The past 2 weeks I had very positive but unexpected experiences with two big international companies: Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) and Hilton.

Scandinavian Airlines

Although I was in not impacted in any way by this, SAS sent me an e-mail about an accident that happened with one of their aircraft at Copenhagen airport the day before. I wouldn't even have known this, if they didn't send me this e-mail.

Nevertheless, in my opinion, the company reacted correctly to the incident by sending that e-mail to their customers. It makes me feel that they value me as customer:

• I'm important enough to them that they want to reassure me that they did everything possible to make sure a similar accident will not happen again. Hey, they don't want to loose me as a customer.
• SAS knows that I'm Belgian. So I got a message from the Belgian SAS office, signed by their Belgian general manager, informing me about changes in their schedule for flights between Brussels and Copenhagen. A Scandinavian "global" company that acts locally.
• Paul Kristensen, who appears to be the general manager for Belgium and Luxembourg, put his own e-mail address in the accompanying letter. So that "in case I have any questions and/or remarks, I would be able to send him an e-mail". They could easily have used an e-mail address like feedback@sas.dk in that letter; instead I can now send my comment to a real person. A personal approach.

Since my first flight with them a few years ago, I really liked the SAS approach. And they keep impressing me. Well, even when I'm not flying for business purposes (in other words I'm paying for the flight myself), I'm willing to spend some extra Euros to get their service!

Hilton

I have not stayed many times at Hilton hotels, and the last time was more than a year ago. This time, for TechEd Developers, I booked a room at Hilton Diagonal Mar that's located beside the conference venue. At check-in, I also signed up for their Hilton HHonors program since the reception desk clerk insisted about some of the "advantages". Personally, I expected to get just another card to would sit in my wallet for a long time without any purpose and get a lot of spam e-mail on Hilton offers. I can't judge about those two yet, since I just joined that program.

The first surprise was when I entered my room on the first evening I was in the hotel. A letter posted under my door. On a few past occasions, this hasn't always been good news. But it was something that I didn't expect at all: they sent me a confirmation letter for my Hilton HHonors membership, explaining the details of the program once more and asking about my preferences. Wow, that was fast.

The second surprise was when I checked out. They actually sent me an e-mail to thank me for their stay. Simple and clean. Nothing more, nothing less. No advertising included in that e-mail. Some might think that was a missed opportunity for them, but I liked that approach. And also here, Hilton Diagonal Mar's front office manager, mr. Cedric Nubul, included his personal e-mail address in the e-mail.

I prefer buying/using services from companies that give me a feeling that they care about me. Yes, I know that their is a big marketing engine behind those unexpected experiences of SAS and Hilton. But it would have been far easier for those companies to do nothing, and I wouldn't probably have noticed it. But the fact that these companies gave me that personal treatment, that surprised and impressed me.

For a limited time, the Windows Mobile site offers free downloads of Halloween wallpapers and ringtones. Get them at https://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/domore/halloween-ringtones.mspx.

[Cross-posted from http://blogs.msdn.com/tommer/archive/2007/10/25/spooky-halloween-ringtones-and-wallpapers-for-windows-mobile-owners.aspx]

This morning I received the shocking news that David Boschmans, a fantastic colleague and friend, has passed away last night. David and I got to know each other in the Belgian developer community about 5 years ago. Three years ago he joined Microsoft as the Developer Evangelist where we worked very closely together. During that time I got to know David as a smart and great person. The past weeks, he was recovering from health issues; everything seemed to go well (given the circumstances). Till last night.

My thoughts go out to his wife, his daughter and family.

David, we miss you and will never forget you. Rest in peace...

Update: You can write a message to David and his family at http://david.vsdotnet.be. If you have photo's with David, it would be nice if you could add them to the David Boschmans group at Flickr. This group will be a center location with several different memories.

Although I'm not a gamer (probably because I'm bad at gaming), six months ago I bought an XBox 360. I love it as a Windows Media Center Extender, but I have not been playing that many games on it. Till past weekend...

Some time ago, I was in Redmond and visited Steven Wilssens and Thomas Delrue. (They are both Belgians working at Microsoft Corp, in case you wouldn't know that.) After some shopping and a BBQ at Steven's house, we all gathered around his big television screen. Steven started his XBox 360 and took out an electronic guitar-like device. The game for that night was Guitar Hero 2 (Guitar Hero 2 on xbox.com for Belgium - Dutch). Everyone seemed to playing quite well. Since I never played that game, I didn't want to compete with these guys.

But this weekend I bought my own Guitar Hero 2 game with guitar. And guess what... I really love the game and have never played that many hours on my XBox 360 before. It's really not hard to start, you can learn quite fast and make progress.

Tommy Gun of Cracked Rabbit Gaming recorded a video of him playing Guitar Hero 2 in Expert mode. And before people start telling me that I should get a life and buy a real guitar, I agree with Tommy Gun on why we're playing Guitar Hero instead of the real thing.

Not so long ago, Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions announced the availability of the Massive platform for in-game advertising (press release in-game advertising in Dutch - information in Dutch - information in French - information in English). I'm really proud to say that we've just launched the first Microsoft campaign in Belgium on this advertising platform.

Defy All Challenges is a campaign that informs developers about the possibilities of the Visual Studio development environment. The campaign consists of several traditional components, including pretty cool advertisements in magazines and bannering on websites. One of the less obvious components is the advertising that is displayed in several Xbox 360 and PC games. To get these advertisements, the computer or Xbox 360 of the player must be connected to the internet, he must be Belgian and have at least an Xbox 360 Live Silver Membership account.

Here are a few screen shots of some of the games, displaying the advertisement:

And here is some proof that it's actually there (game: Need for Speed Carbon on Xbox 360, photo taken on 29 May 2007). The pictures are not really clear but then again I'm not a professional photographer and I suppose a television screen is not the best object to take a picture of):

µ

Patrick Viaene, a colleague at Microsoft Belgium, and some of his friends are organizing a motorbike trip to Auschwitz. They call their project "Daddy's On Tour" (link to a page in Dutch). The friends also wanted to leverage this trip as a fundraiser. Since there were a lot of children that didn't survive Auschwitz, they decided to support Unicef, as this organization is working on improving the life of the youngest amongst us.

A nice initiative. If you want to learn more, check out their page (in Dutch) and blog (in Dutch). They are still looking for companies to support their trip with a donation to Unicef.

The guys (I think Patrick is behind the camera):

Recently we had a little celebration with a few colleagues from the Enterprise group. During one discussion, following quote from Angela Merkel (prime minister of Germany) was mentioned: "If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go with your team." (The quote is slightly adapted from the original one, where she mentioned "together" instead of "with your team"). Nice one-liner...

(A quick search on the Internet reveals that Angela Merkel said this during the World Economic Forum 2007 in Davos.)

After a full day of meetings, you are happy to return to your desk and your so familiar chair... But then you find out that some of your colleagues have more time available than you to fool around. Introducing my MSDN chair:

Thanks for this piece of decoration, Miel, Walter and Wim Vanden Driessche...

Technorati tags: prank, msdn

Need a little energy boost? I found a music video on Soapbox that does the trick for me: it is a rock version of Johann Pachelbel's classical music piece "Canon in D", arranged by Jerry C and played by Funtwo. Put the volume on maximum and enjoy!

Video: Hot Guitar Solo

Wikipedia has a lot more information and links on Johann Pachelbel's "Canon in D". On the Unofficial Jerry C video links website you can find a lot of other people that covered this piece of music, including the original "Canon Rock" by Jerry C himself.

Update: Jelle told me the link for the unofficial JerryC Video links website was incorrect. This has been fixed.

Together with a few other developer audience marketing managers, I had the opportunity to spend quality time last week with key stakeholders of Microsoft's audience strategy towards software developers at our headquarters in Redmond. We didn't discuss our products and features in those products, that's for other people. As it was an audience marketing summit we focused on how - in the short and long term - we can improve the experience developers have with Microsoft. We had great discussions on our relationship marketing strategy, our work with the community, market intelligence and customer insights, and a lot more...

For a part of the summit we worked in different smaller teams. I had the honor of being part of the team that also consisted of:

• Our team lead: Eileen Rumwell, Developer Audience Marketing Manager at Microsoft Corp
• Wendy Rogers, Developer Audience Marketing Manager at Microsoft Canada
• Frank Fischer, Developer Evangelism Manager at Microsoft Germany
• Maxine Cook, Marketing Manager at Microsoft UK
• Woody Pewitt, Developer Evangelist at Microsoft USA (Southern California area)
• George Kamarinos, Developer Audience & Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft Central & Eastern Europe HQ
• Dave Morehouse, Product Manager in the Community team at Microsoft Corp
• Korby Parnell, Product Manager in the Community team at Microsoft Corp

Out of the 9 people in our little team, it positively surprised me that 5 people have their own blog. And Frank writes a lot of technical content for the MSDN Germany site, so he has web presence too. Other people that were at the summit and have a blog include:

• Frank Arrigo, Developer Evangelism Manager at Microsoft Australia
• Amy Sorokas, Developer Community Marketing Manager at Microsoft Corp
• Clare Dillon, Developer Audience Marketing Manager at Microsoft Ireland

At the end of the summit we had 4 hours to present the results of our work to several Microsoft executives, which was absolutely an inspiring experience. Although such summits take up quite a lot of regular working time, I always find them very inspiring as you have a chance to think about and discuss several topics with other people in a related job. Something that is not easy to do over conference calls. Also the fact that you really disconnect from the daily challenges allows one to think more "out of the box". That really energizes me again.

And now it's time to catch up with e-mails and get some rest. Next trip is to the Luxembourg subsidiary for the MSDN Event next Tuesday.

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...

Live blogging from Brussels... Ine Dehandschutter posted the first backstage pictures from the 'Experience the "Wow"' event that will happen tonight.

I've met quite some bloggers here in Brussels; some of them have already posted something:

• Kevin De Mulder (in Dutch) - Wow
• Maarten Schenk - Experience the Wow
• Maarten Schenk - Vista: Wow
• Ine Dehandschutter - What to expect tonight in the Atomium

I just came by a recently released Digital Photography Powertoy named "Microsoft Photo Info". From the product's website:

Microsoft Photo Info is a new software add-in for Microsoft Windows that allows photographers to add, change and delete common "metadata" properties for digital photographs from inside Windows Explorer. It also provides enhanced "hover tips" and additional sort properties for digital photographs in Explorer (in Details view).

Here's a screenshot from the software running on a Windows Vista machine:

Quite exciting times again at Microsoft Belgium. Tomorrow we'll officially launch Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Windows Live OneCare to the broad public. After the big Business Innovation Launch event in November for enterpise customers, tomorrow is the day that we'll celebrate the (general) availability of Windows Vista and Office 2007 in stores and shops. As part of this general availability launch, there will be a launch event in the Atomium with a very limited number of attendees. To win an entry ticket, you should have participated in a contest organised by one of the media partners. At this moment all tickets are already distributed, so the few lucky ones that will be able to participate are already known and have been notified.

If you didn't get an entrance ticket, there is one last opportunity for you. You'll be able to watch the gig of Praga Khan for the launch event, live from the Atomium, through three different media: via MSN/Telenet, via Proximus 3G Vodaphone Live! or - probably the coolest - in Second Life. The details for the event in Second Life were mainly worked out by one of the newest Developer & Platform Evangelism members, Miel Van Opstal, who also gives more detailed information on his blog. The technical aspects (such as the streaming) are being taken care of by a marketing agency. (Technical aspects and a marketing agency... Let's hope that works out well...    )

The gig will be broadcasted on 10 different locations in Second Life:

• Strawberry Estate, Miel's own chunk of land with a miniature Atomium in the garden. In every sphere of the Atomium there are screens where people can watch the concert. There will also be 2 giant screens in the Strawberry Estate Club.
• Parioli Club in the Italian Virtual Parks region. They have created a great looking themed location, especially for this launch.
• Club Elements
• Crayonville Island
• Isle of Lesbos
• Mermaids Gentlemens Club
• ShowGirls
• Liquid Dreams
• The Sanctuary Rock
• Irie Vibes Club

And because a picture says more than a thousand words, I'm very happy that Miel allowed me to use his images on this blog:

Slightly adapted from http://blogs.msdn.com/tommer/archive/2007/01/29/second-life-streaming-of-concert-at-belgian-windows-vista-office-2007-launch.aspx.

In September, Microsoft Belgium - with the support from Child Focus and the Belgian Federal Computer Crime Unit (FCCU), distributed booklets that explains children how they can safely surf the internet. (Read Luc Van Braekel's Dutch blog post "Safe Internet for Children" about this booklet.)

As a follow-up for this campaign we're currently looking for volunteers who want to deliver a presentation on the same subject in schools to pupils aged 8 to 14. Quite some people from Microsoft and from our MSDN and TechNet communities have already delivered these presentations at difference schools with great success. You can now help increase the reach of this information to even more pupils.

If you feel that you want to be part of this project and teach children how they can safely surf the internet, please have a look at the information on this project and register (French speaking people, click here).

PS. Note that you don't have to be a developer and IT professional to deliver these presentations. Registration is open to everyone with a good knowledge on the Internet and with the necessary capabilities to bring over a message to children.

This Friday, Tom Raftery will be in Belgium. Tom is a known blogger, focussing on Web 2.0 and business blogging. His current Technorati rank is 2.985, which is obviously higher than my current rank at 20.591. ;)

Simon McDermott took the opportunity to organize a blogger community dinner in the evening together with Tom Raftery. Unfortunately I won't be able to attend this dinner, but it looks like it's going to be fun. Simon just wrote me that already 6 people confirmed their attendance but that there is a lot more space available. Leave a comment on Simon's blog post if you want to attend the dinner as well.

No blog silence at all. Although I must admit that I've neglected this blog for quite a while. For several reasons, I decided to blog on 2 different sites. Each site will have its specific content.

All things related to software development stuff, Visual Studio and MSDN in Belgium and Luxembourg will now be posted on my MSDN Blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/tommer/. This blog at http://www.vsdotnet.be/blogs/tommer/ will remain active but will change focus to other topics that interest me and that I come across in my role of audience marketing manager at Microsoft Belgium & Luxembourg.

In short, developers reading my blog will now get the same kind of information from me on http://blogs.msdn.com/tommer/. People interested in audience marketing, web 2.0-stuff, etc, can continue reading this blog.

Now I need to find some time to update the layout of both websites... Urgently...

There's one thing that everyone agrees on about Bart De Smet: he is not the regular nine-to-five developer. During his daily-blogging-mission in September, he wrote a few posts on how to create barcodes on the fly in C# (without requiring 3rd party software):

• Code 39 barcodes in C#
• EAN-13 barcodes in C#
• ISBN to EAN-13
• An ASP.NET .ASHX HTTP handler for Code 39 barcode generation

Please join me in congratulating Bart for the 4th consecutive year he's been awarded as a Visual Developer MVP. All of this, and a lot more, made us decide to make Bart our Belgian "MVP in the spotlight" at MSDN Belgium & Luxembourg during October.

Cross posted on Tom's MSDN Belux Corner.

Last Monday (25 September) more than 600 developers attended the free MSDN Belux event on .NET Framework 3.0 development. According to the attendee feedback, Peter Himschoot and Ingo Rammer rocked the house! Apparently for some people the content was a little too advanced, but most of you appreciated every presentation. So many people were also nice for us in their comments; here are a few of them:

• "The MSDN events are always interesting."
• "Microsoft keeps innovating, and listens to the feedback of developers."
• ".NET is my weapon of choice for any project!"
• "Microsoft gives me all I want, plus a lot more..."
• "I'm a MS developer in heart and soul... wouldn't want to trade for other tools and languages anymore..."
• "It is very pleasant developing with Microsoft products"
• "Great tools. Great resources. Great community."
• "Microsoft is doing well for the developers community."

Thanks, guys. Also the people that didn't leave such positive comments. Constructive critism is always appreciated... and developers are a very critic audience.

Someone of the event crew tooks some pictures, which I uploaded to http://www.pixagogo.com/3877614242.

Cross posted at Tom's MSDN Belux Corner.

DasBlog 1.9 was recently released by Omar Shahine and Scott Hanselman. Several features have been improved and a lot of new ones have been added. One of the new features ("multi-user/blogger support") was added by a Belgian developer: Christoph De Baene. You might also know Christoph as a board member of the Visual Studio User Group - VISUG - in Belgium.

Scott also points to a blog post of Kris van der Mast, another Belgian developer and VISUG member, on writing custom macros for DasBlog.

Congratulations to the entire DasBlog team for this getting this release out, and a special shout out to both Belgian developers for their contribution...

Cross posted on Tom's MSDN Belux Corner.
Tags: MSDN Belux Community, DasBlog

Cyra Richardson - lead program manager for layout and rendering in the Internet Explorer team - is touring across EMEA for making developer aware of the changes in IE7. Although initially she wasn't going to visit Belgium, David managed to get here coming over to Belgium for delivering a MSDN Evening session on 29 September. From the website:

Internet Explorer provides rich new experiences around three pillars: great user experience, secure/trustworthy browsing and powerful web developer platform. Learn how your sites shine up on Internet Explorer 7 by taking advantage of better HTML and CSS standards support, RSS, search integration, and new security features. We will also take a deep look at what you can do and how we can help to prepare your existing sites for IE7.

