There has been quite some activity in the blogosphere for a few weeks on the Origami Project, now also known as the Ultra Mobile PC (see here for more links).

Yesterday, while driving, suddenly I heard a discussion on the radio about the Ultra Mobile PC. Those nice folks of Q-Music even posted the audio fragment in their online audio gallery (look for fragment of March 13, 2006). Here is also the direct link to the audio fragment (in Dutch).

David Grudl says that he doesn't like GUId's in the URL of a blog (link in Czech) and sent quite some traffic to me to show the (bad) example. I admit, a GUID doesn't really express the content of the page. On the other hand, I almost never enter links by hand in my browser or decide to visit a page based only on the URL.

But point taken, David. If I have some time left I'll check if I can change from GUID permalinks to more meaningful links without breaking too many links...

Update: It seems to be just a matter of checking some checkboxes in the DasBlog configuration. So, friendly URL's from now on at this blog.

A few days ago, we announced the next MSDN Belux Event on Visual Basic 2005. It will all happen on April 3rd (first day of the Easter Holidays) at Kinepolis Brussels. What's not yet mentioned on the website is that the sessions will be delivered by the Visual Basic product team. In fact, they are so excited to come to Europe that Jay Roxe and a few of his team members recorded a short video about it.

Some weeks later we're organising (together with Microsoft EMEA and Microsoft HQ) hands-on labs on Visual Basic 2005 and hands-on labs on ASP.NET 2.0.

But before all that, both our Regional Directors will host a webcast on website skinning with ASP.NET 2.0 and cascading style sheets. Peter Himschoot will present the webcast in Dutch, while Grégory "Rédo" Renard takes care of the French spoken webcast. A few months ago, I already blogged about the power of CSS for skinning websites and I still find it very cool...

Thursday evening I had a chat with Kris Hoet, marketing manager at MSN Belgium. Normally our conversation would have been very short as the person he was looking for was not at the office. I can't recall how we started the conversation, but we talked for more than one hour on Windows Live.com.

First of all, I'm very fond of the brand new "infinite scroll" of Windows Live Search. No more clicking to go to the next page of the search results. You just keep scrolling. Really neat. And so far the upgraded search engine seems to return precisely the results I'm looking for. Nathan Weinberg explains a lot of the features of Windows Live Search at the Inside Microsoft blog news channel:

• First look at Windows Live Search
• Windows Live Search Macro's
• Windows Live Image Search

After my chat with Kris, I also replaced the currently installed MSN Toolbar and Desktop Search with the new Windows Live Toolbar (Beta). Now I have also access to Onfolio and Live Favorites. These Live Favorites allow me to synch my favorites across all PC's I work on. One of the other neat features is that you can basically use any search engine from within the toolbar's search box.

It seems many people also added quite a lot of bots to their Messenger account. Up till now, I didn't. But after talking a bit about it, several potential ideas for using a Messenger bot popped-up. I'm pretty sure that we'll see more and more of these bots in the near future. Kris sent me a link to a website that contains a lot of Dutch and English Messenger bots: http://www.mensmerk.nl/chatbots.html. Go and try them yourself.

You need a special SDK (software development kit) to develop such bots. For a limited time, Conversagent offers a free license of such an SDK. A few days ago, Dutch Cowboys blog (in Dutch) reports that Oberon Medialab from The Netherlands is Microsoft's first European Messenger ISV (independent software vendor) that offers a Messenger (ro)bot platform. As said before, this is only the beginning...

Bots aren't the only software you can create for MSN Messenger. You can also develop your own "activities" that can be used during chats. A lot of examples are available on the MSN Messenger World's Best App contest website. What about the Live Translator: you chat in one language and your correspondent sees the text in his own language? I remember seeing this as part of an Imagine Cup 2005 finalist application, but now it is available in the real world.

More information on developing for MSN Messenger is available on the MSDN MSN Messenger Developer Center. That's also the site where you'll find the Messenger Activity SDK.

