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.

There's another amazing sample application online at MSDN: FotoVision.

The FotoVision sample allows you to easily share photos on the web and demonstrates a variety of .NET technologies including Windows Forms, ASP.NET, Web services, and the .NET Compact Framework. It consists of a desktop, web, and Pocket PC sample applications. This paper provides information so you can get the most from the FotoVision desktop application.

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!