The capacity for the event is limited to 50 people as it will be hosted in the training rooms at Microsoft in Belgium. Please only register if you're absolutely sure that you'll attend.

More information and registration.

Incredible: 3 weeks after I first blogged about our "MSDN Event: .NET Framework 3.0 Development", we had to switch theaters to increase the event capacity with 50%. Now, one and half weeks later the event is almost  fully booked again. Only 25 seats available at this moment... No more seats available! This means Peter and Ingo will inform more than 600 developers on the .NET Framework 3.0.

Updated on 12 September 2006.

From the MSDN Windows Workflow Foundation website:

"Windows Workflow Foundation is the programming model, engine and tools for quickly building workflow enabled applications on Windows. It consists of a .NET Framework version 3.0 (formerly WinFX) namespace, an in-process workflow engine, and designers for Visual Studio 2005. ..."

Scott Guthrie lists a couple of good resources covering Windows Workflow Foundation. One of those resources was written by probably the most famous Belgian developer/student: Bart De Smet. Congratulations for this... Bart's three posts, that Scott refers to, are:

• Getting Started with Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)
• WF - How to make a workflow dynamic? (Part 1)
• WF - How to make a workflow dynamic? (Part 2)

 Tags: Windows Workflow Foundation workflow .NET WinFX

Last week, Ritchie and I had a meeting with Gerd De Bruycker on TechEd Europe. During the meeting I remembered my plans to blog about the Speaker Idol initiative at TechEd: Developers, what I haven't done till now.

From time to time we get questions from people that want to present at one of Microsoft events. The expectations of our speakers are very high, since they have to be able to keep the audience's attention for more than one hour and deliver the right message in the same time. People with presentation experience know that it takes a lot of preparation to do a good presentation.

On the other hand, I'm sure that there are more good presenters than we currently know. If you are one of them, you should definitely consider to participate in the Speaker Idol at TechEd: Developers.

Short overview of Speaker Idol (refer to the website for all details and official statements):

• Prerequisite: you should attend TechEd: Developers (7-10 November 2006) in Spain.
• Record a 3 minutes presentation. While filming, focus on the person conducting the presentation. Convert the film to Windows Media Video (WMV) and keep the file under 5 MB.
• Submit your presentation. Don't wait to long to submit, as the organization will only accept the first 40 submissions. (Only one submission per person!) The deadline for submitting is Friday 13 October 2006.
• 12 finalists will be chosen by a jury. The finalists will be informed before the conference starts.
• During the conference, finalists give their presentation again on-site for a live audience. This will be done in 3 waves, where the best 3 finalists will be chosen.
• Final round for best 3 finalists during a break-out session. After this we'll know the winner.
• Winner and 2 runners-up are announced. The winner will get the opportunity to give a presentation on TechEd: Developers in 2007, the two runners-up will get a free entrance ticket for TechEd: Developers in 2007. There are also several other smaller activities planned for the winner and the 2 runners-up.

This is my personal interpretation and definitely a shortened and incomplete version of the rules. But it gives you a good idea of what the contest is. Don't be scared of the numerous rules and regulations on the official website. Just participate...

PS. If you're a Belgian or Luxembourger (or working in Belgium or Luxembourg) and want to participate, don't hesitate to let me know at tom.mertens@microsoft.com. I'd be more than happy to assist you through the process.

PPS. The same Speaker Idol initiative is organized during TechEd: IT Forum. Arlindo Alves also blogged about this.

Tags: Microsoft, Tech Ed, Tech Ed: Developers

Are developers eager to know more about the Windows Communication Foundation, Workflow Foundation, CardSpaces and the Windows Presentation Foundation? It must be so. With the exception of a few mentions (like in the MSDN Belux Flash and on the MSDN Belux website), we didn't make lot of promotion for our next MSDN Event on .NET Framework 3.0 (on September 25, 2006 in Kinepolis Brussels). Therefore I'm a bit surprised that just a few minutes ago already the 430th person registered for this event.

In the 4 years that I work on/for the Belgian developer audience, I've never seen registrations come in that fast with so little effort. I'd better ask a bigger theater for this event, shouldn't I...

Now, I wouldn't mind hearing from you why you think this event is so popular...

• Is it because of the speakers: Peter and Ingo? (They are great, aren't they?)
• Maybe you'd like to ask David in person if he can get you a free ticket for TechEd: Developers? (Good luck, but don't count that you'll succeed: he's responsible for the web development track at TechEd: Developers, not for the registration.)
• Has it been too long ago that you've seen a good looking registration desk hostess? (With that many people we'll need a lot of registration desk hostesses again.)
• Do you hope that we'll distribute a voucher for 10 free Windows Vista Ultimate boxes? (I can already tell you: we won't.)

Feel free to drop me an e-mail or a comment on this post with what you think is the reason. There are at least 5 MSPress books on the MSDN shelves waiting for a new owner. The "best" answers will get a copy.

Update 26 August: 460 people registered...

Tags: Microsoft, WinFX, .NET, development, Windows Vista

Yesterday our local big boss (the general manager of Microsoft Belgium & Luxembourg) briefly mentioned 2 guys named "Tom" that recently left Microsoft to start their own company. Just to avoid some confusion: I'm not one of those two. No need to call me for this.

Kris Hoet just notified me that the Windows Live Writer beta has gone public. I've been dogfooding a few internal versions for a few weeks already and must say that I'm still amazed by some of Windows Live Writer's functionalities. And yes, some of the past blog posts on my blog were posted with Windows Live Writer (not all, since I only had Writer installed on my notebook and not my home PC).

About one year and half ago, I blogged how you can configure an i-mate SP3i to enable GPRS and MMS for Proximus, a Belgian mobile phone operator. Recently I got a Qtek 8310 and apparently the configuration is a bit different on this phone. That's why I'm updating the configuration steps in the blog post.

1. Set up data connections
Click "Start"; "Settings"; "6 Connections".
Click "3" for "Dial-Up"
Open the menu and choose "Add"
Apply the following settings:
  Description: Proximus WAP Data
  Connects to: WAP Network
  Phone number: +32477151927
  User name: wap
  Password: wap
  Domain:
Click "Done" to save this dial-up connection. Click "Done" once again to go to the overview of different connections.
Click "4" for "GPRS".
Open the menu and choose "Add"
Apply the following settings:
  Description: Proximus Internet
  Connects to: The Internet
  Access Point: internet.proximus.be
  User name:
  Password:
  Primary DNS: 195.238.2.21
  Secondary DNS: 195.238.2.22
  IP address:
Click "Done" to save this GPRS connection.
Open the menu and choose "Add" again
Apply the following settings:
  Description: Proximus MMS
  Connects to: WAP Network
  Access Point: event.proximus.be
  User name: mms
  Password: mms
  Primary DNS: 0.0.0.0
  Secondary DNS: 0.0.0.0
  IP address:
Click "Done" to save this GPRS connection.
Open the menu and choose "Add" for the third time
Apply the following settings:
  Description: Proximus WAP GPRS
  Connects to: Secure WAP Network
  Access Point: wap.proximus.be
  User name: wap
  Password: wap
  Primary DNS: 0.0.0.0
  Secondary DNS: 0.0.0.0
  IP address: 10.253.7.3
Click "Done" to save this GPRS connection.
Click "Done" to quit the list of GPRS connections.
Go to the home page.

2. Configure MMS
Click "Start"; "Messaging".
Click "4" for "MMS".
Open the menu and click "8" for "Options".
Click "4" for "Account Options" and choose "2" for "MMS".
Open the menu and click "1" for "MMSC Settings".
Edit the existing configuration (probably named "Sample Server") and apply the following settings:
  Name: Proximus
  MMSC URL: http://mmsc.proximus.be/mms
  WAP Gateway: 10.55.14.75
  Port 9201
  Connect Via: "WAP Network"
  Max. Sending Size: 100K
  WAP Version: WAP 1.2
Click "Done" and go back to the home page.

It is necessary that GPRS and MMS are activated for your Proximus account. If you don't know how to activate these, please call the Proximus help desk from your mobile phone on the number 1212 (or +32 (475) 151212).

I don't know if all these settings are absolutely necessary, but I do know that once I set up my Qtek 8310 like this sending and receiving MMS'es worked correctly... If you only want to have GPRS connectivity, you only have to configure "Proximus Internet".

Please remember that I'm not employed by Proximus and don't have access to all their information. The information I share in this post was gathered from different sites on the internet and might or might not be correct.

OSCON 2006, O'Reilly's Open Source Convention, was held in Portland, Oregon (US) at the end of July. The team of Port 25, the website of Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab, was there too. And they got to interview two famous open source software advocates and conference organizers:

Bill Hilf interviews Tim O'Reilly
Tim O'Reilly is the CEO of O'Reilly Media and amongst several other things, he is known as an Open Source Software advocate. From the website:"In this interview Bill and Tim discuss the redefinition of 'Open Source', Web 2.0, and some other topics that arose in the first two days of the conference."

Bill Hilf interviews Matt Asay
Matt Asay is VP of Business Development at Alfresco, co-founder of OSCON, and thus also an Open Source Software advocate. From the website: "In this interview Matt and Bill discuss Open Source business models, monetization opportunties for open business apps, and thoughts on the first days of OSCON."

Related background information:

• Q&A on Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab
• Bill Hilf's short bio

At MGX 2006, we got the see, hear and experience several exciting things. One of those was a presentation of Blaise Agüera y Arcas on Microsoft Live Labs Photosynth. As always when you get to see a result from Microsoft Research (or Microsoft Live Labs in this case) project, you can expect something extraordinary, something really fancy... Same again this time with Photosynth. I'm convinced that this software has the ability to change our view on digital photos and images and the way we will work with them.

According to its website, Photosynth will enable you to:

• walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle;
• seamlessly zoom in or out of a photograph even if it's gigapixels in size;
• see where pictures were taken in relation to one another;
• find similar photos to the one you’re currently viewing;
• explore a custom tour or see where you’ve been; or
• send a collection to a friend.

You can learn more about Photosynth:

• at the Microsoft Live Labs Photosynth website;
• with the "Dive into the World of Photosynth" video;
• with the "Take the Photosynth Tour" video;
• by watching the Channel 9 video interview "Photosynth: What. How. Why." with Blaise Agüera y Arcas;
• by watching the On10 video report "A Global 3D World On Your PC";

Screenshot from Microsoft Live Labs Photosynth

At this moment it is not yet possible to try the software yourself, as there is no download available. Get updates on the Photosynth team blog (or by subscribing to their RSS feed).

[Found reference to Photosynth on Kris Hoet's Cross The Breeze blog]

Tags: Microsoft Photosynth imaging

I know, I know; it's not new... And it's inspired on something created by a big fast food chain in the US. But nevertheless: here is the subservient programmer. Just give him any command, and he'll (try to) comply.

If you have even more free time, you might even want to consider how to create your own subservient character, with tutorials covering both development and filming.

PS. The original one that I'm referring too is subservient chicken.

Our colleagues at MSDN in Germany posted a "simple" 3D game, written using Visual C# and managed DirectX: Rocket Commander. It comes with a Coding4Fun tutorial article, 10 step-by-step video tutorials (each 30 minutes), many links and resources and of course, the full source code. Feel free to modify the code and create "mods" of the original version. You can find some of such mods on the RocketCommander.com website.

You can also download an installer for the game only. .NET Framework 2.0 and the Managed DirectX version of December 2005 are required to play the game.

Here's a screenshot from the original Rocket Commander and one of the "Mod" Pizza Commander:

Tags: Microsoft .NET development directx game

I'm still at MGX, Microsoft's yearly field gathering, in Orlando, Florida. Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to have a discussion with Dan Fernandez, the guy with the best job at Microsoft - at least according to himself. He's the lead product manager for Visual Studio Express and a great guy. You might remember him as speaker at the MSDN "On Tour" Event on Visual C# and Windows Forms last year in Brussels.

Dan showed some really cool stuff, which I absolutely want to share. Here is the first one:

 
Picture by Clint Ruskas

Clint actually used Visual C# to create an application to control his custom-build LED Disco Floor. Have a look at some of the videos that Clint posted on his blog that demonstrate the capabilities of his Disco Floor and the application. If you want to know how this was built in about 10 months, be sure to check out the Disco Floor article for MSDN's Coding4Fun website. And of course Clint Ruskas' blog at BetterThanEveryone.com.

I must say, I'm amazed... This is absolutely cool. Thanks for sharing, Dan!

Tags: Visual C#, Microsoft, technology, software

Our Luxembourger colleagues are very proud (and so are we, in Belgium): for the first time we've released Luxembourgish Language Interface Packs for both Windows XP and Office 2003. This means that now it is possible to have your Windows XP and Office 2003 interfaces in the Luxembourgish language.

Here are the downloads:

Windows XP in Luxembourgish

• Download the Windows® XP Lëtzebuergeschen Interface Pak

Office 2003 in Luxembourgish

• Download the Office 2003 Lëtzebuergeschen Interface Pak
• In order to get this Language Interface Pack working, you'll also have to download following updates for Windows XP:
  • If you are using an English version of Windows XP, please download this language locales update.
  • If you are using a French version of Windows XP, please download this language locales update.
  • If you are using a German version of Windows XP, please download this language locales update.

The Luxembourg "Ministry of National Education and Professional Formation" posted information (in Lëtzebuergesch) on their website about the Lëtzebuergeschen Interface Language Packs.

It's already announced for 2 weeks on MSDN Belgium & Luxembourg: there is a new book of the month. During July and August, MSDN Connection members can get a 40% discount on the book "MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit: Microsoft® .NET Framework 2.0—Application Development Foundation". This book helps developers prepare for taking Microsoft Certification exam 70-536.

A few days before this promotion went live, I received some annoying news from Microsoft Press. Apparently the book was far more popular than forecasted. As a result, we could only get about 10% of the ordered number of books in the participating shops at the start of the promo. But I just received an e-mail that the rest of the order has now been delivered to the shops.

Now do I find this book and the certification interesting? Well, I didn't read the book. But yes, I do find it interesting because I see value in certifying your developer skills. Yes, I was a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer for Visual Studio 6.0 and I'm still a Microsoft Certified Professional. You can check out my MCP transcript at https://mcp.microsoft.com/authenticate/validatemcp.aspx: use transcript ID 674356 and access code X7S3vApN68. (Note: If you're an MCP, you can also publicize your MCP transcript by logging on to the MCP Secure Site and choosing "View My"/"Transcript Sharing Code" from the menu.) Although these credentials matter less in my current (community manager) job at Microsoft Belgium, they helped me in several ways during the time that I was a self-employed developer. I'd be glad to explain all this in person, so don't hesitate to ask me about certification.

I personally studies for my MCP exams using Self-Paced Training Kits (on top of several other resources, such as website articles and experience of course). And I've never failed for any of them. OK, for some exams, I also used exam simulators to be better prepared. Today there is also the Skills Assessment website that helps you evaluate your current skills.

As an alternative for preparing with Self-Paced Training Kits, you could also attend in-depth training classes at any of the Microsoft Certified Partners for Learning Solutions (here is a list of Belgian and Luxemburger CPLS's).

Weren't you in time to get your copy of Windows Vista beta 2? For Flemish speaking Belgians there is an alternative to get a copy of this software: PC Magazine België has included the Windows Vista beta 2 DVD with a product key. On top this, you'll also get a CD with "Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition (English)".

PC Magazine België, edition July/August 2006, includes a copy of Windows Vista Beta 2.

Tags: Microsoft Windows Windows Vista

Yes, there are some possibilities...

• For our enterprise customers, we're having a job opening as "Solution Sales Application & Development Platform". In this role, you'll be a sales professional, responsible for the developer tools (Visual Studio), SQL Server and the integration servers.
• If you want to become my new manager, you can apply for the "DPE Lead" job. "DPE" is the department at Microsoft I work for. It's an acronym for "Developer & Platform Evangelism".
• I'll soon be hiring a "telesales account manager" for developer tools (i.e. Visual Studio, VSTO and VSTS).

This is just a limited list of the open positions at Microsoft Belgium. You can get an up-to-date and complete list at http://www.microsoft.be/jobs (more than 20 at this moment!).

Oh, one last thing... Recently we welcomed Philippe Blondeaux as the new ISV Developer Evangelist in our team. Philippe used to work for EPG (the department that focuses on the big enterprises). I'm sure his knowledge is a real addition to the DPE team in Belgium. Now Philippe, when will you start your own blog?

Tags: Microsoft jobs

As of today, I'm no longer a twenty something... Still enjoying a week of holidays, and hope to resume blogging next week. Till later.

Steven Wilssens, the president of the Belgian Visual Studio User Group, was recently hired by John Montgomery to work at the Microsoft product team in Redmond. Steven will take up the role as product manager in John's team that works on a project code-named "Tuscany".

Congratulations for that, Steven! Here in Belgium, we'll miss your knowledge, passion, dedication and enthusiasm for software development in its broadest sense.

