Developer & IT Pro Days is the main conference in Belgium for developers and IT pro's that are interested in learning about current and near future products and technologies. Some of this year's highlights:

• Pre-conference on 27 March with Wintellect's Jeff Prosise on ASP.NET 2.0, ASP.NET AJAX and WPF/E
• More than 60 sessions during the 2 day main conference
• Opening keynote by David Chappell
• Several industry experts already confirmed: Thinktecture's Ingo Rammer and Christian Weyer, Jeff Prosise, Roy Osherhove. There are a few other amazing speakers in the pipeline currently; I hope David can confirm them really soon...
• Ron Jacobs, the man behind the ARCasts, will host an architecture track
• If you register on or before 28 February, you get 15% off the normal registration price.

After the good feedback we received on last year's venue, we decided to host the event again in Ghent. I hope to meet you there...

On Friday, we published a new article by Jan TIelens (Belgian MVP for Sharepoint) on the MSDN Belgium & Luxembourg web site. In this article Jan shows the different web part platforms and developments techniques a developer can choose from for building Sharepoint web parts.

Here is the article summary:

Web Parts are a great opportunity for developers to customize SharePoint, both to extend the existing functionality and to bring functionality or data coming from external applications in SharePoint sites. You can say that web parts are the building blocks for a SharePoint site. Since web parts are around for quite some time now, and you can develop web parts by using more than one technique, it can be hard for developers to decide how to build their web parts. This article is discussing the different development techniques and web parts platforms available today and in the near future.

Tags: sharepoint, development, asp.net, microsoft, msdn

From the website:

Virtual Lab Express is the fastest and easiest way to test drive Microsoft products and the Virtual Lab environment. These are 20-minute hands-on overviews of some of your favorite Microsoft products and developer tools. Try them out online now - no need to download full trial versions or dedicate test machines.

Express: What’s New in ASP.NET 2.0

In this lab you will learn to:

• Create, prepare and utilize master pages
• Add TreeView and Menu navigation controls
• Use the new Login control

Express: What’s New in Visual Studio Team System

In this lab you will learn to:

• Create an application
• Create unit tests
• Determine and enable code coverage testing

Express: What’s New in Visual Studio 2005

In this lab you will learn to:

• Utilize improvements to the IDE
• Utilize the refactoring capabilities in C#
• Utilize new debugging features

Express: What’s New in BizTalk 2006

In this lab you will learn to:

• Quick Setup Review
• Import a BizTalk 2006 Application
• Examine Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)
• Deploy a Package as an msi file

Express: What’s New in SQL Server 2005

In this lab you will learn to:

• Use the SQL Server Management Studio
• Use the Try/Catch blocks in SQL
• PIVOT and UNPIVOT data

With MSDN's Showtime, you can watch world-class presenters bring their best presentations from several big events around the world. On MSDN's Showtime, you can currently watch the following "blockbuster" movies:

ASP.NET Differences
In this session Dave Webster looks at the key differences between ASP 2.0 and previous versions of ASP.

ASP.NET Tips and Tricks
Interested in the latest tips and tricks for ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005? Stefan Schakow gives an update to Scott Guthrie's famous tips & tricks session from the 1.x days redone, updated, and improved for ASP.NET 2.0!

ASP.NET 2.0 Data Controls
This talk discusses the fundamentals of data access and how to render data ina web site using the new data source and data-bound controls in ASP.NET 2.0. Topics covered include binding to a SQL database, performing sorting, paging, update, insert, and delete operations, building data access and business object layers, rendering customization using templates, and improved performance through caching. This talk also covers aspects of Visual Studio 2005 Express and SQL Server 2005 Express for building data-driven web sites.

ASP.NET 2.0 - Master pages, themes, and site navigation
Properly integrating the powerful features of ASP.NET 2.0 into a high quality, professional site design is often difficult. In this talk, we will look at specific best practices, tips and tricks, and other lessons learned to help you more easily customize Master Pages, Site Navigation, themes, and more to build the most attractive and functional Web Sites possible.

