Many people have already asked me on several Microsoft Belgium events what the .mspx extention on the MSDN Belux and TechNet Belux (and other Microsoft.com)websites exactly are and how they work. Michele Leroux Bustamante, one of the US Regional Directors, answers this question.

From Paul Vick's blog: Visual Basic Power Pack released! 7 cool custom UI controls, written in Visual Basic .NET 2003 and delivered with full source. Sweet...

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?

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...