This makes the list of Belgians going to work at Microsoft Corporation in Redmond longer again. In the past few years I saw the following great guys leave for Redmond:

• Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux, SDE/T in the Common Language Runtime team
• Thomas Delrue, SDE in the Visual Studio product team
• and now... Steven Wilssens

But there are a lot more Belgians working at Microsoft in Redmond: Ronald Laeremans, Yves Dolce, Guy Gilbert, just to name a few...

With the opening ceremony for the World Cup Football 2006 in Germany that is currently running, this is a perfect time to draw your attention to the Football/Soccer Scoreboard gadget application.

Abstract:

Follow your favorite teams and players during the FIFA World Cup tournament with Microsoft Soccer Scoreboard. This fun program allows you to access all the latest tournament news and information with the click of a button! Live game data allow you to monitor your favorite teams progress in real-time. Want more? Check out your team’s fixture (schedule), standing, and news as they advance through the tournament. If you are a soccer fan, don’t miss a minute of the action. Download Microsoft Soccer Scoreboard today!

We already released CTPs (community technical previews) of 2 parts of the Microsoft Expression product line:

• Microsoft Expression Graphic Designer and
• Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer

Today, we announce the availability of the first CTP of the third part, the Microsoft Expression Web Designer. This is an ideal opportunity for web designers to get their hands on this technology and start working with it. Expression Web Designer is a new tool that enables an easier and closer collaboration between web designers an web developers. It supports all the features that you would expect from a modern website design tool, such as CSS 1.0, 2.0 and 2.1 support, XHTML support (strict and transactional), easily build views based on XML data, and of course ASP.NET support.

The first CTP can be downloaded (224 MB) from the web. If you want to get a quick overview first, be sure to check out the features list and the feature tour demo videos.

Update: It seems some people (including me) can't install it and get an error message "The installation of this package failed." Hopefully this gets resolved quite soon.

Update 16 May 2006: The installation problem should be solved if you download the software again.

Tags: Expression Web Designer

Maarten Schenk showed a nice touch of blogger humor at Blognomics, a blogger conference in Amsterdam. He created the following entry for the "Shoot the web-logs.nl girls" competition at the event:

[Via Coolzor]

David was the first to blog it: our first podcast at MSDN Belux is live. David Boschmans and Bart De Smet talked to the Visual Basic product team at one of our local MSDN events. Get the techie details at David's blog. I'll stick to the organizational side of things.

I'm going to be honest about it: we don't have a publication schedule for next podcasts (yet). First of all, we don't want to "compete" with Channel9 or with On10.net.  So you'll get new podcasts if we have new interesting and relevant local (i.e. Belgian and Luxemburger) information. Secondly, this is something extra that we do in our free time. It's not really part of our official work commitments. But we see value in it and therefore we do offer you these podcasts through MSDN Belux.

Aaargh, it seems that Pixagogo is not correctly displaying my 3 photo albums of the previous blog post when they are on 1 HTML page. So here are the links to the photo album directly:

• Photos of MSDN Hands-On Labs (April 2006)
• Photos of Jesper Johansson at Microsoft Belgium & Luxembourg (May 2006)

It has been quite a while since my previous post. I was quite busy at work and had some very interesting times. Here is a short (and limited) overview of my past activities:

April 18 - JavaPolis partner meeting

The previous 2 years, Microsoft participated in JavaPolis as a sponsor. I already wrote a post explaining why we are sponsoring that event. In short: we do care about developers and all developers should get the information they want/need. So, yes, even a Java developer might want/need information on the Windows platform, on SQL Server, on Office, ... JavaPolis is a unique opportunity for them to talk to us about this. Although initially there was some fear from the Belgian Java User Group about our sponsoring, I think we're now working together quite well.

April 19 - MSDN Security Evening in Mons

Because we take application security very seriously, we organised several "Developing secure applications" briefings. This was done together with Walter Stiers, who is taking care of the student and teacher community at Microsoft. So several speakers visited several locations and schools throughout Belgium. The first session was delivered by Grégory Renard, our local Regional Director.

I find it always nice to talk to developers on such events. They always give me some great feedback and things to think about. Feeling the excitement of these guys is so gratifying.

April 20 - Blogger meeting with Phil Holden on Windows Live

David, Kris and I teamed up to reach out to some of the Belgian bloggers that we know for an evening with Phil Holden, the director of Windows Live at Microsoft Corp. Here are some of the reports that were writting about this:

• Kris Hoet
• Luc Van Braekel
• Coolz0r
• Matuvu
• Shoob
• Smetty
• Pietel

April 23 to 26 - Microsoft Worldwide Developer Audience meeting

On April 23rd I left for Vienna where we had the Microsoft WW Developer Audience (Marketing) meeting. Such meetings are very interesting the people from the local subsidiaries (such as I) can communicate with our colleagues of other countries as well as with people from Microsoft EMEA and Microsoft Corp (i.e. the people from our HQ at Redmond). It were quite intensive days with lots of new information and fantastic discussions. Unfortunately I had to leave a bit earlier because...

April 26 - Visit of Michael Leworthy, corporate product manager Visual Studio Team System

Michael Leworthy - you might know him from the MSDN "Visual Studio Team System On Tour" event - dropped by for a planning and feedback meeting. Very interesting discussion, but way too soon to blog about the content of the meeting.

April 27 & 28 - MSDN Hands-On Labs on Visual Basic and ASP.NET

More than 100 developers attended our hands-on labs in Mechelen. I didn't know this upfront, but apparently the business center where the labs were hosted was owned by Anouchka Balsing. You might know her as one of the jurors of "Sterren op de Dansvloer" TV show.

During lunch, I talked to several of the attendees. Happy to hear that you were satisfied with the labs. And happy that I've been able to help some of you with your requests and unanswered questions.

April 27 - Security presentation from Jesper Johansson

We were able to security a slot in the agenda of Jesper Johansson for a security presentation. Amongst the attendees were Microsofties, but also some MVP's and MSDN Belux article authors. Had to leave early because I wanted to go by the security evening in Liège, but I heard both Security Development Lifecycle presentation and the Windows Vista security presentation were quite well appreciated.

April 27 - MSDN Security Evening in Liège

Yet another security evening session that I could attend. Nice to meet some people again that I didn't see for some time: Gérard Leblanc, Tony Bastianelli, Jérôme Noirfalise, Stéphane Hildebrandt, Didier Danse, ...

May 2 - MSDN Security Evening in Antwerp

This is the first security presentation of Bart De Smet that I see. He already did some before, but unfortunately I couldn't attend all security evenings... I got one very interesting reaction from a student at this session. He congratulated us because we were not bashing our competition. Apparently he recently attended a presentation from another software company, where the local speaker was constantly making jokes about Microsoft. Well, I'm not convinced of the approach to bash competitors. Luckily, the Microsoft "Standards of Business Conduct" is on my side...

May 3 - Team lunch

Lovely DPE team lunch at a Brussels tapas restaurant. Can't remember the name though... It has been a long time that the entire DPE team sat together in one room, so it was nice to have this team discussions.

May 4 - Windows Vista and Office 2007 meeting

To be honest, this is not the first one and it was definitely not the last one... More on Windows Vista en Office 2007 later... (You might want to mark 22 June in your agenda for an MSDN Evening on Office 2007 development).

May 4 - MSDN Connection "Book of the Month" promo launched

It might look silly, but this is one of the things that I've been working on for quite some time. So I'm very happy that finally we can offer 40% discount on a selected MS Press book through MSDN Connection. For May, the selected book is "CLR via C#, Second Edition" of Jeffrey Ritcher. The offer expires end of May and is only valid at selected bookstores in Belgium. Get more information on this "Book of the Month" promo on MSDN Belux.

May 10 - MSDN Security Evening in Kortrijk

Again, more than 40 people showing genuine interest in learning how to develop their applications more securely. It's always good when you hear people saying: "I think I'd better check my website for security". I do hope that one day, all developers will be aware of security in their applications. Hopefully very soon, there are no websites left that are prone to cross site scripting or (SQL) injection attacks.

May 11 - MSDN Security Morning in Leuven

Finally a session close to my home... It was the last public security session for this year. There will be more sessions online though. Have a look at the Microsoft webcasts.

May 11 - Dinner with Simon Brown, Vice President of DPE at Microsoft EMEA

Our team went to the Japanese restaurant "Tagawa" in Brussels for a dinner with our vice president of DPE EMEA, Simon Brown. The atmosphere was relaxed and we had quite some strategic discussions.

Next week we'll be meeting with our VIP Community. This community consists of several of our MVP's, article authors of MSDN Belux and very knowledgeable developers and IT professionals. More on this later...

The new Beta Experience program is about "the pleasure of testing" Windows Vista and 2007 Office System. That's why we needed a new set of Windows Mobile themes to replace the theme of the previous Beta Experience (that was about Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005). I've already had a few people asking for it.

Installation of the new theme is easy:

• Download your copy of the theme that you want to use.
• Unzip the file and copy the unzipped file onto your Smartphone or Pocket PC (version 2003 or 2003 Second Edition only).
• Use the device's Explorer to navigate to the file and "click" the file.
• You'll probably get a warning for the installation; after acknowledging the message, your theme will be installed.

Click the image to download the version you want:

Windows Mobile Smartphone

Pocket PC

Note: unfortunately these themes do not work on Windows Mobile 2005 devices at this moment...

Quite some people at Microsoft Belgium & Luxembourg, including me, have been hoping for people in our management team to start blogging. The first one with a blog was Michael Kögeler, our marketing director. Michael has been blogging for quite some time already. I was very happy to see that on April 1st, Bruno Segers, our general manager, also took up blogging. If you want to know what's going on in the life of a general manager of a subsidiary of an American multinational software company, this is your chance...

I'll have to check if he already has a copy of Scoble & Israel's book Naked Conversations; if not, I'm going to give him one.

PS. Bruno did consider to blog in English or dual Dutch/French, but in the end decided to write in Dutch.

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

Every quarter, Microsoft recognizes people for their participation in the technical communities by honoring them a Microsoft MVP award. There were 2 new MVP's nominated this quarter for Belgium. One of them has already updated her information and is now visibile on the MSDN Belux MVP page.

Congratulations to Mieke Verburgh (a.k.a. Miekemoes) for being awarded as Security MVP. Besides being active on several security related forums, Mieke is also running her own website and forums (in Dutch) where she fights malware: http://www.bluemedicine.be/ and http://www.bluemedicine.be/forum.

I also know the second Belgian MVP, but he didn't announce his MVP award yet. Therefore I can't reveal the second Belgian MVP for now.

The second new Belgian MVP also revealed his nomination: Steven Wilssens got nominated as MVP for Visual Developer - Team System. He is now one of the 18 Team System MVP's worldwide (at least that the number of MVP's that made their profile publicly available.)

From the marketing trenches about the MVP program:

The Microsoft MVP Program is a worldwide award and recognition program that strives to identify amazing individuals in technical communities around the globe who share a passion for technology and the spirit of community. Microsoft MVPs are recognized for both their demonstrated practical expertise and willingness to share their experience with peers in Microsoft technical communities.

Very very late notice, but the .NET User Group Brugge has a meeting tomorrow on ADO.NET, focussing on the differences between Visual Studio .NET 2003 and Visual Studio 2005. The meetings are held in Dudzele (near Bruges).

Unfortunately I won't be able to join them...

Some time ago we launched a website and campaign to increase the security awareness amongst the Belgian computer users. No dull/boring webpage, but a fun movie should generate your interest and the interest of your friends. Yes, you can also customize the movie and send it out to your friends, family, colleagues... Great for April fools day, not? Find it at http://www.misterjefferson.com/ (link contains information in Dutch and French).

Lately I decided to try out some beta versions of our software:

• Windows Live Toolbar beta, including Windows Desktop Search
  Like it; you also get a chance to install Onfolio, Windows Live Favorites and some other nice things. The Web Search feature can be configured to use almost any search engine. Works smoothly under IE6 and IE7 beta. After the upgrade, the Live toolbar detects changes and disables some of his functionalities that are not necessary any more (tabbed browsing to name one).
• Windows Defender beta 2
  Like it; this replaced the beta of Microsoft Antispyware. I find this software to be less intrusive (less pop-ups and sounds), and asking me for the right confirmations.
• Internet Explorer 7.0 beta 2
  Like it; although sometimes I have to search for features that I knew where to find before. Of course, I could just enable the "Classic Menu" toolbar. But I don't feel that is an option. Just to save you some time, I experienced that if you're running Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Web Developer Express, your CSS Style Builder does not work any more (it pops up and immediately disappears again). There is post on the ASP.NET Forums that explains a workaround. According to the Microsoft Product Feedback Center, this problem exists because of the hardended security features in IE7.
• Expression Graphic Designer March CTP
  I'm not that much of a graphics designer, so this application is somewhat too complex for me (just as Adobe Photoshop or even JASC Paint Shop Pro). Guess I'll have to start with the Tours And Demos and probably afterwards ask some of our more experienced designers to give me a short introduction. This is not a software that you can start using without some knowledge about the software.
• Windows Live Messenger beta
  Didn't had time to try out the new features, such as Shared Folders, yet.

No need to warn you that you shouldn't install pre-release software on your production machine... ;)

"Voices of Innovation" got launched today and is a new global community, supported by Microsoft. If you want to participate in the debate about policies on technology and innovation, you might be interested to join this community.

From the website at http://www.voicesforinnovation.org/:

Voices for Innovation is an open and transparent network of individuals and companies who support a balanced, pro-innovation policy environment. Voices for Innovation is about growth and jobs, consumer benefits, small business productivity, technology choice and entrepreneurship.

(...)

Voices for Innovation aims to give a voice to an extensive network of solution and product developers, resellers, OEMs, web developers, software advocates, businesses and consumers who look to enhance innovation, as well as increase their overall productivity.

The "Voices of Innovation" website

The website is also available in the following languages:

• Dutch
• French
• English
• German
• Spanish

Periodically B.V.L.G. posts his BelBlogs listing (in Dutch). His latest BelBlogs listing is based on the "Blog Influence Number". There are quite some bloggers that write about Microsoft products and technologies in the list:

• 2nd place for Nix (although he comes to Belgium regularly, he's still French and still lives in France and therefore shouldn't be in the ranking of Belgian blogs... ;) ).
• 4th place for Doppler Radio, a project by Erwin "Mobile Viking" Van Hunen and Smetty.
• 10th place for Luc Van Braekel (who wrote a series of posts on MIX06 recently).
• 15th place for Jan Tielens.
• 16th place for Jelle Druyts.
• 20th place for Gregory "Rédo" Renard, one of the two Microsoft Regional Directors for Belgium and Luxembourg.
• 22nd place for me.
• 37th place for Patrick Tisseghem.
• 50th place for Joris Poelmans.

Not that I care a lot about this ranking, I do have to admit that I like to read such lists. It does seem a little strange that some popular Belgian blogs seem to be missing from this one. On top, this ranking does not really represent the value that I would assign to the different Belgian bloggers. The previous one - that was using only Technorati numbers - was better, IMHO.

After some articles were published containing incorrect information, Scoble says that we need to be vigilant against bad journalism. He's right. I'm surprised to see that there are still "journalists" that write articles containing statements that can easily be countered by simply looking up information on the web.

Readers expect to get trustworthy and qualitative news from a journalist (especially if he's paid for the job), and not just his "personal wish fulfillment fantasies" as someone described it in the comments on Scoble's post. Sadly it is not only the journalist's credibility that is on the stake, but also the one from his readers. When a reader is not familiar with the topic and just believes what is written, he can end up making a fool of himself or even worse: he might make decisions based on incorrect information. Indeed, one shouldn't believe just one source. Problem is that many news sources (such as blogs, but also newspapers and news websites) tend to take over stories without checking them. If nobody checks the story, incorrect information may spread easily and very fast.

Luckily, till now, such bad journalism is more an exception than a rule. And journalists or bloggers who write incorrect/incomplete stories regularly are quickly identified as non-credible and should be ignored.

From time to time I'm discovering some nice (not so obvious) features of the Live.com beta website. It's easy to add syndication feeds to the Live.com website. You can click on the headline, and you're transferred to the full post on the website. However, if you hover over or click on "[more]", you get a preview of the content in a popup window.

Reading the MSDN Belux RSS feed on Live.com

Using that same technique you can also listen to your favorite podcasts, straight from within Live.com. Just click [more] and a small Windows Media Player appears so that you can start, pauze or stop the podcast. You don't have to keep that popup box open; the podcast keeps playing as long as you stay on Live.com.

Playing podcasts directly from Live.com 

This also seems to work in Firefox, although there was a difference. Instead of Windows Media Player, QuickTime was loaded as media player when I clicked on the [more] link using Firefox.

I'm using Live.com for somewhat more than 2 weeks, and I'm still impressed. Especially Windows Live Search and the "infinite scroll" are a real treat. On top I see so many opportunities for building gadgets. If only there was some more time in a day...

A few weeks ago, I blogged that the renewed Beta Experience was open for registration. If you also like the  "pleasure of testing" software, you should definitely register for this new Beta Experience. You'll receive a newsletter once every 6 weeks during the beta period, and once available, you'll be able to download the public beta's/CTP's of the software. This allows you to get hands-on experience with the new Windows Vista and 2007 Office System.