ASP.NET "Atlas" (a.k.a. building AJAX applications with ASP.NET)
Take a first look at "Atlas", a new set of technologies that will build on innovations in ASP.NET 2.0 and make it easier to build Web applications that deliver rich, interactive, and personalized experiences in the browser using technologies such as DHTML and XMLHttp. Atlas includes a 100% JScript cross-browser client script framework that allows you to easily build browser applications with rich UI and connectivity to Web services, full integration with ASP.NET application services such as user profiles, a set of ASP.NET server controls for "Atlas", and a set of client application services. Learn how you can use the "Atlas" preview release and ASP.NET 2.0 to start developing richer Web applications.

Tags: Microsoft ASP.NET .NET development webcast

Dan Fernandez blogs that Visual Studio Express is completely free, not just till November 2006, but permanently. He also has some nice other Visual Studio Express related announcements over at his blog.

Last Monday, we had 2 guys from the Microsoft Visual Basic product team in Belgium for the MSDN Event: "Visual Basic On Tour". During 5 presentations Todd Apley and Paul Yuknewicz gave an overview of the new features in Visual Basic 2005. OK, one presentation was also given by Alexander Holy, developer evangelist at Microsoft EMEA.

In my previous life, I've did quite some Visual Basic development and I'm still proud of that. I'm also still convinced that Visual Basic is the perfect language for doing rapid application development. Combine the easy-of-use of Visual Basic with the advanced capabilities of the .NET Framework and you've got a application development tool on steriods. But before starting a religious language war, let me just say once more that - given my VB background - I was very happy to welcome the guys that actually worked on Visual Basic in Belgium.

Here are some links that may be of interest to Visual Basic developers:

• Jacob Cynamon lists the webcasts in the Visual Basic 2005 Today! series that he'll be doing...
• Tobin Titus writes about 202 Visual Basic samples (for version 2003 and 2005)
• Brad McCabe says the free eBook "Introducing Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 for Developers" was recently updated.
• And there is a lot more on the Visual Basic Developer Center at MSDN.com.

www.flickr.com

VISUG, Belgium's Visual Studio User Group, is having a meeting next Thursday (March 30 at 18:00) in Leuven Zaventem, as reported by Steven Wilssens, the user group's president. Topics of the meeting:

• discussion on presentation topics for upcoming meetings,
• discussion on membership conditions,
• discussion on Developer & IT Pro Days,
• presentation of advanced generic in Visual Studio 2005.

Did you know that VISUG together with MSDN Belgium offer a limited number of free memberships to the user group? Register for the Belgian MSDN Connection program and claim your free membership now. There are only a few free memberships left.

I'll do my best to drop by, but there is also the Dutch spoken MSDN Belux webcast on ASP.NET 2.0 running at that time...

Update: Steven had to change the location to the Compuware offices in Zaventem, because of the high number of attendees.

A few days ago, we announced the next MSDN Belux Event on Visual Basic 2005. It will all happen on April 3rd (first day of the Easter Holidays) at Kinepolis Brussels. What's not yet mentioned on the website is that the sessions will be delivered by the Visual Basic product team. In fact, they are so excited to come to Europe that Jay Roxe and a few of his team members recorded a short video about it.

Some weeks later we're organising (together with Microsoft EMEA and Microsoft HQ) hands-on labs on Visual Basic 2005 and hands-on labs on ASP.NET 2.0.

But before all that, both our Regional Directors will host a webcast on website skinning with ASP.NET 2.0 and cascading style sheets. Peter Himschoot will present the webcast in Dutch, while Grégory "Rédo" Renard takes care of the French spoken webcast. A few months ago, I already blogged about the power of CSS for skinning websites and I still find it very cool...

Thursday evening I had a chat with Kris Hoet, marketing manager at MSN Belgium. Normally our conversation would have been very short as the person he was looking for was not at the office. I can't recall how we started the conversation, but we talked for more than one hour on Windows Live.com.

