As you might imagine, it are quite hectic times for the Belgian Developer & IT Pro Days team. With only approx. one week to go, we're at 91% of the capacity. This means that there will be a lot of people again at the event. Although the biggest part of the attendees comes from Belgium, there are also people coming from France, The Netherlands, Ireland and Romania to see and hear our excellent speakers.

We've been working on the opening keynote for quite some time already, but apparently nobody of the team noticed that we didn't mention our keynote speaker on the website. Apologies for that. The opening keynote speaker is Wilfried Grommen, General Manager for the Business Strategy at Microsoft EMEA. The team that's working on Wilfried's keynote consists mainly of techies, so expect something interesting. Let me also reveal that Wilfried will be assisted by the honorable Hans Verbeeck and Dave Webster.

A few days ago, David unfortunately had to decide to replace the initially planned session on MSF v4.0. Reason for this is Rafal's travel schedule. No worries, IMHO he found a good alternative in Roy Osherhove's introduction to agile methodologies and concepts. All the other sessions that were planned for Rafal remain the same.

Yesterday, Ritchie and I had a meeting with Rob Creemers to talk about his closing keynote on the event. This one is a very nice one too. There is something about Rob and I like the way that he explains things. For those that don't know Rob Creemers, you should definitely stay for this closing keynote. As technology watcher, Rob will explain the impact of technology on the way we live. And a lot more...

Also yesterday, Gerd De Bruycker - the former manager behind MSDN Belux and now in charge of organizing TechEd Europe - started his own blog. I had the pleasure of working for/with Gerd during 2 years. He is a real great guy to work for and I learned a lot from him. Guess what, a few years ago he was a developer himself! While he was the MSDN Belux audience manager, Gerd talked a lot about starting his own blog but never really got to it. Really good to see that it finally happened... Now let's hope he makes it a habit to post.

Apparently there are quite some people that never saw Nikhil Kotari's Virtual Places sample application.

This is a quote from the website:

The idea behind Virtual Places is to highlight Virtual Earth in a mashup-style (aka Web 2.0 aka Programmable Web) application, wherein other Web services brought into the application in the form of gadgets (ala live.com). The application is implemented using ASP.NET Atlas, and features a complete mapping framework built using Virtual Earth and Atlas that features a programmable map control, overlays and pushpins.

This web application uses different services, such as the Amazon E-Commerce Web services, Amazon Alexa service, Weather.com, Flickr, GeoBloggers, MSN Search Web Services, FeedMap and GeoURL. As stated above, it was built using ASP.NET "Atlas".

Speaking of this package, a new version was released a few weeks ago. If you want to try out "Atlas" for yourself, you should be using Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Web Developer Express (this last one is available as download from Microsoft).

Peter Himschoot is organizing a geek dinner in Ghent on 7 March. So after your portion of deep technical geek presentations at Developer & IT Pro Days, you can enjoy a nice dinner with other technology adepts...

A few of my colleagues were lucky and went on a short ski last week. Michael Kögeler, our marketing director, put up some pictures on his blog:

• I'm not sure I would eat this...
• Bruno Segers, our general manager, also works during a short holiday ...
• ... but not the entire time.
• Microsoft employees like each other and some are not afraid to show it.

Looks to me that I missed some nice activities and relaxing moments in Garmisch Partenkirchen. But Developer & IT Pro Days is coming very close and I really couldn't afford to take a holiday break.

Brad Abrams reports that his book "Framework Design Guidelines" is the 19th best selling book in the category "Computing & Internet" at Proxis... So is Belgium really becoming a center for framework design excellence (or are we it already :) )?

Thanks Rudi for sending me the link to Brad's post...

I guess the word is finally out on Rédo joining the Regional Director community as representative for Belgium and Luxembourg. Together with his Flemish speaking peer in RD community, Peter Himschoot, he'll be working on several (community) initiatives. Both are independent from Microsoft and are working at their own company (Peter at U2U and Rédo at Wygwam). I look forward to see the first results of their work.

Oh, we have plans to announce some of this work at Developer & IT Pro Days...

Soma had quite some nice announcements the past few days. First of all, Team Foundation Server - the collaboration server of Visual Studio Team System - will be available in March.

As good developer, you already knew about the availability of the .NET Enterprise Library v2.0, didn't you? :)

It's also nice to have a look at the future, isn't it? So check out the new CTP's of the Expression tools, such as the Expression Interactive Designer (previously know as code name "Sparkle"). Or maybe you like Visual Basic 2005 (version 8.0), so why won't you check out the new Visual Basic 9.0 CTP?

Geez, when I read about all this new stuff

Warning: Marketing Content is following after this sentence! If you want to know more about Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server, book your ticket for the Developer & IT Pro Days now... There will be plenty of sessions on these subjects. And you'll be able to fire your questions at experts that have real life experience with these products.

Federal Developer blog reports that for a limited time we're offering MCAD's and MCSD's 3 beta exams for free.

Attendees of the Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 Event in Belgium also got a voucher to take one exam for free. Passing one exam is all that it takes to become a Microsoft Certified Professional. My advise is not to waste this opportunity. In my days a self-employed developer I benefited a few times of my MCSD status: both financially as well as with the work I got to do...

A few days ago we released a brand new, pure Java (type 4) JDBC 3.0 driver for SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005. This JDBC driver also works with the free, easy-to-use, lightweight version of SQL Server 2005: SQL Server 2005 Express Edition.

But I'm not going to go into too much detail as I'm not a subject matter expert on this.

Was just checking out the availability in Belgium of "Naked Conversations", the book on "how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers" of Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. Two Belgian online bookstores announce that it will be available on Monday January 30: here for Proxis, and here for Azur.