Find the sites:

• Beta Experience (Belgium - Dutch)
• Beta Experience (Belgium - French)
• Beta Experience (general)

There has been quite some activity in the blogosphere for a few weeks on the Origami Project, now also known as the Ultra Mobile PC (see here for more links).

Yesterday, while driving, suddenly I heard a discussion on the radio about the Ultra Mobile PC. Those nice folks of Q-Music even posted the audio fragment in their online audio gallery (look for fragment of March 13, 2006). Here is also the direct link to the audio fragment (in Dutch).

David Grudl says that he doesn't like GUId's in the URL of a blog (link in Czech) and sent quite some traffic to me to show the (bad) example. I admit, a GUID doesn't really express the content of the page. On the other hand, I almost never enter links by hand in my browser or decide to visit a page based only on the URL.

But point taken, David. If I have some time left I'll check if I can change from GUID permalinks to more meaningful links without breaking too many links...

Update: It seems to be just a matter of checking some checkboxes in the DasBlog configuration. So, friendly URL's from now on at this blog.

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/.

Here are a few more posts on Developer & IT Pro Days that were not included in my previous blog post:

• David Boschmans, the developer content owner and co-creator of the opening keynote,  wraps up.
• Erwin "Mobile Viking" van Hunen writes about his experience on a Microsoft event with his IBM and Domino background.
• Tim De Keukelaere blogs about his first day and his second day on the event. It was nice talking to you again during the event, Tim!
• Nix, the famous French developer community leader, was also in Belgium and he liked it over here! Text is in French, he also has some nice pictures...

Update: Here are some of photo's that were taken by our event photographer, An Nelissen. And guess what, she is blogging...

I'm starting to recover from the tremendously exhausting preparation of the Belgian Developer & IT Pro Days. The event in a nutshell:

• +1.200 participants
• 10 gold sponsors, 10 silver sponsors, 2 media sponsors on site
• 53 sessions delivered by MSFTies and local and international experts
• 7 different Belgian user groups (of which 4 are new):
  • Visual Studio User Group (VISUG)
  • Fx User Group for French speaking developers
  • Belgian XP / Agile User Group
  • Belgian Information Worker User Group (BIWUG)
  • ACCB.net - .NET User Group for the Bruges area
  • Pro-Exchange
  • Belgian SQL Server User Group (SQLUG)
• A few thousand liters of drinks (available all day during the conference)
• Approx 10.000 sandwiches and salades
• A surf corner to charge your notebook and connect to the net

Here are a few attendee blog posts that I discovered:

• Yves Hanoulle was the host for the Belgian XP / Agile User Group.
• Frédéric De Vries gives his opinion (in Dutch) on Developer & IT Pro Days and FOSDEM. He also has pictures of both events.
• Luc Van Braekel summarizes Rob Creemers' closing keynote of the first day.
• Wesley Baekelant says he wasn't too thrilled about the sessions? He claims most technologies are 'too old' to talk about them in such a way. My reaction: not all developers are dealing with bleeding edge products and technologies. With Developer & IT Pro Days we have to find the right balance between bleeding edge and current technologies. Not an easy job...
• Didier Danse, a Belgian MVP, gives his quote (in French) for several parts of the event and ends up with an 8/10 for the entire event. Thanks for that!
• Miel "Coolz0r" Van Opstal blogged his experiences on the first day and on the second day of the conference. He also added pictures. And cross posted the articles on the Inside Microsoft blog news channel.
• Pieter Gheysens says the event was a great success.
• Steven Van de Craen got to see some interesting stuff on 2007 Office System.

Apparently Jan Van Ryswyk had other priorities than attending a developer event. Congratulations with your newborn, Jan!

Please let me know if you also blogged about the event and I didn't include you in this list.

Some of the speakers also blogged about their experiences:

• Hans Verbeeck blogs about the preparation of the Developer & IT Pro Days keynote and has some pictures of it. My personal opinion: this was one of the best opening keynotes we ever did in Belgium towards our technical community.
• Bart De Smet, MVP and WPF speaker.
• Roy Osherhove gets nice comments from attendees of his sessions.
• Steven Wilssens thinks that I influenced the introduction for his first session. I'm innocent...

My personal conclusion on the event: since so many of you came to congratulate us on the event, I'm very happy. Beside a few hick-ups of the internet connections in the surf corner (a technician of the internet access provider misconfigured one of the 6 routers), everything went well. The online evaluation results are coming in; 23% of all attendees have already replied as we speak. Oh, just one little extra note on the feedback, we read every line of feedback that is entered.

At last, this event wouldn't have been a success without the professional assistance of our event agency D.D.M.C. A special thanks goes out to Els, Alex, Ineke, Olivier and Johan for your excellent work (once again).

With over 1.200 registrations the Developer & IT Pro Days are now officially sold out... We've exceed our target with 20% and for the first time in Developer & IT Pro Days history we have to close the registration early. See y'all in Ghent...

In case you didn't know this yet, the colleagues of Microsoft Dynamics in Belgium are launching their CRM v3.0 on March 9 also in Ghent (right after the Developer & IT Pro Days). This event won't be very interesting for hardcore developers, as it is oriented towards a business audience (ie. a lot of talking, very few lines of code). But nevertheless, judge for yourself at the CRM Day web page.

As you might imagine, it are quite hectic times for the Belgian Developer & IT Pro Days team. With only approx. one week to go, we're at 91% of the capacity. This means that there will be a lot of people again at the event. Although the biggest part of the attendees comes from Belgium, there are also people coming from France, The Netherlands, Ireland and Romania to see and hear our excellent speakers.

We've been working on the opening keynote for quite some time already, but apparently nobody of the team noticed that we didn't mention our keynote speaker on the website. Apologies for that. The opening keynote speaker is Wilfried Grommen, General Manager for the Business Strategy at Microsoft EMEA. The team that's working on Wilfried's keynote consists mainly of techies, so expect something interesting. Let me also reveal that Wilfried will be assisted by the honorable Hans Verbeeck and Dave Webster.

A few days ago, David unfortunately had to decide to replace the initially planned session on MSF v4.0. Reason for this is Rafal's travel schedule. No worries, IMHO he found a good alternative in Roy Osherhove's introduction to agile methodologies and concepts. All the other sessions that were planned for Rafal remain the same.

Yesterday, Ritchie and I had a meeting with Rob Creemers to talk about his closing keynote on the event. This one is a very nice one too. There is something about Rob and I like the way that he explains things. For those that don't know Rob Creemers, you should definitely stay for this closing keynote. As technology watcher, Rob will explain the impact of technology on the way we live. And a lot more...

Also yesterday, Gerd De Bruycker - the former manager behind MSDN Belux and now in charge of organizing TechEd Europe - started his own blog. I had the pleasure of working for/with Gerd during 2 years. He is a real great guy to work for and I learned a lot from him. Guess what, a few years ago he was a developer himself! While he was the MSDN Belux audience manager, Gerd talked a lot about starting his own blog but never really got to it. Really good to see that it finally happened... Now let's hope he makes it a habit to post.

Peter Himschoot is organizing a geek dinner in Ghent on 7 March. So after your portion of deep technical geek presentations at Developer & IT Pro Days, you can enjoy a nice dinner with other technology adepts...

A few of my colleagues were lucky and went on a short ski last week. Michael Kögeler, our marketing director, put up some pictures on his blog:

• I'm not sure I would eat this...
• Bruno Segers, our general manager, also works during a short holiday ...
• ... but not the entire time.
• Microsoft employees like each other and some are not afraid to show it.

Looks to me that I missed some nice activities and relaxing moments in Garmisch Partenkirchen. But Developer & IT Pro Days is coming very close and I really couldn't afford to take a holiday break.

Brad Abrams reports that his book "Framework Design Guidelines" is the 19th best selling book in the category "Computing & Internet" at Proxis... So is Belgium really becoming a center for framework design excellence (or are we it already :) )?

Thanks Rudi for sending me the link to Brad's post...

I guess the word is finally out on Rédo joining the Regional Director community as representative for Belgium and Luxembourg. Together with his Flemish speaking peer in RD community, Peter Himschoot, he'll be working on several (community) initiatives. Both are independent from Microsoft and are working at their own company (Peter at U2U and Rédo at Wygwam). I look forward to see the first results of their work.

Oh, we have plans to announce some of this work at Developer & IT Pro Days...

Soma had quite some nice announcements the past few days. First of all, Team Foundation Server - the collaboration server of Visual Studio Team System - will be available in March.

As good developer, you already knew about the availability of the .NET Enterprise Library v2.0, didn't you? :)

It's also nice to have a look at the future, isn't it? So check out the new CTP's of the Expression tools, such as the Expression Interactive Designer (previously know as code name "Sparkle"). Or maybe you like Visual Basic 2005 (version 8.0), so why won't you check out the new Visual Basic 9.0 CTP?

Geez, when I read about all this new stuff

Warning: Marketing Content is following after this sentence! If you want to know more about Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server, book your ticket for the Developer & IT Pro Days now... There will be plenty of sessions on these subjects. And you'll be able to fire your questions at experts that have real life experience with these products.

Federal Developer blog reports that for a limited time we're offering MCAD's and MCSD's 3 beta exams for free.

Attendees of the Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 Event in Belgium also got a voucher to take one exam for free. Passing one exam is all that it takes to become a Microsoft Certified Professional. My advise is not to waste this opportunity. In my days a self-employed developer I benefited a few times of my MCSD status: both financially as well as with the work I got to do...

A few days ago we released a brand new, pure Java (type 4) JDBC 3.0 driver for SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005. This JDBC driver also works with the free, easy-to-use, lightweight version of SQL Server 2005: SQL Server 2005 Express Edition.

But I'm not going to go into too much detail as I'm not a subject matter expert on this.

Was just checking out the availability in Belgium of "Naked Conversations", the book on "how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers" of Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. Two Belgian online bookstores announce that it will be available on Monday January 30: here for Proxis, and here for Azur.

I didn't read the book yet, so I can't tell you (yet) if I liked it. But don't hesitate to check out the opinion of several other bloggers on this book.

You might recall that a few weeks ago Scoble and his wife Maryam visited Belgium. You might have noticed this in the Belgian press: StuBru interviewed him and broadcasted the interview in prime time, and Vers L'Avenir and Data News wrote articles about his visit. Yesterday I received a copy of the February edition of Bizz Magazine that contains a 3 page interview of with Scoble. The interview is an excellent summary of what Scoble talked about with the journalists.

Today we've announced that we moved TechEd Europe 2006 from July to November. Also the location was changed from Amsterdam to Barcelona. Why did we reschedule? For those that might think that it was because I didn't want to celebrate my 30th birthday on a geek conference, well, they are wrong.  :)  Actually, July was not longer the most optimal time frame for the event:

• Many developers indicated that they want to enjoy their well-deserved summer holidays and have a difficult time coming to a geek conference in July
• People from the product teams in the US wanted to spend their official national holiday - the 4th of July - at home
• The worldwide Microsoft Partner Conference is also held in the same timeframe

On top of the date change, the event is now fully split up between developers in the first week (7 - 10 November 2006) and IT professionals in the second week (14 - 17 November).

The TechEd Europe team created a nice Frequently Asked Questions section on the website that contains all the official statements about the change.

In short: yes, there will be a TechEd Europe in 2006 but it will be held in November in Barcelona, Spain.

Wim Van Winghe is the business group manager for Windows Client (i.e. Windows XP and Windows Vista) at Microsoft Belgium. He will be spending a week at Microsoft Campus in Redmond visiting the Windows Vista product team. This is not very exceptional, wouldn't it be that Wim is blogging (in Dutch) about it for a full week.

I've been very quiet on the blogging front lately. For a big part this has to do with the preparation for the Developer & IT Pro Days 2006. After a lot of work, we've finally been able to open the registrations for this event. Have a look at the site (http://www.dev-itprodays.be); the agenda is almost completely finalized.

To give you a little insight, here are the people that are part of the event core team:

• Ritchie Houtmeyers and I are the project owners.
• David Boschmans and Arlindo Alves are responsible for the content and speakers
• Wim Verhaeghen is working on the website
• Lut Goedhuys is dealing with all marketing and communication activities

PS. The first 400 people that register will receive an MSPress book...

There are already quite some user groups in Belgium focussing on development on the Microsoft platform:

• Belgian Information Worker User Group
• .NET User Group Brugge
• Visual Basic Group

I already blogged about the user group for French speaking developers that Rédo and his friends want to start.

Two other guys, Steven Wilssens and Peter Himschoot, are starting the Belgian Visual Studio User Group. Their first meeting is scheduled for next Wednesday (25 January).

While they were in Belgium last Thursday, Studio Brussels (Belgium national radio's youth channel), interviewed Robert and Maryam. The people of StuBru have been so nice to put the interview online at http://outpost.vrt.be/privemp3/blog_20051211_154702.htm.

Wednesday evening, 19:00. Back home from a day with meetings from 8:00 till 18:00. While checking your e-mail (you always want to do that after being a day without it, don't you) and you see that Scoble and Maryam sent the phone number of the hotel they are staying at. You call them and say you'll pick them up at the hotel in 45 minutes.

So far so good. Until you arrive at the hotel but the police won't allow you to stop. Why? Because Dr. Condoleezza Rice is also staying at that hotel. Because of this I way too late to pick them up, of course.

After picking up Wim, we went to visit the city of Leuven. After having a big casserole of mussels (note for Robert: that was in Leuven and not in Brussels ;), Wim and I gave Robert and Maryam a quick tour around the city with of course a visit to the Oude Markt (freely translated as "Old Market Square"). This place also has the nickname of being the greatest bar of Western Europe. Not many people out there that night though... Luckily we had quite some stuff to talk about: culture, food, beers, Microsoft, Google, Apple, blogging... One thing's for sure, if you're out with the Scobles you're never out of conversation material. Robert is a great guy and knows a lot about so many different things. His wife, Maryam is such a spontaneous and lovely woman.

Before bringing them back to their hotel, we also gave Robert and Maryam the opportunity to see the Atomium at 1:00 in the morning. Luck was definitely not on our side, because normally this piece of art is completely lighted. But not now... Robert posted some photo's of places we visited.

Thursday morning Scoble gave a breakfast presentation to my colleagues at the Microsoft Belgium offices. Besides the "regular employees" also several members of the management team could free up time in their agenda to attend his presentation on blogging. Sweet!

In the evening, there was David's Geek Dinner at Serenata in Zaventem. On the previous geek dinners I attended almost everyone was part of the .NET developer community. (Yup, I definitely should go to more geek dinners.) This time, however, there were quite some people that I didn't met or even knew before. With the risk of forgetting someone, the people that I remember to have seen: Scoble & Maryam, David Boschmans, Wim Verhaeghen, Jelle Druyts, Joris Poelmans, Erwin van  Hunen, Luc Van Brakel, Smetty "I Kissed Scoble", Miel Van Opstal (Coolz0r), Maarten Schenk, Frédéric De Vries (Druppels), Will Moffat (Hamstersoup.com). Also Bart Goossens, author of the Dutch book "Webloggen" of Clickx Magazine, joined us. During the evening we had nice chats on several topics, such as Apache, Windows Media Server, PHP, having blog dinners when interesting people visit Microsoft, open source, and much more. Erwin showed us the coolest mobile application that I've seen since Imagine Cup's SmartRunner. DopplerMobile is an enhanced version of the desktop DopplerRadio with many nice features. This is one of those apps that would convince me to buy a new Smartphone, just to be able to run it. Knowing that it has been written by someone that lives in Belgium just adds that extra touch. Erwin didn't release a beta version to the public yet.

During dinner one of the Belgian national radio's, Studio Brussel, broadcasted the interview that Kaat Mendonck did with Robert and Maryam earlier that day.

Summarized: it was a fantastic experience. Thanks Robert and Maryam for taking the time to visit our nice country (view an informational video). It was nice to hear that you enjoyed your visit!

PS. Today, De Morgen also published a piece on blogging with quotes from Robert.

Update: Maarten Schenk has also published a lot of pics of the dinner.

Warning: commercial content following...

Together with my colleagues at the Microsoft Press front, we were able to extend the Launch Event promotion on the following 2 books:

• Working with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System for 21,60 EUR
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Pocket Consultant for 19,99 EUR

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.

David has invited Robert Scoble and his wife Maryam to Brussels. He was right to leverage this opportunity and organize a geek dinner in the neighborhood of Brussels on December 8.

More details on the 8 December Brussels Geek Dinner is on David's blog...

Blatantly copied from the site:

Watch Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer introduce SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 in the worldwide launch event in San Francisco. See how this next generation application platform makes the next leap in productivity, scalability and availability for mission critical applications.

So tune in at 18:00 (if you live in timezone GMT+1) -- http://www.microsoft.com/emea/steveballmerlive/

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.

The IT Pro guys have created a video on how they think developers should share the pain of the end-users when something goes wrong. I suggest you watch this 4-minute video on the "WSYP project: Leverage customer feedback for software reliability" (WSYP = We Share Your Pain) when you need a good laugh. I find it quite funny.