First of all, I'm very fond of the brand new "infinite scroll" of Windows Live Search. No more clicking to go to the next page of the search results. You just keep scrolling. Really neat. And so far the upgraded search engine seems to return precisely the results I'm looking for. Nathan Weinberg explains a lot of the features of Windows Live Search at the Inside Microsoft blog news channel:

• First look at Windows Live Search
• Windows Live Search Macro's
• Windows Live Image Search

After my chat with Kris, I also replaced the currently installed MSN Toolbar and Desktop Search with the new Windows Live Toolbar (Beta). Now I have also access to Onfolio and Live Favorites. These Live Favorites allow me to synch my favorites across all PC's I work on. One of the other neat features is that you can basically use any search engine from within the toolbar's search box.

It seems many people also added quite a lot of bots to their Messenger account. Up till now, I didn't. But after talking a bit about it, several potential ideas for using a Messenger bot popped-up. I'm pretty sure that we'll see more and more of these bots in the near future. Kris sent me a link to a website that contains a lot of Dutch and English Messenger bots: http://www.mensmerk.nl/chatbots.html. Go and try them yourself.

You need a special SDK (software development kit) to develop such bots. For a limited time, Conversagent offers a free license of such an SDK. A few days ago, Dutch Cowboys blog (in Dutch) reports that Oberon Medialab from The Netherlands is Microsoft's first European Messenger ISV (independent software vendor) that offers a Messenger (ro)bot platform. As said before, this is only the beginning...

Bots aren't the only software you can create for MSN Messenger. You can also develop your own "activities" that can be used during chats. A lot of examples are available on the MSN Messenger World's Best App contest website. What about the Live Translator: you chat in one language and your correspondent sees the text in his own language? I remember seeing this as part of an Imagine Cup 2005 finalist application, but now it is available in the real world.

More information on developing for MSN Messenger is available on the MSDN MSN Messenger Developer Center. That's also the site where you'll find the Messenger Activity SDK.

You can personalize the Windows Live website with several gadgets. Not only just the set that Microsoft thinks to be useful, you can also develop your own gadgets. For more gadgets and information on developing them, check out the Microsoft Gadgets website. It seems there are also Belgians that submitted their gadgets already...

After the opening keynote of Developer & IT Pro Days some people asked me what the difference is between the live.com and start.com websites. You can find the answer on Sanaz Ahari's blog.

Do I think Windows Live is important for developers? Well, it's important for a lot of companies and thus it will become important for a lot of developers. On top of this, I think it's fun to build these bots, activities and gadgets for Windows Live, so don't hesitate to experiment with this stuff now... And feel free to let me know if you built something...

You can check out the latest Windows Live products at http://ideas.live.com/.

Available from the Microsoft.com Download Center: Microsoft Anti-Cross Site Scripting Library v1.0. At MSDN Blogs, Dan Sellers explains this library a bit more. If you use HttpUtility.HtmlEncode somewhere in your ASP.NET application, make sure to check out this new library...

Apparently there are quite some people that never saw Nikhil Kotari's Virtual Places sample application.

This is a quote from the website:

The idea behind Virtual Places is to highlight Virtual Earth in a mashup-style (aka Web 2.0 aka Programmable Web) application, wherein other Web services brought into the application in the form of gadgets (ala live.com). The application is implemented using ASP.NET Atlas, and features a complete mapping framework built using Virtual Earth and Atlas that features a programmable map control, overlays and pushpins.

This web application uses different services, such as the Amazon E-Commerce Web services, Amazon Alexa service, Weather.com, Flickr, GeoBloggers, MSN Search Web Services, FeedMap and GeoURL. As stated above, it was built using ASP.NET "Atlas".

Speaking of this package, a new version was released a few weeks ago. If you want to try out "Atlas" for yourself, you should be using Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Web Developer Express (this last one is available as download from Microsoft).