You can personalize the Windows Live website with several gadgets. Not only just the set that Microsoft thinks to be useful, you can also develop your own gadgets. For more gadgets and information on developing them, check out the Microsoft Gadgets website. It seems there are also Belgians that submitted their gadgets already...

After the opening keynote of Developer & IT Pro Days some people asked me what the difference is between the live.com and start.com websites. You can find the answer on Sanaz Ahari's blog.

Do I think Windows Live is important for developers? Well, it's important for a lot of companies and thus it will become important for a lot of developers. On top of this, I think it's fun to build these bots, activities and gadgets for Windows Live, so don't hesitate to experiment with this stuff now... And feel free to let me know if you built something...

You can check out the latest Windows Live products at http://ideas.live.com/.

Here are a few more posts on Developer & IT Pro Days that were not included in my previous blog post:

• David Boschmans, the developer content owner and co-creator of the opening keynote,  wraps up.
• Erwin "Mobile Viking" van Hunen writes about his experience on a Microsoft event with his IBM and Domino background.
• Tim De Keukelaere blogs about his first day and his second day on the event. It was nice talking to you again during the event, Tim!
• Nix, the famous French developer community leader, was also in Belgium and he liked it over here! Text is in French, he also has some nice pictures...

Update: Here are some of photo's that were taken by our event photographer, An Nelissen. And guess what, she is blogging...

I'm starting to recover from the tremendously exhausting preparation of the Belgian Developer & IT Pro Days. The event in a nutshell:

• +1.200 participants
• 10 gold sponsors, 10 silver sponsors, 2 media sponsors on site
• 53 sessions delivered by MSFTies and local and international experts
• 7 different Belgian user groups (of which 4 are new):
  • Visual Studio User Group (VISUG)
  • Fx User Group for French speaking developers
  • Belgian XP / Agile User Group
  • Belgian Information Worker User Group (BIWUG)
  • ACCB.net - .NET User Group for the Bruges area
  • Pro-Exchange
  • Belgian SQL Server User Group (SQLUG)
• A few thousand liters of drinks (available all day during the conference)
• Approx 10.000 sandwiches and salades
• A surf corner to charge your notebook and connect to the net

Here are a few attendee blog posts that I discovered:

• Yves Hanoulle was the host for the Belgian XP / Agile User Group.
• Frédéric De Vries gives his opinion (in Dutch) on Developer & IT Pro Days and FOSDEM. He also has pictures of both events.
• Luc Van Braekel summarizes Rob Creemers' closing keynote of the first day.
• Wesley Baekelant says he wasn't too thrilled about the sessions? He claims most technologies are 'too old' to talk about them in such a way. My reaction: not all developers are dealing with bleeding edge products and technologies. With Developer & IT Pro Days we have to find the right balance between bleeding edge and current technologies. Not an easy job...
• Didier Danse, a Belgian MVP, gives his quote (in French) for several parts of the event and ends up with an 8/10 for the entire event. Thanks for that!
• Miel "Coolz0r" Van Opstal blogged his experiences on the first day and on the second day of the conference. He also added pictures. And cross posted the articles on the Inside Microsoft blog news channel.
• Pieter Gheysens says the event was a great success.
• Steven Van de Craen got to see some interesting stuff on 2007 Office System.

Apparently Jan Van Ryswyk had other priorities than attending a developer event. Congratulations with your newborn, Jan!

Please let me know if you also blogged about the event and I didn't include you in this list.

Some of the speakers also blogged about their experiences:

• Hans Verbeeck blogs about the preparation of the Developer & IT Pro Days keynote and has some pictures of it. My personal opinion: this was one of the best opening keynotes we ever did in Belgium towards our technical community.
• Bart De Smet, MVP and WPF speaker.
• Roy Osherhove gets nice comments from attendees of his sessions.
• Steven Wilssens thinks that I influenced the introduction for his first session. I'm innocent...