Watch the video:

• English spoken with Dutch information and subtitles on TechNet Belux
• English spoken with French information and subtitles on TechNet Belux
• English spoken with English information and subtitles on TechNet UK

On the "IT's Sh0wtime" website, IT professionals can also find high quality technical content from different experts such as Kimberly Tripp.

Over the past few weeks, we have published several articles from different Belgian & Luxemburger authors on the local MSDN website. Here's an overview:

Visual Studio 2005 Walkthrough: ASP.NET 2.0 Web Services and ADO.NET 2.0
In this walkthrough Wim Uyttersprot learns you how to create an ASP.NET 2.0 Web Service that returns and updates an ADO.NET 2.0 DataSet. The dataset is consumed in a Windows Form and bound to a DataGridView instance, using the new asynchronous patterns of .NET 2.0. The dataset is serialized in XML. Using a XSD schema, a typed dataset is created.

Extend Windows Media Player with Visual C++ Express and Advanced COM Interop - Part I
Learn how to create cool plug-ins for Windows Media Player. Ianier Munoz guides you to the process of enhancing the user experience of Windows Media Player with new visualizations, audio effects and other power toys.

Remote monitoring of mobile device applications
Philippe Cailleau explains how to get back information about memory usage during execution time in order to spot key points that could be useful to identify the source of strange memory consumption.

Enterprise Source Control with Visual Studio Team System
In his latest article Peter Himschoot talks about the source configuration management features of Visual Studio Team System, and shows what features are important for us developers in day to day development. Some features are compared with Visual Source Safe. There is even a hands-on lab includeded so you can try for yourself.

Do you also want to share your knowledge with the developer community by authoring articles? If you're Belgian or Luxembourger, please send an e-mail to msdnbewm@microsoft.com. Everyone else can check out the article submission section on MSDN.com.

I recently realized that you have to be careful with what you say to a marketeer. During one of the Launch Event preparation meetings we were talking about Clemens Vasters, one of the speakers. Since not everyone knew him, I compared him with a popular international singer.

A few days later our marketeers announced to all people at Microsoft Belgium that Clemens Vasters - the Robbie Williams of .NET development - will give a gig on the Launch Event. Given Robbie's reputation with women, I'm not sure if Clemens's girlfriend likes this comparison. ;)

What? Microsoft at one of the biggest Java conferences in Europe? Microsoft sponsoring BeJUG, the Belgian Java User Group? What the heck is going on...

We got similar reactions when we sponsored JavaPolis 2004. Stephan Janssen, the chairman of BeJUG (Belgian Java User Group), asked for views and comments on Microsoft sponsoring JavaPolis. Although not too many people commented on his post, during the conference we had quite a lot of developers coming over to us and asking what we were doing at the event.

After recently talking to Stephan, it appears that several Java developers still ask similar questions and are not confident about Microsoft being at "their" event. Now I could try to explain some of the reasons here, but it would always be someone from Microsoft that's talking.

That's why I prefer having someone from the Java community talk a bit about his experiences with Microsoft. Not just anyone from the Java community. No, hear for yourself what Rick Ross, the founder of the Javalobby community website (which is also the website that JavaPolis uses for hosting their presentations), has to say about his experiences after being invited by Microsoft for attending the Technology Summit in March 2005. His webcast is only 20 minutes long, but it is worth seeing.

Not convinced yet? Just come over to our booth in the exhibition for a chat. Or attend the presentation on SQL Server 2005 by Shelby Goerlitz, product manager for the SQL Server 2005 JDBC Driver, on Thursday 15 December at 11:30.

Man man man, we've crossed the barrier of 2.000 registrations for the Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 Launch Event here in Belgium on 10 November. I'm sure we'll have to close the registration really soon. Together with all questions and inquiries I received over the past few weeks on Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio Team System (because of RTM), it's obvious that this launch is really getting the attention of the Belgian developer community.

You'll also be able to meet several partners/sponsors on the launch event that are as happy as we are about this release. They'll show you what Visual Studio, SQL Server and BizTalk Server means to them. I'm not going to spoil the surprise, but it will be worthwhile to visit them...

Oh, I'm talking too much fluff here... but that's only because I feel so happy about this Launch and its products. Please forgive me.

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.

Did you already notice that MSDN.com contains local Belgian headlines on its home page?

If you don't see headlines for Belgium, you can change this by clicking on the "Change" link.

You can of course still subscribe to the local MSDN Belux RSS feed too.

The Belgian Launch Event for Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 is scheduled for November 10th in Court-St-Etienne (this is near Brussels). The Launch Event website is at http://www.microsoft.be/events/ready or you can go directly to the registration page (Dutch / French).

Keynote speaker is S. "Soma" Somasegar. If aliens don't abduct him, Clemens Vasters will give a brief overview of Visual Studio 2005 while Astrid Hackenberg will do the same for SQL Server 2005.

MSDN has published a white paper on Visual Studio 2005 and its security features.

Visual Studio 2005 makes it easier for developers to write secure applications. Write unmanaged code that's safe, or get IDE tools that help you to build and deploy managed applications that take advantage of Code Access Security.

You can read it here.

David Boschmans arranged that Robert Scoble, Microsoft Geek Blogger and A-list blogger, will pay our little country a visit on December 7 and 8. More info on David's blog at http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/davidb/archive/2005/09/20/132825.aspx.

The Belgian blogging community was quite active at the PDC (Professional Developers Conference) last week in Los Angeles. Here's an overview of their PDC-related blog posts:

• Notes on Keynote Day 1 (http://blogs.bartdesmet.net/bart/archive/2005/09/13/3539.aspx)

• PDC05 Keynote (http://jelle.druyts.net/2005/09/13/PDC05Keynote.aspx)
• Keynote 2 (http://jelle.druyts.net/2005/09/14/PDC05TheSecondKeynote.aspx)
• Keynote 3 (http://jelle.druyts.net/2005/09/15/PDC05TheThirdKeynote.aspx)
• PDC05 Pre-Con: The Art Of Building A Reusable Class Library (http://jelle.druyts.net/2005/09/16/PDC05PreConTheArtOfBuildingAReusableClassLibrary.aspx)
• Static Classes And The HasShutdownStarted Property (http://jelle.druyts.net/2005/09/16/StaticClassesAndTheHasShutdownStartedProperty.aspx)

• PDC Day 1 - After the presentations (http://www.pixato.com/?p=67)
• PDC Day 2 - After the presentations (http://www.pixato.com/?p=68)
• PDC Pictures (including Office “12” pics) (http://www.pixagogo.com/6001135117)

• You know why PDC '05 is held in LA? I do! (http://weblogs.asp.net/jan/archive/2005/09/12/424925.aspx)
• Son of SmartPart: more details (http://weblogs.asp.net/jan/archive/2005/09/14/425192.aspx)

• Photos from PDC05 uploaded (http://jopx.blogspot.com/2005/09/photos-from-pdc05-uploaded.html)
• High expectations for PDC05 concerning SharePoint and MCMS (http://jopx.blogspot.com/2005/09/high-expectations-for-pdc05-concerning.html)
• .Net Language Integrated Query (http://jopx.blogspot.com/2005/09/net-language-integrated-query_14.html)
  Windows Workflow Foundation and SharePoint (http://jopx.blogspot.com/2005/09/windows-workflow-foundation-and.html)
• Windows Vista at PDC05 (http://jopx.blogspot.com/2005/09/windows-vista-at-pdc05.html)
• Office 12 - you got it first at PDC (http://jopx.blogspot.com/2005/09/office-12-you-got-it-first-at-pdc.html)
• Enhancements in SharePoint V3 (http://jopx.blogspot.com/2005/09/enhancements-in-sharepoint-v3.html)
• IBF has a new brother, here comes BDC (http://jopx.blogspot.com/2005/09/ibf-has-new-brother-here-comes-bdc.html)

• Live from PDC (http://blog.u2u.info/DottextWeb/peter/archive/2005/09/14/9036.aspx)

• Pack PDC 2005 ! (http://blogs.developpeur.org/redo/archive/2005/09/13/11160.aspx)
• Parfois... (http://blogs.developpeur.org/redo/archive/2005/09/13/11199.aspx)
• Introducing LINQ by Paul Vick !!! (http://blogs.developpeur.org/redo/archive/2005/09/14/11205.aspx)
• Atlas Unleashed... by Scott Guthrie (http://blogs.developpeur.org/redo/archive/2005/09/14/11206.aspx)
• Quand mono rime avec zéro ! (http://blogs.developpeur.org/redo/archive/2005/09/14/11214.aspx)
• Première journée PDC ... Que du bonheur !!! (http://blogs.developpeur.org/redo/archive/2005/09/14/11249.aspx)
• Nouveautés annoncées : C#3, VB9, LINQ Project (http://blogs.developpeur.org/redo/archive/2005/09/15/11253.aspx)
• Anders Hejlsberg, Just do it !!! (http://blogs.developpeur.org/redo/archive/2005/09/15/11257.aspx)
• Visual Basic .NET 9 : Future Directions in Language Innovation (http://blogs.developpeur.org/redo/archive/2005/09/15/11310.aspx)
• Paul Vick, Just do it (Part2) !!! (http://blogs.developpeur.org/redo/archive/2005/09/15/11312.aspx)
• C# 3.0 Language Enhancements + Chat C# 3.0 le 22 septembre !!! (http://blogs.developpeur.org/redo/archive/2005/09/15/11315.aspx)
• Après la première journée... la suite : Acrylic, Sparkle, Quartz, XAML, Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) ... (http://blogs.developpeur.org/redo/archive/2005/09/16/11321.aspx)
• Migrez vos applications de .NET 1.x vers .NET 2.0 (http://blogs.developpeur.org/redo/archive/2005/09/18/11404.aspx) 

• Arrived at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2005 (http://www.wiver.com/blog/PermaLink,guid,fb997e2e-dfc1-4f82-8af0-82ed9bb277aa.aspx)
• Be Ready for the Wave (http://www.wiver.com/blog/PermaLink,guid,1424b21d-04f7-4e28-a65a-22659be84f04.aspx)

• Windows Vista UX Guide available (http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/davidb/archive/2005/09/12/132516.aspx)
• Visual Studio 2005 Release Candidate (RC): live on MSDN (http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/davidb/archive/2005/09/12/132518.aspx)
• PDC 05 - 1: ASP.NET 2.0 Pre-conf (http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/davidb/archive/2005/09/13/132525.aspx)
• PDC 05: An exciting Day 1 (http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/davidb/archive/2005/09/13/132559.aspx)
• PDC 05: Coolness and Belgian Community on stage! (http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/davidb/archive/2005/09/14/132601.aspx)
• Migrating to Team Foundation Server (http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/davidb/archive/2005/09/16/132625.aspx)

• VSTO 2005 developers and Office 12 (http://blog.u2u.info/DottextWeb/patrick/archive/2005/09/12/8946.aspx)
• VSTO 2005 Pre-Conf and the rest of day 2 (http://blog.u2u.info/DottextWeb/patrick/archive/2005/09/13/8992.aspx)
• ‘Son of the SmartPart’ Technology Preview (http://blog.u2u.info/DottextWeb/patrick/archive/2005/09/13/9033.aspx)
• Where's my menu? (http://blog.u2u.info/DottextWeb/patrick/archive/2005/09/14/9107.aspx)
• SharePoint Day at PDC (http://blog.u2u.info/DottextWeb/patrick/archive/2005/09/15/9142.aspx)
• CAML vNext (http://blog.u2u.info/DottextWeb/patrick/archive/2005/09/15/9146.aspx)
• Reflecting on PDC (http://blog.u2u.info/DottextWeb/patrick/archive/2005/09/17/9172.aspx)

Did I miss a blog post from a Belgian somewhere? Feel free to leave a comment to have this rectified...

A couple of weeks ago, Ritchie Houtmeyers started as the new IT Pro Audience Manager at Microsoft Belgium & Luxembourg. He is responsible for running the TechNet program in Belgium and Luxembourg. Ritchie is already for quite some time at Microsoft where he worked as a technical specialist on several server products.

You can read his blog (currently only one post though) at http://blogs.technet.com/rho_weblog.

Just a quick note that you can all mark your agenda's and make sure you make no appointments on November 10! Because November 10 is the date that we will launch Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 in Belgium. Save the date!

More information will be available on the official Microsoft Belgium website soon, but now you already now the date...

Update: I'm not going to spoil the surprise by already giving his name, but we managed to have a fabulous, fantastic, superb keynote speaker for the event. (No, it's not me ;)) Let me give you some teasers:

• He works at Microsoft Corporation
• His job title sounds good (well, that is according to me)
• He's part of the Developer Division
• He has 2 kids
• He blogs

Could be anyone, right? Not! A good internet searcher should be able to get into the right direction.

Bernard Vander Beken sent me mail, informing that he and Kris Lauwereins started a new user group for .NET developers in the region of Bruges (Brugge for the Flemish). Their first meeting is on September 21st.

Visit their website (in Dutch) for more information: http://accbnet.ccat.be/.

On September 23rd, we'll be hosting an event in Brussels on Visual Studio Team System with 2 great presenters from Microsoft Corp in Redmond: Michael Leworthy and Sonal Pardeshi. Both are product managers on Visual Studio Team System and are of course very knowledgeable on this subject.

As usual with our MSDN Events in Belgium, the show can be attended for free but we do ask you to register upfront.

For more information and registration, see http://www.microsoft.com/belux/nl/msdn/events/2005/vsts_ontour.mspx.

Other community information:

• .NET Rocks audio talk show on VSTS
• Visual Studio Team System forums on microsoft.com

Tony Krijnen, a technical specialist at Microsoft Netherlands, had a few spare hours and created a video of the nightmares his kids put him through before he had a Media Center PC. Funny!

Patrick Tisseghem announced the start of a new user group in Belgium: the Belux Information Worker User Group (or BIWUG in short). He has been working on this start for quite some time already, so I'm glad to see the public announcement now. As the user group's name suggests, the participants will focus on information worker technologies. People that know Patrick, know that he's very knowledgeable in this subject, that he's an active community participant (blogging, speaking at conferences, participating in podcasts, writing top notch articles, ...) and that he's also a nice guy.

More information on the user group and how to join is available on Patrick's blog.

Jay, one of the students working on the Blueconnect project, created a nice summary of his adventures at the Imagine Cup 2005 in Japan.

The electronic version of De Standaard, a newspaper for the Flemish speaking part of Belgium, reports that more than 570.000 blogs have already been created in Belgium (note: this link goes to an article in Dutch and will probably redirect to a 'Subscribers only' page soon) on MSN Spaces. The other blogger site for Belgians, Skynetblogs, currently hosts 62.000 blogs (or just 11% of the total of Belgian MSN Spaces blogs). The article talks some enhancements to both blog platforms. Here are already some of the MSN Spaces Power Toys to get extra functionality on your MSN Space:

• MSN Spaces Tweak UI Power Toy
• MSN Spaces Custom HTML Power Toy
• MSN Spaces Windows Media Player Power Toy

Want to see the artwork created by the Short Film finalists of Imagine Cup? Would you love to feel the atmosphere of the World Festival? It's all possible at http://data.thespoke.com/thespoketv/. (And apparently we're also able to see the Office Designer invitational finalist presentations there - but I still have to look at them.)

For me, Imagine Cup was quite some experience too. Honestly, I was really amazed by the quality of the projects that the students delivered. Not only in software design, but also in the rendering and short film invitationals. When seeing such high quality, one can only admit that there is a bright future ahead of us with so much young talent...

I'm now going to take a few weeks of holidays, so probably there won't be many posts the next weeks.

One of the very cool demos we got at MGB was given by the MSN team: Virtual Earth. The site went live today, so go and have a look at http://virtualearth.msn.com. Here are some community links:

• Channel9 interview with Virtual Earth team
• Chandu Thota's blog
• Virtual Earth team blog
• viaVirtualEarth community site for software developers

This morning I got back from MGB (Microsoft Global Briefing) in Atlanta. (If you don't know what MGB is: Frank Arrigo gives a great quick overview.) Before the many fantastic presentations of upcoming products started, we got to enjoy Bond - a fabulous female quarter playing "classical" music (tip: watch the video of "Explosive" on their website). Just as sooooo many people, I can't wait to get my hands on "Office 12", Windows Vista, the XBox 360... Yes, we've got some really cool things coming up.

Unfortunately I had to get back one day earlier than most of the other Microsoftees. The reason for that is tomorrow I leave with the Belgian "BlueConnect" student team to the world wide Imagine Cup finals in Yokohama. The team will participate in the software design invitational.

This is my first blog post ever that I do from a Windows Vista powered PC. I know that this os is still pre-beta, so I don't mind refreshing my HTML skills to write this post in plain HTML (DasBlog uses FreeTextBox but it apparently doesn't render in this Internet Explorer).

Anyway, the experience I'm currently having ROCKS tremendously! It is difficult to describe how I feel while playing around in Windows Vista; one could compare it to an energizing excitement. Currently the plans are to have Windows Vista Beta 1, targeted at developers and IT professionals, available by August 3rd 2005. Dev's going to PDC -- be prepared for any incredible experience. (And the ones that stay at home, please do too...)

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.