Rédo wants to start a new user group for developers in Belgium that work on the Microsoft platform. Therefore he put up a survey to know what potential members would be interested in. This will help him and the other user group leaders to compose a nice and compelling agenda for the next year.

For the French speaking people: Donc, si vous parlez le Français et vous souhaitez que votre avis soit pris en compte, complétez le questionnaire.

Recently Rédo and Aurelien showed me a very nice website that demonstrates the power (and flexibility) of using CSS to skin your website. Probably I should already have known this, but it was a real eye opener that one can easily work this way.

The concept is quite easy: you have one HTML file and you have to change its appearance only by modifying a CSS file. Graphic artists can submit their CSS to the site owners. After they approve it, the design can be viewed from the site.

All of that on http://www.csszengarden.com/. Choose different designs in the right hand column.

A few weeks ago "The RAD Race" (copyright) was held in Hasselt (Belgium). With 14 different participants, an impressive list of jurors, and a nice concept, the contest looks quite interesting...

I just received the news that the winner of this competition used Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 for their entry. The winners also wrote up a report on their own website in Dutch.

If you understand Dutch and want to get up to 5 .be domains for free, you should register before 30 November on the Combell website: http://www.combell.com/pcworld/. While you're there, you could also check out their ASP.NET hosting offer (webpage also in Dutch); it's also free till the end of 2005.

Only a few days left to start a free 90-day subscription to Microsoft E-Learning. You can register for the following courses free of charge till November 17, 2005:

• Clinic 2551: Introduction to Visual Studio Team System
• Course 2924: Building Data Components in Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005
• Course 2925: Building Managed Code for SQL Server 2005 and Creating SOA Applications with Visual Studio 2005
• Course 2926: Building Windows® Forms Applications with Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005
• Course 2927: Building Web Applications with ASP.NET 2.0
• Course 2928: Implementing Data Access and Security in an ASP.NET 2.0 Web Application
• Course 2929: Implementing Wizards, Site Navigation, State Management, and Configuration in ASP.NET 2.0
• Course 2930: Implementing Master Pages, Personalization, and Web Parts with ASP.NET 2.0

After November 17, these trainings will still be available but not for free.

During several conversations with developers I noticed not so many are aware of the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar (currently still in beta and probably only useful if you're into web development). Jeff Varga explains what's changed in the Beta 1 Refresh release.

No need to say more... http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/

Looking from the .NET Framework 2.0 download? Find it here.

Exciting, exciting, exciting... I didn't know that I would actually feel so strange/good after reading the news.

Blatantly copied from David Boschmans's blog:

... Huge was my suprise when Mike Ammerlaan introduced the "Son of the SmartPart" aka SmartPart version 2. If you are wondering what this is all about check the Son of the SmartPart's post with details at http://weblogs.asp.net/jan/archive/2005/09/14/425192.aspx. I am amazed to see that a community tool driven by a very smart Belgian guy is picked by the Microsoft WSS teams at Microsoft Corp. and is considered as "the way" to make it possible to host ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts or user controls in the current version of Windows SharePoint Services. So congrats Jan and keep up the great community work or as Mike Fitzmaurice blogs it "Rock on, guys!".

Well done, Jan and Patrick...

I just encountered the following on the ASP.NET Development Center. Web developers, here you go:

Watch presentations on ASP.NET 2.0 from the experts that know it best. We have dozens of hours of video to help you learn ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Web Developer.

• Scott Guthrie walks you through the new features in ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005
• Learn Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition with Bob Tabor of LearnVisualStudio.net
• Learn ASP.NET 2.0 with Interactive Computer Training
• Learn ASP.NET 2.0 with Jeff Prosise of Wintellect
• TechEd 2005 presentations

There are so many tools you can use today to create ASP.NET 2.0 web applications (such as Visual Web Developer Express and Visual Studio 2005), but the places where you can show off the result of your work are quite limited.

