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!

It seems we are teasing both our developers and IT professionals...

• Visual Studio 2005 - Beta Experience (live on April 11th 25th, now only information) 
• Gatekeeper Test (live on April 4th, now teaser video's available)

I know that "exciting" and "marvelous" and similar words tend to be perceived as "marketing talk". So to avoid these words, the least I can say is that it certainly looks promising.

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...

Want to share an opinion with your co-workers? Are you tired of the standard screen savers? Do you want something else to decorate your screen while you are not working on your Tablet PC?

The "Ink Screen Saver for Tablet PC" from the Microsoft PowerToys for Tablet PC is something you must have. The "Handwriting Analysis Tool for Tablet PC" is also a cool tool that can help you to get the attention of even non-technical (geeky) people. And there are a whole lot more PowerToys for Tablet PC.

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.

At the same time that I installed Voice Command, I also tried out Pocket Streets 2005. Now not only does the phone understand me when I talk to it, it can also show me where I am and display a map of the neighbourhood...

Microsoft Pocket Streets 2005

Pocket Streets 2005 displays maps on your Pocket PC and Smartphone. You can zoom in, zoom out, see points-of-interests, etc. If you throw in a Bluetooth GPS receiver, Pocket Streets 2005 will indicate where you are on the map. I cannot tell if this works well, since I didn't try it. It's important to note however that Pocket Streets does not give road directions and is not a navigation software.

Maps can be exported from MapPoint and some other software.

Here are is one of the utilities I installed a few days ago on my Smartphone. Not only is it extremely cool (and geeky), it can be handy from time to time too...

Microsoft Voice Command

With this product I can talk to my phone -- without needing to train it first! Some of the questions/commands you can ask are rather dull: "what time is it?", "what is my signal strength", "what is my battery level", etc. But some others are quite nice:

• What calls have I missed?
• What's my next meeting?
• What's my schedule tomorrow?
• Call <name> on mobile
• Call <another name> on work
• Dial +3227043000

Ok, what makes the "Call" command really good is that you don't have to create a voice recognition tag for everyone. The Voice Command software actually recognizes the name and looks it up in the Contacts list. To be honest, there is one problem though... I don't know how pronounce some Dutch names in American English. so it doesn't always work that well for all names, especially non-English names. To give an estimate, I would say it works for approx. 80% of the names, but that's only because of my lousy English.

There are many other instructions too, for example to launch applications, to play media files, and much more. Be sure also to check out the demo's on the Voice Command website.

With a price around $40, it isn't for free but it isn't expensive either. And I can tell you: it feels good to be on the bleeding edge of consumer technology...