What happens when a geek interviews Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer? ... He asks questions such as:

• Why does Microsoft care about developers?
• Why does Microsoft have an evangelism team?
• What is your call to action for developers right now?
• Microsoft is a leader in transparency and blogging. Why did you allow blogging?
• Can you give us some examples of where Microsoft is innovating?
• If you were in my position what tough questions would you ask Microsoft's CEO?
• What do you want to be remembered as?

See the 10-minute video at Channel9.

Just saw the keynote at TechEd 2005 Europe with Andy Lees, Corporate VP Server & Tools at Microsoft. I'm sure several people will address the details, but there is one big overall theme that I remembered from this keynote: "the Microsoft platform allows IT departments to deliver the promise of enabling businesses without disabling/limiting the information workers".

Somewhat less marketing and more concord, this means having developers and IT pro's really working together. It also means really fulfilling the end user's needs without limiting them because of technical and IT related constraints. But in the end, it means enabling a business to run more succesfully.

Just one example (since there are a lot more examples): don't ask end users to use 6 applications (e-mail, CRM, sales, support, order entry, shipment follow-up, reporting, ...) to work with only 1 customer. It's time consuming, inproductive and frustrating.

Some companies don't use have a "Human Resources Department"; they have an "Employee Department" instead. Which "IT Department" dares to call itself the "Enable Department"? Anyone?

After Virtual Server 2005 and SQL Server 2005, we just announced that attendees for TechEd 2005 Europe will also receive a free* copy of Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition (see Terms and Conditions on the TechEd Europe website). What a deal...

BTW: you can still register if you want...

Oh oh, it seems there is only a limited number of free Beta Experience kits available. So if you want to receive a copy of Visual Studio Team System Beta 2, SQL Server 2005 April CTP and a WeFly247 training CD for free, it's time to act now (if you live in the EMEA region): http://www.microsoft.com/betaexperience.

At this moment there are only 5796 kits available, but the number lowers almost every minute.

Direct links for:

• Belgium (English): http://www.microsoft.com/emea/msdn/betaexperience/nlbe/
• Belgium (French): http://www.microsoft.com/emea/msdn/betaexperience/frbe/

Steve Lanuit is a Belgian developer that is rather experienced with Managed DirectX and he's blogging. Steve is one of the developers of the "New World" project, the Belgian Imagine Cup 2004 finalist in the software design invitational.

You can find his blog at http://zeknight.blogspot.com. He already posted 2 HLSL examples with source code.

Many Tablet PC's contain a gyroscope. I wasn't aware that the one I have (a Toshiba Portégé) also contains one. After activating the Toshiba Accelerometer tool, I'm now able to open my Start menu or switch between the different applications by "shaking" my Tablet PC. Usefulness: probably not that high, I guess; coolness: really high...

If you have a Toshiba Portégé, you can enable this functionality by going through the Start menu to "Toshiba", then "Tablet PC" and then "Setup for Accelerometer Utilities". Note that this path can be different on your Toshiba Tablet PC. After you click this shortcut, you'll probably see the following application.

Wow, it seems we are hiring at Microsoft Belgium & Luxembourg. Our team (Developer & Platform Evangelism) is hiring 2 persons. One is an IT Professional Evangelist and the other one is an Academic Program Manager. And here is the full list of open positions:

• Senior Partner Technology and Solutions Advisor
• Senior Account Manager Financial Services
• Senior Account Manager Industry and Manufacturing
• Partner Account Manager ISV
• Solutions Sales Professional – Infrastructure (Management)
• Partner Sales Manager (PSM) focusing on Information Worker
• Solutions Sales Professional – Application and Development Platform
• Technology Solutions Professional – Infrastructure (focus on Management)
• Technology Solutions Professional – Infrastructure (focus on NOS/Security)
• Customer Service Manager
• Security Mobilization Program Manager
• Product & Solutions Marketing Manager
• Business Group Lead – Information Worker (IW)
• Product & Solution Marketing Manager – MS Office
• Product & Solution Marketing Manager – Information Worker Products
• Home & Entertainment Sales Manager
• Partner Account Manager Microsoft Business Solutions
• DPE – Academic Program Manager
• IT Professional Evangelist
• Technical Audience Marketing Manager
• Database - CRM Manager
• Enterprise Strategy Consultant
• Solution Sales – Application and Development Platform
• Services Executive
• Technical Account Manager
• MCS Infrastructure Consultant

You can apply by sending your CV and a motivation letter to:

Microsoft Belux
Human Resources Dept.
Culliganlaan 1
1831 Diegem
Belgium

Or by sending it by e-mail: hrbelux@microsoft.com.

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.

On April 29th, the Visual C# and Windows Forms product teams are coming to Brussels for a full day of presentations on their products and technologies in Visual Studio 2005. Both Dan Fernandez (C# Product Manager) and Joe Stegman (Lead Program Manager for .NET Client team) are very experienced and good speakers. In fact, I still remember one presentation by Joe Stegman on WinForms 2.0 on PDC. In fact, I was so impressed that I even blogged about that particular session. More information and registration on http://www.microsoft.com/belux/msdn/events/.

BTW: Dan Fernandez invites for a meet up when he's in Brussels.

See you all in Brussels on April 29!

Hey, we're looking for a new colleague in the team I work in. That person will become our IT Professional Evangelist. Just to be clear: this job is not oriented towards software developers.

One of my colleagues is also looking for someone to strengthen his team as IT Pro Audience Marketing Manager. There is a long explanation of the job on the website, but basically his responsabilities would be to run the TechNet program at Microsoft Belgium & Luxembourg. But I do recommend you to read the full page if you want to apply.

And those are only some of the open positions. You can find them all here...

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.

In my previous post I talked about .Music, a band of Microsoft Belgium employees. Their first upcoming hit "Realize Your Potential" also has a video clip. This clip was created by 2 students of the Hogeschool West-Vlaanderen: Brecht Ameye and Dries Douterloigne. See who you recognize...

View the video clip at http://extra.msn.be/simonodil/video.asx.

... does amazing things. Or should I say: "amazing employees do amazing things"?

At the end of the year, many companies and corporations announce that they'll do a big donation to some charity organization. It is important that they do that, because without their genorisity those charity organizations would not be able to do their work as good as they do it now. But for many companies such a donation is, well, just a bank transfer.

But what if the employees of a company get together to support the charity organisation even more. For example, by using their knowledge and skills in advantage of that organisation... This gives, IMHO, an extra dimension to that charity work.

Just as last year, Microsoft Belgium & Luxembourg decided to support Simon & Odil. This project wants to lighten up the days of children that are hospitalized regularly and for long times. Therefore they created an internet portal site with the little dude Simon and his crocodile Odil. But Microsoft doesn't help them only with money and software licenses. At least one consultant of Microsoft Services (but there are more, I sure of that) is working on the getting the infrastructure in place. He does this during his spare time.

A number of other creative and musical employees at Microsoft decided to create and record a song. Therefore they joined forces and gave their group the name ".Music"... These Microsoft Belgium employees are probably the first employees of major corporation that make a record and sell it - with the support of that corporation. After preparing for days, weeks, yes, even months, they were finally ready to go to a recording studio. All the time they spent on this project was also in their own free time. Talking about a commitment. Even though I personally didn't participate in this, I must say I am impressed by the final result. But then again, I guess I'm a little biased. :) So, here's a little shout out to Katia, Mieke, Geert, Patrick, Roel, Raf, Erik, Wilfred and Gunther for their hard work to support Simon & Odil...

Unfortunately all this information is only available on the web in Dutch or French, the two major languages that we speak in Belgium & Luxembourg. You can hear a 30 second preview on this page of MSN Music. Just press the play button in front of the title of the song (under the cover). If you want to buy it, press the "Kopen" button.

The following links redirect to a page in Dutch or French:

• Microsoft page on Simon & Odil (French)
• .MUSIC, Microsoft Belgium's band (French)
• Buy the song "Realising your potential" by .Music (French)
• Get the song as ringtone (French)

Update: read more about .Music's video clip (and stream it) [9 December 2005: link no longer valid]

Updates 9 December 2005: several links are no longer valid.

A study of the Solvay Business School reveals that Microsoft Belgium indirectly employs 5.379 people in Belgium through more than 300 Certified Partners. Their partnership with Microsoft results in sales of 1.5 billion Euro...

Read more:

• Dutch press release
• French press release

From the Trend Micro website:

"Trend Micro™ Mobile Security is designed to protect data-centric mobile devices such as smartphones against viruses and short message service (SMS) spam."

Available for free but the product will expire on June 30, 2005 September 30, 2005 30 days after installation. Who would ever have thought a few years ago that he would have installed an antivirus software on his phone??

More information
Direct to download

BTW: In a previous post on my blog you'll find links to several antivirus products that you can use on your home desktop PC for personal use only.

Update (July 3, 2005): Trend Micro now has a new version for download that will expire on September 30.
Update (March 27, 2006): The free version has been replaced by a 30 day trial version.

Did you notice that all speakers of the MSDN Event on December 2nd are bloggers?

• Bart De Smet: http://blogs.bartdesmet.net/bart/
• David Boschmans: http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/davidb/
• Rudi Larno: http://blogs.msdn.com/rudi_larno
• Peter Himschoot (Regional Director): http://blog.u2u.info/DottextWeb/peter/
• Gunther Beersaerts: http://blogs.msdn.com/guntherb

A couple of weeks ago, Yves Kerwyn asked Jelle Druyts as a co-speaker for a TechNet Evening session on InfoPath. Some time before that, Jan Tielens already appeared on the TechNet Evening floor too.

Of course, there are the more famous names: Patrick Tisseghem and Rédo (especially known in the French speaking community).

Hey are you blogging too? Do you live in Belgium? Send me the URL for your blog; it won't hurt you... Just drop it in the comments or follow the instructions on the MSDN Belux bloggers page.

I don't know if other countries have this, but Belgians can now register to receive Microsoft Security news through MSN Alerts. Now you can receive security-related messages through MSN Messenger, Windows Messenger and even on your mobile phone.

More information and subscription:

• Dutch: http://www.msn.be/alerts/microsoft
• French: http://www.fr.msn.be/alerts/microsoft

From the website: "During this session we will give you detailed insights in the new features and functionality of Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 which will be released beginning of next year. We will show you practical examples on what has changed and will demonstrate how to benefit from these in your organization."

Note that this session will be given on Tuesday instead of the regular Wednesday! Registration can be done here.

Other sessions:

• December 1: Streamlining complex paper based administrative processes with BizTalk and Microsoft Office
• December 8: Overview of the Windows XP and Office 2003 Desktop Deployment Solutions Accelerator

Every attendee of the MSDN Event on December 2nd will receive a very cool DVD containing even more cool products that all integrate very nice in Visual Studio .NET 2003. What would you think about:

• A full version of ActiveReports for .NET
• AmberPoint Express
• CodeObject
• DeKlarit
• Sax Communication, Community Edition

And much more... 67 products (full versions, trials and demo's) in total. Great stuff! Register now for the MSDN Event and get your own copy by attending the event: http://www.microsoft.com/belux/nl/msdn/events/msdnevent.mspx.

Of course, you'll also get some great content:

• SQL Server 2000 Notification Services (this is not Reporting Services, for those that might be confused)
• Upcoming Patterns & Practices' Enterprise Library - A Sneak Preview
• Developing applications with Authorization Manager in Windows Server 2003
• Practical real-world examples for using XML features in Office System 2003

Metablogging the InfoPathHelper .NET library from Jelle Druys that adds offline support to InfoPath forms.

My Wix overview article (written in Dutch) for the .NET Magazine is now available for download. Belgians can register for a free subscription to the .NET Magazine at http://www.microsoft.com/belux/nl/msdn/community/netmagazine/default.mspx. Please note that the magazine is only available in Dutch. (Reason is that it is actually published by our colleagues in The Netherlands, but you'll find many Belgian authors in the magazine too...)

On December 2nd, we will have another MSDN Event for Belgian and Luxemburg. It will take place in Kinepolis, Brussels. IMHO, we have some extremely interesting content; but I guess everyone says that about the events they work on, not?  :) Anyway, we will have sessions on "Enterprise Library", "Using Authorization Manager", "SQL Server Notification Services" and real-world examples of using "XML features in Office".

More information on MSDN Event "Unleashing the Potential of the Microsoft Platform" and registration is available on http://www.microsoft.com/belux/nl/msdn/events/msdnevent.mspx.

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!

Today Master Chief arrived at Microsoft Belgium. With his height of 2 meters, he's standing in the lobby where he is protecting the ladies of the reception desk. Quite cool. I hope I'll be able to post some pictures of this soon...

If you want to win such a "life size Master Chief", you'll have to attend the "Halo 2 Mission Party" on November 12 in the Ancienne Belgique (Brussels) where you can win one. It is a private event and there's only a number of people that will be able to get in.

Check out the instructions on how to get in at this party by clicking the banner.

Ok, this is probably a little over the edge, but... Happy 49th Birthday, Bill Gates!

It is important for people to know what resources are available to them. Also in the IT industry you'll see that people that know their way around the web, that know some of the peers, have a head-start of others.

One of the side-projects that I've been working on lately was to make developers, system and applications administrators, etc... aware of the technical communities. Yesterday, on the SQL Server Day event, we first brought this little project into the public: a sort of postcard, with a cartoon by the Belgian cartoonist Quirit. This a small version of the cartoon:

We'll distribute this card (and other successors too) on different Microsoft events. But you can also see and download a bigger version of this cartoon on http://www.microsoft.be/communities. Because you live and breath IT, don't you?

So you live and breath IT?
Well then, join Microsoft's technical communities.

You get to share ideas and solutions, you get to pick the brains of other IT fanatics, experts, peers and Microsoft employees. By far the best way to stay ahead of the pack.

http://www.microsoft.be/communities
Live IT. Love IT.

At the end of January 2004, I wrote about Computer Associate's offer for their eTrust EZ Armor antivirus and firewall solution: you can now download and use their software without any charge for one year. CA's software is also included in the recently released Microsoft's Partner Pack for Windows. IMHO, eTrust EZ Armor doesn't have an integrated experience: firewall and anti-virus are just 2 different products that are installed at once. On top of this, I find the user interface of the AV product very basic and not intuitive at all, and the firewall appears just to be a rebranded version of ZoneLabs' excellent free ZoneAlarm firewall.

There are also other anti-virus companies that offer free versions of their software for personal/home/non-commercial use. One of these companies is Alwil with their avast! anti-virus product. The "Home" edition of Alwil's avast anti-virus product can be downloaded freely without any registration. The software is available in several languages: English, Dutch, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Czech, Slovak and Japanese to name a few. (Note that you'll eventually have to register the product before the end of the 60-day trial, but registering doesn't cost you a thing.)

Another company that also offers a free anti-virus solution is Grisoft with their "AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition". This software can also be used without any required payment, but you'll have to register (and give your personal contact details) before you can download the software.

Other anti-virus companies also have several offers on Microsoft's Security @ Home anti-virus page. And of course, visit http://www.microsoft.com/protect (English) or http://www.microsoft.com/belux/protect (Dutch and French) for information on keeping your PC safe and protected.

Luc Van Braekel, a Flemish "A-list blogger" (but blogs in Dutch/Flemish only), has a copy of an English spoken promotional video for Belgium. With everything that's going on, I thought it might be good to be reminded that our government wants us to be proud of our country.

PS. Note the part when a commercial airplane flies over... Tragically ironic.

Robert Scoble says it's time that we get over our fear of weblogging. I find it an interesting read and it will certainly reflect on several statements he makes.

But there is one thing that he seems to forget: we aren't all developers on the Windows/Linux/MacOS OS, Visual Studio, ASP.NET or the .NET Framework, we don't all design Ford cars and we aren't all managers/CxO's of a big corporation. During several talks with people, many told me the same thing: "I don't blog because I don't think I'll have enough interesting material to write about."

Indeed, you'll need to free up some time to blog. And time is just that one thing that we don't have enough of, do we? On the other hand, blogging is also about communicating and building a network, building relationships. Keeping relations alive will always consume time and energy. Having a blog could help you to keep your existing relations but will certainly helps you to meet new people easier. And you'll find that blogging can be fun... And if you don't like it, you can always quit.

Here's an example. If it wouldn't have been for blogs, I would probably never have heard of Vasanth Dharmaraj. Just the fact that I remember him while writing this post is remarkable, not? By reading his blog, I got to know some things about him: he's a big Formula 1 adept, he's a Java developer but isn't afraid of doing some things  with .NET either. He has an Xbox. But most of all I got to know him as a person, even though I never met him in real life. Does he blog every day? No, he doesn't. But because I don't have to visit his site (thanks to RSS and an aggregator), I'll be automatically informed when Vasanth writes a new post.

Another example: I wouldn't have known about Peli's (a.k.a. Jonathan de Halleux) Redmond adventure and wouldn't have given him a bottle of champagne if he didn't have his blog. In fact, he even told me that his blog was somehow involved in his recruitment process. And if you read his blog, you'll certainly understand that. Because blogs, he was able to team up with Jamie Cansdale and moved several of his projects into TestDriven.net.

There are plenty more blog related success stories, even here in Belgium. You could check out the list of Belgian & Luxembourger .NET technology bloggers and see how a blog impacts their lives. Now, why don't you give it a try?