Recently the Belgian/European hosting provider Hostbasket also started providing ASP.NET 2.0 Beta 2 hosting. And it's free until ASP.NET 2.0 is officially released. On top of that, you also get some disk space on SQL Server for storing your data.

This is way cool... You can give the home page of your Windows Mobile 2003 Smartphone or Pocket PC a nice Beta Experience look-and-feel. (For those that don't know the Beta Experience, have a look at http://www.microsoft.com/betaexperience.)

This is an example at how your Smartphone/Pocket PC home page can look like if you install the themes:

Smartphone theme

Pocket PC theme

You can install it on your own phone by following these steps:

• Download the file to your desktop PC.
• Copy the file to your mobile phone. (I placed it under "Storage/Windows", but I guess you can place it anywhere.)
• Start up the File Manager and go to the location where you stored the file.
• Click on the file and confirm the automatic installation of the theme.

It is possible to switch back to other home page skins at any time through the Settings menu.

Do not hesitate to drop me a note if you've installed them on your Smartphone/Pocket PC.

Note: If you decide to install the home page skin, you take full responsability for it. I had no problems installing it on my Windows Mobile 2003 powered Smartphone, but I cannot guarantee that it will work with yours too. Damage to your device, data loss or earthquakes (or anything else) are your own responsability if you decide to download and install these home pages.

Update: The files are now available from the Microsoft.com Download Center. I also updated the instructions.

Update April 2006: a new Beta Experience campaign started and a new Windows Mobile theme is available now.

It's more than one week ago that we had the Developer & IT Pro Days. Amazingly enough, we are receiving a very high number of evaluations. Would the Motorola MPx-220 Smartphone contest have to do something with that?

Most of you already know by now that a few weeks ago I became the new developer audience manager and product manager for developer tools at Microsoft Belgium & Luxembourg. While I already did parts of the job for several months on "ad interim" basis, now it is official. And I'm sure we'll all continue to be part of a vibrant developer community.

On March 2nd, the "ASP.NET 2.0 On Tour" event will be helt in Belgium (Kinepolis, Brussels). It appears you are all very interested in learning about this upcoming technology according to the number of registrations that are coming in. I don't remember ever having that high number of registrations after only one week.

This is what we've been working on the last few weeks:

And finally the website is live at http://www.dev-itprodays.be. Oh, almost forgot to mention that Bill Gates will give the opening keynote!

Microsoft EMEA (EMEA = Europe, Middle East and Africa) gives you the possibility to order the MSDN Web Developer Kit (shipping and handling costs apply) or to download parts of this kit.

MSDN Web Developer Kit
Flexible, multipurpose and effective: Developing web applications has never been easier than in the .NET environment. We’d like to offer you the chance to evaluate how your development projects could benefit from the unique advantages of .NET through our Web Developer Kit. Read on to find out how...

Here are some direct links:

• Belgium (Flemish)
• Belgium (French)
• The Netherlands
• United Kingdom
• All other countries, visit this page.

While Rédo is a developer celebrity in France, he is actually living in Belgium. Grégory (that's his official name) is an MVP for ASP.NET and a Microsoft CodeWide Community member for his website http://www.asp-php.net. Most of the posts on his blog are written in French, but sometimes he also writes in English. You can find the RédoBlog at http://blogs.developpeur.org/redo.

Yesterday the following article by Christof Claessens was published on MSDN Belux:

A basic introduction to BizTalk Server 2004 messaging
By Christof Claessens
BizTalk Server 2004 has just been released and a lot of people are planning to hit the road with it. While BizTalk Server 2004 has lot to offer, this article focuses on the core workings of this brand new server, more in particular: messaging.

We also welcomed a second new author on MSDN Belux: Jan Ceulemans. He wrote this article:

Inserting multiple records at once with the ASP.NET DataGrid control
By Jan Ceulemans
Very often a DataGrid control is used to insert just one new record in a database. However, sooner or later you might come into a situation in which the insertion of multiple new records at once is desirable. This article shows you how this can be achieved using a web form, a DataGrid control, a data access layer and stored procedures.