My personal conclusion on the event: since so many of you came to congratulate us on the event, I'm very happy. Beside a few hick-ups of the internet connections in the surf corner (a technician of the internet access provider misconfigured one of the 6 routers), everything went well. The online evaluation results are coming in; 23% of all attendees have already replied as we speak. Oh, just one little extra note on the feedback, we read every line of feedback that is entered.

At last, this event wouldn't have been a success without the professional assistance of our event agency D.D.M.C. A special thanks goes out to Els, Alex, Ineke, Olivier and Johan for your excellent work (once again).

With over 1.200 registrations the Developer & IT Pro Days are now officially sold out... We've exceed our target with 20% and for the first time in Developer & IT Pro Days history we have to close the registration early. See y'all in Ghent...

The Belgian Extreme Programming (XP) / Agile User Group announced their next meeting on Visual Studio Team System and MSF For Agile. The meeting will be held on March 16 at the offices of Info Support in Mechelen. Abstract from the user group's website:

Many development teams have adopted "agile" methodologies to manage change and to improve software quality. These methodologies promote continuous integration as a practice to build and test software products incrementally as new features are included, bugs are fixed, and code is refactored. So how does Visual Studio® 2005 Team System and Team Foundation Server facilitate the process of agile development and continuous integration?

This presentation gives an overview using agile concepts such as test-driven development (TDD), creating a team project using Team Foundation Server and use this technology's extensibility features to build a custom Web service that enables continuous integration to build the application as code is checked into source control.

In case you didn't know this yet, the colleagues of Microsoft Dynamics in Belgium are launching their CRM v3.0 on March 9 also in Ghent (right after the Developer & IT Pro Days). This event won't be very interesting for hardcore developers, as it is oriented towards a business audience (ie. a lot of talking, very few lines of code). But nevertheless, judge for yourself at the CRM Day web page.

Available from the Microsoft.com Download Center: Microsoft Anti-Cross Site Scripting Library v1.0. At MSDN Blogs, Dan Sellers explains this library a bit more. If you use HttpUtility.HtmlEncode somewhere in your ASP.NET application, make sure to check out this new library...

David and a couple of people from the community have been working very hard to work on the fundaments for 2 new developer user groups. These user groups will be present at Developer & IT Pro Days, so be sure to visit the community area where you can meet the people behind the user group. First the new user groups that will participate:

• Visual Studio User Group Belgium (VISUG) - http://www.visug.be
• Fx User Group
  This is a development user group by and for French speaking developers in Belgium.
• SQL Server User Group - http://www.bemssug.org/
  Since this user group is supported by Culminis, the organisation that supports IT Pro user groups, I guess they will focus on database administration stuff...
• ProExchange
  Now guess what their topic of interest is...

On top of these new UGs, the following existing user groups will also be present on the event:

• Belgian Information Worker User Group (BIWUG) - http://www.biwug.be
• Belgian XP / Agile User Group (xp.be) - http://www.xp.be
• ACCB.net - .NET User Group Brugge - http://accbnet.ccat.be/

The "patterns & practices" team released new guides on best practices for developing with the .NET Framework 2.0 and with ASP.NET:

• ASP.NET 2.0 Security Guidelines
• ASP.NET 2.0 Security Checklist
• ASP.NET 2.0 Security Practices at a Glance
• How To: Perform a Security Code Review for Managed Code and the Security Question List: ASP.NET 2.0
• patterns & practices ASP.NET 2.0 Security Guidance Index
• patterns & practices Web Application Security Engineering Index

Find more of them at the "patterns & practices" development center on MSDN.

For security fans (which includes every developer, right), there is also The Code Room episode on security: Breaking into Vegas. From the site: "The Code Room is a 1/2 hour internet TV show that exposes technologists to the latest tools and technologies for tackling real-world software development issues."

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...