kit.
This kit is a real goldmine, containing presentations, Hands-On-Labs, demo's... on all topics related to Visual Studio 2008.
Now you only have to find about 5 days to complete all that's in here, and you're set!

All the info is below:
The Visual Studio 2008 Training Kit has been updated for the RTM and has been released on the Microsoft.com Download Center for anyone to download and use.

The Visual Studio 2008 Training Kit contains a full 5-days of technical content including 20hands-on labs, 28 presentations, and 20 scripted demos.   The technologies covered in the kit include:  LINQ, C# 3.0, VB 9, WCF, WF, WPF, Windows CardSpace, Silverlight, ASP.NET Ajax, .NET Compact Framework 3.5, VSTO 3.0, Visual Studio Team System, and Team Foundation Server. 

Originally developed for early adoption work with ISVs, it is now available to all. 

You can download the entire training kit from the download center here:  http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7602397 .  The kit is just over 120MB compressed.   After downloading the kit, simply run the installation program to extract the contents to your local machine.  Once the installation process is complete, you will see an HTML page that allows you to navigate through the contents of the kit.  

Yes, it's here, the eagle has landed!

Visual Studio 2008 has RTM'ed! If you're an MSDN subscriber, you can start your download engines, it's a whopping 3921 MB large file for the entire Team Suite.

From MS PressPass:
"On Monday, Nov. 19, Microsoft announced that Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 were released to manufacturing (RTM). With more than 250 new features,Visual Studio 2008 includes significant enhancements in every edition, including Visual Studio Express and Visual Studio Team System. Developers of all levels – from hobbyists to enterprise development teams – now have a consistent, secure and reliable solution for developing applications for the latest platforms: the Web, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, the 2007 Office system, and beyond."

You want it? Of course you do!

Here are some links you might find useful:
-LINQ cookbook: series of solutions to specific scenarios, that the team comes across when writing code and using queries
-Nice intro to ASP.NET MVC framework
-Looking for a replacement for FreeTextBox? Maybe this newly created rich text box for ASP.NET is the solution: http://www.codeplex.com/rte

Visual Studio Orcas beta 1 has been released just now!
Go here to download the beta-install or a VPC image: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa700831.aspx 

Enjoy!

If you don't know what to do this Sunday, I've got some interesting LINQ links you can easily fill your day with!

On CodeProject, I found a nice introduction article on LINQ, so if you haven't used it yet, this article might get you up to speed. You can read it here: http://www.codeproject.com/vista/LINQ_1.asp
After that, there's a nice on-demand webcast on Enterprise Library 3.0 that you can see here.

Enjoy!