We just published Bart De Smet's article about database cache invalidation in ASP.NET "Whidbey" on MSDN Belux. An interesting read.

Database cache invalidation is one of the new features in the upcoming release of ASP.NET "Whidbey". This article explains the benefits of this feature and how to use it.

PaschalL has a problem with URLs that include a slash after the page name, like for example http://www.vsdotnet.be/blogs/tommer/PermaLink.aspx/2904c29c-70e8-4c6c-a4b0-b5da61d0a9c3 (note that slash between PermaLink.aspx and the GUID). This kind of URLs causes that relative URLs in pages don't work. This is normal behavior for both IIS and Internet Explorer (or any other browser, for that mathers). Let me try to post an explanation for this.

First, IIS (with the .NET Framework installed) is configured to have URLs that include ".aspx" extention handled by the ASP.NET ISAPI (C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\aspnet_isapi.dll on my machine). It's also good to know that IIS can be configured to check if a certain file exists before IIS sends the request to the ISAPI. Now in it's standard configuration, IIS does not check if the file exists before it sends the request to the ASP.NET ISAPI. This allows URL Rewriting and much more.

When we have a look at the .Text blogging engine, we see that every post has its own "page", for example: http://weblogs.asp.net/pleloup/posts/44590.aspx and http://weblogs.asp.net/pleloup/posts/44058.aspx. But these pages do not really exist on the webserver. The information is stored in a SQL database instead. If IIS would first check if 44590.aspx would exist in the folder <website>/pleloup/posts/, then it would just return a Page Not Found (404) error. But since IIS does not check if the page exists, this request is handled by an ASP.NET HTTP Handler. This has nothing to do with the slash "problem", however, but it's useful background information: now you know why the request is sent to ASP.NET.

Normally you pass request variables to a page using the query string (put a question mark after the page name): e.g. http://www.vsdotnet.be/blogs/tommer/PermaLink.aspx?guid=2904C29C-70E8-4C6C-A4B0-B5DA61D0A9C3. However, ASP.NET also allows to retrieve request variables that are put after the page name followed by a slash. This is handy since some webcrawlers won't cache URLs with a question mark in it.

The webbrowser on the other hand is not aware of the server-side processing of page, and it shouldn't be. So if a request is sent to http://myserver/test.aspx/myvar, the browser will assume that the virtual folder is http://myserver/test.aspx/ and will request every relative URL starting from this URL. If you specify a CSS file with a relative URL this will cause trouble because it will be tough to handle the following situations:

• if http://myserver/test.aspx is requested, the CSS should be loaded from the same virtual folder
• if http://myserver/test.aspx/myvar is request, the CSS should be loaded from the virtual folder that is one level up (according to the browser).

By the way, the same occurs for links to other pages.

I see three simple solutions for this:

1. Use absolute URLs instead of relative URLs. I don't recommend this however: if you hard code the absolute URL, you can encounter some troubles/lots of work if you change the base URL.
2. Use the <base> tag to specify a base URL. The <base> tag should be specified for every page, but only once for every page. An example of this can be seen on http://www.dev-itprodays.be/default.aspx/lkjfdljfsllkj for example. (Yep, shameless plug, I know).
3. Have IIS check that a file exists before it sends it to the ASP.NET ISAPI.

The third solution, have IIS check that a page exists can be done as follows (steps checked on WinXP but may slightly vary on other OS'es):

• Go to the IIS configuration.
• Go the virtual folder of your web application.
• Open the properties of the virtual folder of your web application.
• Click on the "Configuration" button in the "Application settings" frame.
• Select the ".aspx" extention in the list box (or any extention that you want to modify)
• Click on the "Edit" button.
• Check the checkbox for "Check that file exists".
• Click OK to close the window.

Please note that this third solution can have serious impact. URL Rewriting will no longer be possible with a ASP.NET HTTP Handler for example.