And discussing PDC with people from the Belux community at http://groups.msn.com/PDC2003ForumForBelux/

Microsoft Watch reports that Whidbey (successor to VS.NET 2003) is officially in alpha stage and released to a limited number of testers. They also report, what we all hope for, that a beta of Whidbey might be distributed on the PDC2003.

Jeff Key has listed a couple of tips for Windows. Some I already knew, others were interesting.

Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM) has been released. Documentation is available on MSDN. Looks promissing.

This night I dived into DasBlog source code and did some more testing. Apparantly a few (minor) bugs are still in this release. I fixed every bug I encountered and documented it on the DasBlog Bug Report page. I found it amazing how easy I could find the location of these bugs, without any design documentation whatsoever.

I also had a look at the template engine, since this intrigued me. Quite impressive to come up with a solution like this, and then sharing it with the community.

Come on, .NET developers blogging on Radio (Patrick and Patrick?), find yourself a .NET Framework 1.1 enabled server and switch to DasBlog. It even has a conversion tool for you. :)

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?

Yesterday the Belux (Belgian & Luxemburger) attendees had their first party at the beach... It was a big success, and we even held an after-party in a small Spanish "discotheca". No pictures though. (forgot to take my camera)