Microsoft's Ken Levy (VS Data Product Manager) and Yair Allen Griver (Group Manager for the Visual Studio Data group) were both invited by VFPSIG.NL to present the new Visual FoxPro 9. This event is free of charge and will take place on June 28 (starting at 18:30) in Haarlem, The Netherlands. Registration can be done on the site of the event's sponsor: http://www.wantit.nl/default.asp?docid=33 [link to a Dutch page].

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).

Great! In a previous post, I referred to a post by Wesner Moise about the Nullable Types in the C# 2.0 spec. Steve Lasker, PM Visual Basic Data, blogs that these will also be available in Visual Basic .NET. The syntax is different from C#'s, but that is the case for many functions. The VB syntax is, as usual, more readable and longer. Luckily Intellisense comes to the rescue if you use Visual Studio 2005.

C#: public DateTime? DateShipped {get/set}
VB: Public Property DateShipped as Nullable(Of DateTime)

Cool!

Announced at Tech·Ed San Diego: Visual Studio 2005 Team System. This is going to be an awsome product, in my (humble) opinion. But you don't have to trust me, just check out the demos that are available for download.

More information is also available at the Ask Burton blog and Michael Platt posted some extra resources (like the downloadable demo videos).

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...

We added a new article from one of our local authors to MSDN Belux website. This one is pretty cool too and is a follow-up to the "building a drum machine with DirectX":

Sound Synthesis Revisited: Porting the Drum Machine to the .NET Compact Framework
By Ianier Munoz
This article shows how to port the drum machine described in the previous article "Building a Drum Machine with DirectSound" to the .NET Compact Framework so that it can be run on the Pocket PC.

We've just published the Microsoft Belux Security Summit website. A must-attend event for developers, IT professionals and technology decision makers, held on May 4th at Kinepolis, Brussels. More info at http://www.microsoft.be/securitysummit. See you all there (and maybe we can have a drink afterwards?)...

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.

There is also another Microsoft Belgium blogger (the second one I know of): Rudi Larno. Rudi is a technology specialist for application development and has his desk next to mine. You can find his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/rudi_larno. Apparently the blogging virus is finally spreading at Microsoft Belgium too.

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

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

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

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