I didn't read the book yet, so I can't tell you (yet) if I liked it. But don't hesitate to check out the opinion of several other bloggers on this book.

You might recall that a few weeks ago Scoble and his wife Maryam visited Belgium. You might have noticed this in the Belgian press: StuBru interviewed him and broadcasted the interview in prime time, and Vers L'Avenir and Data News wrote articles about his visit. Yesterday I received a copy of the February edition of Bizz Magazine that contains a 3 page interview of with Scoble. The interview is an excellent summary of what Scoble talked about with the journalists.

Well, at least mine didn't talk much about his Japanese experience with the Microsoft Belgium management team... But luckily it got captured and blogged. (Should someone start experimenting with DopplerMobile??) <grin />

Talking about our management team in Belgium, did you know that 4 out of the 12 management team members are women: Sylvie Irzi, Christine Leonard, Hilde Budts and Hilde Sibbick. So 25% of the management team at Microsoft Belgium & Luxembourg are women. That's not bad at all, is it?

One more statistic... Yes, there is even one MT member that blogs on a regular basis: Michael Kögeler, the business & marketing organisation manager.

On popular demand, we've opened the Developer & IT Pro Days Kennel. In the kennel you'll find graphics that you can use in e-mail signatures and on your website or blog. Wim - the MSDN Belux content master - will keep on adding more content every now and then.

PS. I know that I'm acting quite lame by copying this, but this was too funny to forget about it. You can get some idea's to convince your boss of letting you attend the Developer & IT Pro Days from this PDC05 whitepaper. Not everything in there applies to the Developer & IT Pro Days, but you'll definitely will get some good ideas.

Did you know you can already register for a new Beta Experience with Windows Vista and Office "12"? It's free and will deliver you quite some benefits such as "valuable resources, specialist knowledge and bonus material".

You'll also receive a 6-weekly newsletter. For Belgians, this newsletter will also contain quite a lot of information on local activities and communities. If you want to have us include your content (articles, code samples, ...) in the Belgian Beta Experience newsletter, don't hesitate to send the MSDN Belux team an e-mail at msdnbewm@microsoft.com. I promise you that I or someone from the MSDN Belux team will get back to you quite quickly.

Today we've announced that we moved TechEd Europe 2006 from July to November. Also the location was changed from Amsterdam to Barcelona. Why did we reschedule? For those that might think that it was because I didn't want to celebrate my 30th birthday on a geek conference, well, they are wrong.  :)  Actually, July was not longer the most optimal time frame for the event:

• Many developers indicated that they want to enjoy their well-deserved summer holidays and have a difficult time coming to a geek conference in July
• People from the product teams in the US wanted to spend their official national holiday - the 4th of July - at home
• The worldwide Microsoft Partner Conference is also held in the same timeframe

On top of the date change, the event is now fully split up between developers in the first week (7 - 10 November 2006) and IT professionals in the second week (14 - 17 November).

The TechEd Europe team created a nice Frequently Asked Questions section on the website that contains all the official statements about the change.

In short: yes, there will be a TechEd Europe in 2006 but it will be held in November in Barcelona, Spain.

I'm very happy that we've been able to get Rob Creemers, a trend watcher, delivering the closing keynote on day 1 of Developer & IT Pro Days in Belgium. Rob's presentations are very entertaining while also containing interesting observations about technology today and tomorrow. Yes, one might call it "infotainment".

Apparently I'm not the only one who likes his presentations. Many colleagues have already seen a keynote delivered by Rob. When I told them about the closing keynote, they were all very positive about it. On several past events in Belgium (for Microsoft and other companies), Rob always got very high ratings.

Be sure not to miss this closing keynote. Rob will help you to end a day full of in-depth, technical presentations in a relaxed way.

Wim Van Winghe is the business group manager for Windows Client (i.e. Windows XP and Windows Vista) at Microsoft Belgium. He will be spending a week at Microsoft Campus in Redmond visiting the Windows Vista product team. This is not very exceptional, wouldn't it be that Wim is blogging (in Dutch) about it for a full week.

I've been very quiet on the blogging front lately. For a big part this has to do with the preparation for the Developer & IT Pro Days 2006. After a lot of work, we've finally been able to open the registrations for this event. Have a look at the site (http://www.dev-itprodays.be); the agenda is almost completely finalized.

To give you a little insight, here are the people that are part of the event core team:

• Ritchie Houtmeyers and I are the project owners.
• David Boschmans and Arlindo Alves are responsible for the content and speakers
• Wim Verhaeghen is working on the website
• Lut Goedhuys is dealing with all marketing and communication activities

PS. The first 400 people that register will receive an MSPress book...

There are already quite some user groups in Belgium focussing on development on the Microsoft platform:

• Belgian Information Worker User Group
• .NET User Group Brugge
• Visual Basic Group

I already blogged about the user group for French speaking developers that Rédo and his friends want to start.

Two other guys, Steven Wilssens and Peter Himschoot, are starting the Belgian Visual Studio User Group. Their first meeting is scheduled for next Wednesday (25 January).

Rédo wants to start a new user group for developers in Belgium that work on the Microsoft platform. Therefore he put up a survey to know what potential members would be interested in. This will help him and the other user group leaders to compose a nice and compelling agenda for the next year.

For the French speaking people: Donc, si vous parlez le Français et vous souhaitez que votre avis soit pris en compte, complétez le questionnaire.

While they were in Belgium last Thursday, Studio Brussels (Belgium national radio's youth channel), interviewed Robert and Maryam. The people of StuBru have been so nice to put the interview online at http://outpost.vrt.be/privemp3/blog_20051211_154702.htm.