Btw, sorry for falling into the marketing trap from time to time. I'll try to work on it.

Was just browsing the MSDN Product Feedback Center and saw the following announcement by Anson Horton (Microsoft):

I'm happy to report that based on your feedback we have decided to implement E&C for C#. It will be first available in the upcoming community tech preview drop. Please let us know what you think!!

More information on Edit and Continue in C# is available on Microsoft's Vice President for the Developer Division Somasegar (a.k.a. Soma).

Scoble, being an anti-smoking activist, will be happy... Yesterday Clemens blogged that he quit smoking five weeks ago. I delayed blogging about it, but in fact I quit smoking 8 weeks ago. That are at least 2 smokers less on this planet!

And it feels great being a non-smoker now. I know, I know, these things are all traditional clichés, but now:

• I don't have to be afraid any longer that I annoy people with the smoke from my cigarettes;
• I can visit friends and don't have to interrupt the visit with a smoking break outside their house;
• I no longer feel uncomfortable when I must follow long meetings without smoking breaks;
• I no longer feel uncomfortable when I only have a few or no cigarettes left;
• I no longer have to be nervous for being a long time without the possibility for smoking (for example, when taking a transatlantic flight);
• I can climb the stairs for more than 1 floor without getting out of breath (as a matter of fact, doing sports is a whole lot easier and more fun now);
• I sleep better and need less sleep;
• ...

I've mentioned him a few times in the post, but does that mean that Scoble got me to quit? No, he didn't. I was feeling uncomfortable about all the reasons that I stated earlier. Maybe people like Scoble and several anti-smoking campaigns helped in amplifying that feeling, but I made the decision on my own. And I'm happy about it.

BTW: I bought "Nicorette Microtabs" (tablet that dissolves under the tongue), just in case the need for nicotine would become to high, but never had to use them. When I felt the need to smoke, the only thing I did was postpone smoking with 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, I would postpone it again. And again. And again... Even after 8 weeks, I still think about smoking from time to time. Yes, my brain even tries to convince me that I miss it. But I'll fight that "devil" inside my brain: I'm happy being a non-smoker now.

I encountered the following while working with Word (see the red circles):

It took me quite some time to find the solution to remove these crop marks or margin marks. Don't think that Word help will help you out. But it appears Microsoft does have a knowledge base article on that subject: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=839371. (Thanks to Word MVP Suzanne S. Barnhill and http://www.mcse.ms for the pointer)

Now the "best part" is that these crop marks (or margin marks) automatically appear when you install support for an Asian language. The only way to remove them, is by removing the support for all Asian languages... There will probably be a reason for it, but which one remeans unclear to me. You just have to know.

In the year 2000 I saw him in person for the first time. It was on a Visual Basic developer conference in Orlando, Florida. At that time, I already read several of his articles and 2 of his books, both in the "Hitchhiker's Guide" series. He was THE data access guru; he knew everything about ODBC API’s, DAO, RDO and ADO in combination with SQL Server. Wow, William “Bill” Vaughn certainly impressed me... Well, he's still active and he's still a renowned SQL Server data access expert. And guess what: he's coming to Belgium! Therefore I'm really excited that I can invite you on the Brussels SQL Server Day in Kinepolis (at the Heysel in Brussel). This free event is produced by SQL Server Magazine on October 26. Now, of course, you don’t have to take my word on William's SQL Server expertise. Just check out some of his articles and the books he wrote. To register for this free event or to learn more, visit the Brussels SQL Server Day web site.

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.

The Microsoft.com website has some nice user guides:

• Getting started in the community
• RSS
• Chats
• Newsgroups
• Starting a user group

And under the user guides, you'll also find Microsoft employee biographies. But no, they don't explain how to "use" the Microsoft employee....

Registration is now open for the following TechNet Evening sessions in September, which will both be held at the NH Hotel in Diegem (near Brussels):

September 15: SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 Update for DBA’s
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is Microsoft’s next-generation data management and analysis software that will deliver increased scalability, availability, and security to enterprise data and analytical applications while making them easier to create, deploy, and manage. The speaker will give an overview of the new features in Microsoft SQL Server 2005 for database administration, database availability, scalability, and security.

September 29: Deploying ISA Server 2004
Get an overview of Microsoft Internet Security and Accelerator (ISA) Server 2004, the advanced application layer firewall, VPN, and Web cache solution that enables you to easily maximize existing IT investments by improving network security and performance. This informative session is open to IT Professionals who are familiar with ISA and people who are new to the product.

More information and registration is available on http://www.microsoft.com/belux/technet/events/.

Want to get some developer insights about the recently released Windows XP Service Pack 2? If you rush you can still register for the upcoming Belgian MSDN Evening session on Windows XP Service Pack 2. After an overview of the developer implications of this service pack, you will get some tips and experiences from a developer that tested several applications of his customers on compliance with Windows XP SP2.

There are only a few seats left for this event, so if you plan to attend, do not hesitate to register now!

Update: the session will be redelivered next Wednesday on September 8th at "Living Tomorrow" (a.k.a. "The House Of The Future") in Vilvoorde. There are still seats available: http://www.microsoft.com/belux/msdn/events/#xpsp2redelivery.

Just a few hours ago, the finalists of the Imagine Cup 2004 were announced in Sao Paolo, Brazil. The two Belgian teams were both still in the last final round. In the "Software Design Invitational" the Belgian "New World" team ended on the 5th place and in the "Rendering Invitational" the Belgian "Nautilus" team ended on the 3rd place. Congratulations to all finalists for their accomplishment and a special shout out to 2 the Belgian teams.

Links:
H2Ocean project by the Nautilus team (Charles-Frederik Hollemeersch, Elisabeth Hollemeersch, Wesley De Neve)
New World project (Steve Lanuit, Laurent Mazzapicchi, Pierre Ioannatos)
Belgian Imagine Cup website

Update: Howard Lo has some more results...

Update 2: Microsoft's official press release

Update 3: Channel9 interviewed Microsoft's Imagine Cup team.

BrainBench, an online testing website, offers its exams for free till July 14th. Personally I would give more credit to the Microsoft certification, since these are taken in an exam center. But if you want to get some free BrainBench exam certifications, now might be the time to give it at try. They do have some tests about the .NET Framework...

PS. Currently I don't see anything about this on their homepage, but on this page you can see the following statement: "July 1 - July 14 we are opening up the Brainbench library in celebration of our 5 millionth member. All tests will be FREE.".

Approximatly one year and a half ago, there were about 3 Belgian .NET bloggers that I knew of. During this period, the list grew up to 21 Belgians and 1 Luxemburger. Not all of them are already listed on the MSDN Belux Bloggers page. If you are a .NET blogger from Belgium or Luxembourg, feel free to drop feedback (see the link at the bottom of the MSDN Belux website) with the URL of your blog and a short description and we will add your blog on that page. Meanwhile, everyone can find the updated Belgian bloggers list on my blog (the web interface).

Imagine Cup is an international contest for students, sponsored by Microsoft. This year there are four invitationals for the contest: software design, rendering, algorithms and short films.

I had the honor to be part of the jury that selected the entry in the "software design" invitational that would go to the worldwide finals in Sao Paolo, Brazil for Belgium. To be honest, we had a difficult task choosing between all the entries. Yes, we were pretty amazed by the quality of the entries of the 3 teams that participated in the Belgian finals for this invitational. The winning team is "New World" of the Haute Ecole Rennequin Sualem. They created a solution to help the treatment of young schizophrenia patients. For this, they collaborated with a psychiatric hospital. You can read a very short statement on their website. Hopefully they'll have a full website up and running soon.

But there is also another Belgian team participating in the worldwide Imagine Cup 2004 finals in Brazil. The Nautilus team will participate in the Rendering invitational. If I'm not mistaking, this team of Ghent University was selected by an online voting. For their entry, the students got their inspiration from the sea (and what is below). You can find their project with some really nice movies on the H2Ocean website.

Please join me in congratulating both teams and wishing them the best for the Imagine Cup 2004 Worldwide Finals on July 4th through 6th.

For the interested ones, a full list of official Press Releases is available at the Imagine Cup website.

Update: The white papers of both projects are available at the official Belgian Imagine Cup website at http://www.microsoft.be/imaginecup.

Microsoft has just published new security bulletins for June 2004, containing 2 moderate threats (DirectPlay and Crystal Reports Web Viewer). Did you know that you can subscribe to the security bulletin RSS feed at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/secrss.aspx?

Please join me in congratulating Jonathan de Halleux. He attended interviews for "Software Development Engineer in Test" (SDE/T) position at Microsoft in Redmond... The result is that Jonathan will move to Redmond in October.

He won't be the first Belgian in Redmond; Ronald Laeremans already works there for quite some years (and maybe there are even more Belgians there that I'm just not aware of). Still, it's a very nice achievement so please join me in congratulating Jonathan with his upcoming challenge!

BTW: There's a rumor that Jonathan will show up on the MSDN Evening session on Thursday June 3rd about "In-Depth SharePoint Development". And there are still some seats left, so you can still register for that event (which starts at 18:00).

Karim Hyatt's third installment of developing n-tier applications was just published on MSDN Belux. These are his current articles:

1. Introduction to n-tier application development
2. N-tier application development: implementing the business layer
3. N-tier application development: the data layer

But he's not done writing yet; Karim promises to write a fourth part on transactions in an n-tier application. Check them out...

I've read many posts about the IssueVision Smart Client and especially that it was not distributed on every DevDays (except the DevDays in the US). While preparing the Geek Speak section of this month's MSDN Belux Flash, I encountered a link on Frank Arrigo's blog where you can download an installer for the Visual Basic .NET version.

That same blog posts also contains presentations and sample code from the Security Summit held "Down Under" in Australia.

Update: The full and official IssueVision downloads can be found at windowsforms.net.

Just to help spreading the word: if you receive an e-mail claiming there is something wrong (like spam or abuse) going on with your mail account and the message contains a password protected ZIP file, it is very likely you received a the W32.Beagle.J@mm virus. Delete the mail instantly without opening.

More information on the Symantec Security Response website: http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.beagle.j@mm.html. On this page you will also find a removal tool.

Meanwhile, please visit the international "Protect your PC" website or the local Belux "Protect your PC" website (which is available in Dutch and French).

Note: This post represents my personal opinion. I'm not an employee or representative of Microsoft and this post certainly does not necessarily reflect the official opinion of Microsoft. For completeness: yes, as independent consultant I do some specific jobs for Microsoft in a contractual agreement.

Introduction

The commotion started a few weeks ago when SP-A and Spirit, two joint political parties of the majority in the Belgian government, published press releases in which they advocate “free” and “open” software and announce a petition they started against Microsoft. On its website, Spirit displayed a short movie (in the form on an animated GIF) of Bill Gates receiving a cake in his face while he visited Belgium in 1998 [1]. The movie was next to their press release, but has been removed. SP-A acted a little more mature and only published a regular news topic on their site.

Spirit press release of February 18

I want to discuss the press release of Spirit on February 18, 2004 [2]. I'll give an overview of some of their statements which I freely translated from their website.

1. Spirit wants to break through Microsoft's monopoly of standard software applications for computers and launches an online petition to promote the use of free software in education and the government.

Tom's opinion: It is true that Microsoft owns a very big share of the desktop market. I guess its share on the high-end enterprise server software is also increasing, since, for some time already, their products are capable of dealing with the tremendous requirements for this market. The high-end enterprise software was only for UNIX-alike servers for a very long time.

In the rest of my blog post, I will focus on why it's wrong for SP-A Spirit to bash Microsoft.

2. Spirit wants the government to be more discerning towards the software industry. They claim the government accounts for 10-15% of all software purchases in Belgium and must use its weight as customer to stimulate competition.

Tom's opinion: I would love to see that the government would always be very critical and discerning, not only towards the software industry! Competition is something that should be promoted; most of the time it's in favor of the customers. However they shouldn't push the competition too hard. If I see what's happening in the aviation industry where thousands of jobs get lost due to the harsh competition, I have real doubts. And competition must be created based on facts (most likely true facts), not just cheap opinion setting statements.

I would like to see the government save money. But I don't think their best solution would be to use other (free) software. One of the first things they should try is to improve their internal processes. Meanwhile the government should improve the processes of the governmental companies. Once this is done, they could start thinking about the tools (i.e. software) they use to accomplish the work in the processes.

3. Spirit doesn't want to use the limited budget for education on “unnecessary” Microsoft licenses. The Belgian education is a free training institute for Microsoft.

Tom's opinion: Not too long ago, secondary schools were only teaching DOS applications (like dBase and Turbo Pascal) or Windows 3.x applications (Lotus 1-2-3). Luckily schools have caught up and teach their students applications they might use in their business careers later on. This is, of course, the problem of the chicken and the egg: if schools teach students to work with Microsoft software, most of them will try to use that software in their careers. But I don't think students should be the victims of the politicians. Politicians should focus on getting businesses convinced to use software that isn't from Microsoft. If businesses require knowledge of non-Microsoft software, schools will follow. Public education is not really known for being trend-setters; they tend to follow trends. It's rather easy: if the demand (businesses) changes, the supplier (schools) will act.

Several students have reacted already on different forums, stating that schools do take Linux into account in their classes.

I strongly disagree that schools buy “unnecessary” Microsoft licenses. For heavens sake, do publishers of school books give their material for free? No! Microsoft, on the other hand, does special promotions and actions for schools and students: they can buy the Microsoft software at special heavily discounted prices.

Jan Van Duppen (SP-A) reacted against these cheap prices on December 19, 2002 [3]. His point is that Microsoft's dumping prices for schools and students are a distortion of the competition and an element of forming a monopoly. Hmmm... If free software would be that much cheaper than Microsoft's software, what's the problem? Oh yes, he doesn't mean free software as in “free lunch”. He means “free software” as in “software that can be used by everyone; for example, software that gives everyone an equal opportunity to surf the Internet”. Duh? Am I missing something here? He goes on telling strange arguments on “open standards” and “free software” (in which he indirectly supports Microsoft, since they started to embrace and actively participate in creating open standards). But since Jan Van Duppen's article is not referenced in the current actions of SP-A and Spirit, I don't intend to discuss all his points here.

4. Most free software works with open standards or open source code, so that other people can ameliorate and refine these products. Working this way, thousands of volunteers made sure that free software is most of the time even somewhat better than Microsoft products.

Tom's opinion: Now I must REALLY strongly disagree! One of the major examples of free software, Linux, is not an open standard or does not work with open standards. Linux is indeed open source. But when I'm talking about Linux, I'm actually talking about the kernel. Here's the deal: even when thousands of developers work on a product, there are quality issues. Look at the security bugs that were found in the kernel or supporting applications, or at the mi2g report that claims that more Linux internet servers suffer a successful attack. I'll stop here about Linux before degrading into the religious debate.

I have worked with OpenOffice (Windows version) for a while, just to get to know the product. I worked with different open source software and free software (for the difference, see this page by Free Software Foundation). And while some products are really great, I didn't find it easy to live without certain functionality that exists in Microsoft software. I must admit that I'm used to work with Microsoft's software for years. But I was willing to search for features that I couldn't find.

But what's more important: how will the open source community deal with the necessary innovation in the software world. Microsoft is investing 6,9 billion dollars in research and development this year. If Microsoft would stop existing (which is very unlikely), how fast would we see innovating changes? I can't answer it. Other companies are also investing in R&D, but in my humble opinion, Microsoft's investment is really necessary to keep the software innovation. True, Microsoft has “borrowed” ideas from other companies; but then again, other companies also rely on and look at Microsoft's innovations.

I would like to know which open source/free software is actually somewhat better than a Microsoft product. Java? Not open source, not an open standard. I would say that Sun's Java isn't free software either, but I couldn't find any statements about it (not in favor and not against). Please let me know if it is “free software”.

5. More free software would make our computers cheaper and tighten the digital gap.

Tom's opinion: What would tighten the digital gap? Cheaper Internet access, to name one. How would you get on the internet if you can't afford a telephone line or cable because of the high cost? But hey, what are you with internet access if you don't know how to switch on a PC? What the government could do, is to install more PC's for public use in libraries, for example.

Easy of use is very important for people who are not familiar with PC's. This is one of the main things Microsoft tries to do with its software. Remember Bill Gates' statement: “... a PC in every home…”. With all respect for the open source/free software, but it is not completely ready for this. Perhaps SP-A and Spirit could do a promotion for the Apple Mac, but with this system they're even more closed than Microsoft's operating system. Windows at least runs on any Intel-based computer. And you can buy an new Wintel computer at much lower prices than any Mac, can't you?

Spirit press release of February 29

Are you still reading? Spirit had a press release after they received a letter from Microsoft. Here are the key points:

1. Spirit received many reactions on their online petition for the use of free software in education and by the government. This gives them a strong belief that a social debate must be held about this topic. They claim that what oil was for the industrial revolution, software is for the creative economy.

2. Spirit is convinced:
a) that free software will create more jobs in Flanders (Flanders is the northern and Dutch-speaking part of Belgium).
b) that free software is not only better for schools, but also for the parents at home.
c) that free software is an ideal platform for creating educational software.
d) that free software will make computers cheaper and this will tighten the digital gap.
e) that monopolies aren't doing any good, also in the software industry.

3. Microsoft asked Spirit to stop their campaign; otherwise Microsoft will appropriately announce its position publicly. Spirit has made an appointment with Microsoft but is not stopping its campaign. Spirit challenges Microsoft for a public debate because it is not a technical but more importantly it's a social discussion.

Tom's opinion: For the first statement, this proves they also received negative feedback. They just state that received many reactions. I don't know the exact number, but it must be thousands of employees who rely directly on Microsoft software. I'm talking about ISV's, independents, system integrators, trainer firms, computer stores, developers... They are correct that software takes up a very important role in today's economy and social life! And this will certainly not decrease. Therefore innovation is of utmost importance. Innovation... Innovation requires great minds... And much money and work. Microsoft has shown great innovative work lately. And has done a tremendous job in different “open standards”, like the ECMA submission of (major parts of) the .NET Framework, XML Web services, etc.

The second statement: Spirit believes that free software will create more jobs in Flanders. Well, I don't. And since they don't give a clear explanation, I won't do so either. The easy way, not. I have already discussed my opinion on most other sub-points, so I'm not going to repeat them.

About the third statement; I'm really looking forward to it. On their online petition site you'll find some quite interesting links, revealing some persons that I guess are the lobbyists at Spirit. I'm sure Spirit will need to have really strong arguments if they don't want to look awfully stupid in this socially engaged discussion.

Belgian community

Jan Tielens was the first (that I know of) in the Belgian community to react against these statements. You can read his story and the comments on his blog at http://weblogs.asp.net/jan/archive/2004/02/17/74816.aspx.

Conclusion

SP-A and Spirit have a tendency to make politics something easy, something for the people. They try to gain the public's affection by promoting everything that's free: from free public transportation to free TV. I didn't discuss SP-A article on this topic, since it's even longer and filled with more idiocies. What do you think about the reference they make to the Linux migration in Münich, Germany? (Read more about it at on Wired, also has some number on the higher initial cost of the Linux migration)

While the intention of Spirit seems to be right to me, the message they are sending into the world is completely wrong! They looked at an easy victim: Microsoft; a profitable company, has a huge market share and everyone knows it.

Because they started bashing Microsoft in an unfair manner and using wrong, twisted or incomplete arguments, their message lost all credibility. Their current message is not to promote the usage of free software. It's more like they need to get some extra press attention right before the elections.

Now because they are giving their arguments against Microsoft, I want to share with you why I do use Microsoft software:

• Microsoft has an R&D budget of 6.9 billion dollars. And they do a lot with it.
• Just have a look at the latest Office release:
• How much time do you save with all the new features in Outlook 2003?
• Isn't InfoPath, while still not perfect, a great example of innovation for working with XML?
• Aren't the Office 2003 XML schemas an example of being open? (I know, not an open standard, as far as I know. But the schemas are available. And an “open standard”, namely XML, is used).
• Microsoft does a tremendous lot of work in the “open standards” world. Have a look at the .NET Framework. Sun didn't do this with Java, in fact they withdrew their submission. Check out what's happening with XML and XML Web services.
• While Spirit focuses on products, companies don't need separate products. They need solutions. Solutions that help them solve their problems in the most cost-effective way. Microsoft is currently one of the only software vendors that can deliver such a broad range of solutions, going from the desktop (or even smaller devices) up to the high-end large enterprise servers.
• Microsoft's tag line is “Your potential. Our passion”. I believe this and they prove it to me on a daily basis. Once they would change their attitude to “Your money, our passion” they will loose their market share quite quickly. Microsoft is a commercial company and must make revenue, just like any other commercial company.
• Windows 98 was released in 1997/1998 and is still running on many home PC's and even business PC's. Which open source/free software operating system would still be supported after 6 or 7 years? Would there be a "free software" vendor (sounds contradictory, doesn't it) that support their old version of the OS after so many years?
• Microsoft allows me, as an independent consultant, to deliver custom-build solutions easily on a highly integrated platform. Because of working on their platform, I can deliver solutions faster (and thus cheaper) than if I'd had to do the integration myself. This is how I make my living.

There is so much more to say against the ridiculous arguments of SP-A and Spirit. But since this post is already way too long, I'm stopping here for the time being.

I don't fear to defend my current solutions proposals to my customers, even though they are all based on the Microsoft platform. Yes, I'm a proud Microsoft customer!

This story will certainly be continued, since Spirit announced on their site that they will engage in an open discussion with Microsoft. Check back regularly.

BTW: SP-A's website is running on Windows 2000 Server using Microsoft's ASP technology. By checking the HTTP headers that the server sends I could also see that the .NET Framework is installed on the server. You know, Microsoft first uses its own software internally before it is sold to its customers. IMHO, SP-A has taken a good decision by running their site on the Microsoft platform but how trustworthy are they? They want to convince “the people” of something that they don't follow themselves... Act to what you preach!

BTW2: Another proof of the immaturity of Spirit: the webpage that contains their online petition is called “microsuck.htm” which can be seen at http://www.steunvrijesoftware.be/microsuck.htm.

BTW3: Clemens Vasters has some very interesting thoughts on "free software". Here and the follow-up.

[1] http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9811/07/gates.hate/

[2] Press release by Spirit on February 18, 2004 (Dutch)
http://www.meerspirit.be/article.php?persberichten/2004/2/18/0

[3] News topic by Jan Van Duppen on discounts on Microsoft software for students and schools (Dutch)
http://www.sp.be/nationaal/nieuws/overzicht/nieuws.asp?iID=846

Accidentally I just read on "Teletekst" that tonight Microsoft Belgium was elected for the second time as Belgium's "Best Workplace". They were Belgium's "Best Workplace" of 2003 and managed to keep their title this year. It seems Microsoft does not only innovate in and with its software, it is running their business in an agile way with respect for its employees. Congratulations to Microsoft Belgium's management and employees for having this honor for 2 consecutive years!

More information:

• Official press release Microsoft Belgium (Dutch) (added)
• Official press release Microsoft Belgium (French) (added)
• Belgium's Best Workplaces 2003
• I guess they will post Belgium's Best Workplaces 2004 here one day.
• Great Place To Work Institute Europe
• Great Place To Work Institute Belgium

Jeremy Mazner, a Longhorn Technical Specialist, misses easter eggs in Microsoft's current products. In his arguments Jeremy doesn't agree with one of customers who claimed that anyone who adds easter eggs couldn't be trusted to create software to run enterprise-scale businesses. He states that he always "enjoyed the creativity and humor behind these little gems".

I tend to agree more with what Michael Howard and David LeBlanc write in their book "Writing Secure Code, 2nd edition" (chapter 2, page 47): never include easter eggs in software. These are my concerns:

• Does the customer receive a real added value with the easter egg?
• What if the easter egg would contain an vulnerability that could be exploited by hackers? (Didn't happen yet, as far as I know.)
• Wouldn't it be better that the development team spent their valuable time on different things, like features or code reviews?

While Jeremy says that easter eggs were never near critical path code in the teams he worked on, I don't think this is a valid excuse to include one.

What do you think about easter eggs?

Jeff Davis of the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft announces the release of the long-awaited security fix for IE. Read his post or the Microsoft Knowledge Base article 834489 for more information. And... run Windows Update to update your installation (be aware that there are changes to the standard behavior of IE in some cases).

Yesterday Ezos demonstrated their hands-on lab on mobile development for the Developer & IT Pro Days 2004. And it looks nice, no, it looks awsome. Once again, I won't spoil the surprise by revealing what these mobile heros have prepared (lame, not? :)). So if you're attending this event, I advise you to have a look at this hands-on lab.

BTW, there will 2 hands-on labs on the event: one about mobile development and another about "Whidbey".

Update: we've spoiled the surprise on the event's website. If you want to know what the hands-on lab is about, check it out on http://www.dev-itprodays.be/program/handsonlabs.aspx.

We just published the website for the Microsoft Belgium "Developer & IT Pro Days 2004". This event which targets... developers and IT professionals will be held at the ICC in Ghent on February 10 and 11, 2004.

Delegates will be able to attend sessions by

• Steve Riley,
• Ingo Rammer,
• Gianpaolo Carraro,
• Ronny Bjones,
• Patrick Tisseghem,
• Jurgen Postelmans,
• Astrid Hackenberg,
• Clemens Vasters,
• David Chappell,
• Nigel Watling,
• Hans Verbeeck,
• John Craddock,
• and others....

On the second day (February 11) the delegates can choose between 4 different tracks: PDC Highlights, Active Directory Internals, IT Forum Highlights Tour and Upgrading Applications to .NET.

All of this and much more on http://www.dev-itprodays.be/. By the way, would you like to drive a Ferrari?

Short note: yesterday I broke two bones in my wrist, which means I'm partially disabled right now. Since I want keep up with some of my paid work (need income as a self-employed consultant), I will have to focus on this priority. Let's hope all goes well and I will be able to return to blogging soon...

I was quite astonished yesterday evening when I saw the news on the local commercial television station VTM. Here are some quotes they gave on Blaster and the SoBig virus (freely translated):

1. "Tomorrow evening (Sunday) you have to watch out for a new virus, the SoBig virus." 

2. "Internet experts say this is cyber-terrorism, with purpose of damaging the economy." and a bit later in the footage an expert from a Belgian company that distributes ICT security technology said: "We never saw such thing (the fastest spreading of the virus) happening before, so it is possible that the attack was intentional, a complot. This makes us think that this could be a cyber-terroristic attack".

3. "Experts could defeat the expected attack of yesterday (Friday), but there still is danger."

4. "If you think your PC is infected, don't go on the internet tomorrow evening."

5. "All these viruses raise questions. For example, is the internet safe enough to entrust it with your credit card number?".

This is wrong or at least incomplete information that was sent out to a lot of people in Belgium:

1. Trend Micro states that the virus will become active on Fridays or Sundays and that the virus will deactivate itself on September 10th. This means that Sunday August 24th is only the first attack. They don't even mention that the downloading wave of the virus will become active again next Friday and later on... VTM also neglected to mention the other misbehaviour from SoBig: the mass-mailing of itself, which you might have experience yourself from bounced mails. (I know I already had some annoying experiences with this).

2. What is the purpose of a virus anyway? I don't know how much damage and profit losses viruses already caused, but every virus costs at least some money. The impact is not always that big. But anyway, I always consider every virus an act of cyber-terrorism. In the "real" world, not only the tragic September 11th was a terroristic act. Small bomb attacks, for example, are considered as terrorism too. Isn't terrorism the disruption of a society/community? I think many viruses already tried (and some succeeded to some extend) to disrupt the online community....

3. Did the experts succeed to defeat the expected attack? Was no PC at all infected? Why should we still worry if expects already defeated it once? Won't they do it again?

4. This is my favorite one... Do not go on the internet if you think your PC is infected... Wow, great. Why would you even think your PC is infected? If we reverse this, one could think that his PC is not infected while it actually is and go on the internet. They even don't tell you how to see it is infected. But besides that, this is one of the most lame ways I ever heared to defeat a virus... BTW. What means "connecting to the internet" to "regular users"? Opening Internet Explorer? Reading e-mail? Or working on their PC? What about cable users who are automatically connected on the net?

5. Great for all these e-commerce websites. Luckily they immediately added that online buying is still safe for the time being. However, they are not warning about malafide online resellers or uncareful business owners that don't protect their systems enough... There are lots of things that should be considered before buying online.

That said, I agree that a short news bulletin cannot contain all details. Computer security topics are just too complex. HOWEVER (yes, a big one), I wonder why they didn't mention the useful information, like installing an antivirus software and keeping it up-to-date??? Isn't this the prime directive for internet-enabling a PC? They didn't even mention the free online virusscanners, not even a single website for more information on this virus... BIPT, the Belgian regulatory body for postal services and telecommunication, has a special page for all virus threats (in Dutch and French only). Why don't they mention that Microsoft put up a website about protecting Windows computers (http://www.microsoft.com/protect if you didn't know it yet) against virus attack from the outside? Microsoft Belux even has localized Dutch and French instructions on protecting your PC.(It's a pity though that the instructions still refer to the Blaster virus, since they apply to general PC protection, but still...)

I consider it our (people working in IT) responsability to inform "regular users" about the necessary protection their computer needs. Support from the different media is more than welcome. But they should inform the public correctly and at least give some basic information on protecting their PC's (instead of saying: "don't work on your PC because it could be infected by a virus")....

Now, let's hope someone of VTM news desk will read this and make VTM mention the protection instructions on their next news broadcast...

PS. If you want, you may read virii instead of viruses. I don't want to get into this discussion...

New security patches are available at http://www.microsoft.com/security/.

And just in case you didn't do it yet, inform your family, friends, colleagues, clients, ... on how to protect their PC against intrusion from the internet: http://www.microsoft.com/protect.

DoMyMove is a new service which makes your life a bit easier when it comes to moving, by notifying suppliers about your change of address: electricity, gas, water, teledistribution, phone, Internet, banks, insurances, newspapers, magazines, loyalty cards, ...

DoMyMove will avoid you long waits on the telephone, standing in line, or filling in forms several times. You also avoid forgetting important details. All you need to do is to fill in one single DoMyMove form, and your suppliers will automatically be updated on your new address. For only 12 € (8 € from 1/7 to 31/8/2003), DoMyMove will notify up to 100 different suppliers.

How can I get DoMyMove?

• In your nearest Belgian Post office: fill-in a form and return it to the Post office.
• By calling 070/ 22 44 14 in order to receive a form at your current address. Fill-in the form and return it to your nearest Post office.
• In one of the Belgacom teleshops. Fill-in the form and return it to your nearest Post office.
• On the website at www.domymove.be

 The text above was copied from the DoMyMove website.

Apparently Google started dancing again yesterday.

More info and links on http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/1/27/221829/873.

Kim Clijsters, one of the two Belgian  top tennis players, won the JPMorgan Chase Open tournament in Los Angeles and took over the first place in the ranking from Serena Williams. Like Sports Illustrated says on its tennis homepage: "Clij-mbing to the top".

Congratulations, Kim. Utmost respect...

[Search Google on Kim Clijsters to find more information]

Ian White has listed several funny links. I enjoyed most of them... Warning: you might loose losts of time with his links (and not all are appropriate to view during working hours).

As always, one wants to do something quickly when he doesn't have enough time, hoping that everything goes well... I just read that Clemens released his dasBlog engine. First, GotDotNet was not available to download the installer from there. Luckily, Clemens has another download site.

Best part of it, most of the stuff worked immediately. Except some minor issues:

• I had to configure a maximum memory usage on the Application Pool that is used by IIS6. It wasn't configured by default.
• I had to modify the site redirection for BlogX manually, because the regex doesn't work when your the virtual directory is not below the root. I made a quick fix by adding the "/blogs" in front of the RegEx.
• Cookies seemed required to log on (though I can only say this, because logon seemed not to be working without cookies allowed)

Still some things to do, like check out the new features (like post from Outlook), modify the blog roll, check out the source code, etc... But now I have to leave. I was lucky this time.

Nice work, Clemens! Thank you.

I finally downloaded a copy of all TechEd presentations, demo files and hands-on labs. Because the filenames are very consistent (only the session number) I list the files in Explorer with the "Title", "Subject", "Author" and "Copyright" document properties. It's rather annoying that the authors (or perhaps the editors) didn't enter their document properties correctly. Many files just display "Speaker Name" and "Speaker Title" or "Slide 1", not very informative about the content. But sometimes you even see that speakers used a presentation from another conference (let's say Microsoft Mobility Conference) or that a presentation that was written by someone else (at least, it appears to be).

In brief: always make sure to double check the document properties before making a document public. Not only is this useful (indexing of documents for searching with Index Server or Google, exploring a folder, ...), it also show a slight touch of professionalism. Or am I being too picky?

A customer recently upgraded his outdated iSeries OS to version 5.2. Since then, some queries seem to run far longer than before. This is why they consulted a performance expert of IBM.

After talking for about 30 minutes with this guy, I must admit that I'm still far too prejudiced about the RDBMS (DB2/400) of the iSeries. Appartenly lack of knowledge is one of the major things that cause us to say "this software is worthless", "how is possible that you cannot do this" or similar things . It seems the 'thing' can do more than I expected and works better than I could imagine. But of course, you need to know some basics of the system (which I lack). 

It's really a shame that I didn't think somewhat further. I'm one of those people who like VB. (And yes, I use best practices, I follow naming conventions, create classes (yep, facade, business and data access logic stuff)). But indeed, VB has a bad name. However, if you use the tool in a good way, you can do great things with it in a rather short time...

Only a few months ago I had several discussions with Delphi-adepts (who were trying to do some VB) about this. I countered every statement they made about things they thought that are impossible to do in VB. Never did I leave a change to say to them that you have to learn the platform/tool before trying to make it work. But today, I realized that I made that mistake myself with DB2/400... Yet another lesson learned...

PS. Apparently IBM has some tight release schedules too: they released version 5.2 of OS/400 without a new database engine. The new database engine was released as PTF (similar to a Microsoft Service Pack) later on...