Lately I decided to try out some beta versions of our software:

• Windows Live Toolbar beta, including Windows Desktop Search
  Like it; you also get a chance to install Onfolio, Windows Live Favorites and some other nice things. The Web Search feature can be configured to use almost any search engine. Works smoothly under IE6 and IE7 beta. After the upgrade, the Live toolbar detects changes and disables some of his functionalities that are not necessary any more (tabbed browsing to name one).
• Windows Defender beta 2
  Like it; this replaced the beta of Microsoft Antispyware. I find this software to be less intrusive (less pop-ups and sounds), and asking me for the right confirmations.
• Internet Explorer 7.0 beta 2
  Like it; although sometimes I have to search for features that I knew where to find before. Of course, I could just enable the "Classic Menu" toolbar. But I don't feel that is an option. Just to save you some time, I experienced that if you're running Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Web Developer Express, your CSS Style Builder does not work any more (it pops up and immediately disappears again). There is post on the ASP.NET Forums that explains a workaround. According to the Microsoft Product Feedback Center, this problem exists because of the hardended security features in IE7.
• Expression Graphic Designer March CTP
  I'm not that much of a graphics designer, so this application is somewhat too complex for me (just as Adobe Photoshop or even JASC Paint Shop Pro). Guess I'll have to start with the Tours And Demos and probably afterwards ask some of our more experienced designers to give me a short introduction. This is not a software that you can start using without some knowledge about the software.
• Windows Live Messenger beta
  Didn't had time to try out the new features, such as Shared Folders, yet.

No need to warn you that you shouldn't install pre-release software on your production machine... ;)

"Voices of Innovation" got launched today and is a new global community, supported by Microsoft. If you want to participate in the debate about policies on technology and innovation, you might be interested to join this community.

From the website at http://www.voicesforinnovation.org/:

Voices for Innovation is an open and transparent network of individuals and companies who support a balanced, pro-innovation policy environment. Voices for Innovation is about growth and jobs, consumer benefits, small business productivity, technology choice and entrepreneurship.

(...)

Voices for Innovation aims to give a voice to an extensive network of solution and product developers, resellers, OEMs, web developers, software advocates, businesses and consumers who look to enhance innovation, as well as increase their overall productivity.

The "Voices of Innovation" website

The website is also available in the following languages:

• Dutch
• French
• English
• German
• Spanish

Periodically B.V.L.G. posts his BelBlogs listing (in Dutch). His latest BelBlogs listing is based on the "Blog Influence Number". There are quite some bloggers that write about Microsoft products and technologies in the list:

• 2nd place for Nix (although he comes to Belgium regularly, he's still French and still lives in France and therefore shouldn't be in the ranking of Belgian blogs... ;) ).
• 4th place for Doppler Radio, a project by Erwin "Mobile Viking" Van Hunen and Smetty.
• 10th place for Luc Van Braekel (who wrote a series of posts on MIX06 recently).
• 15th place for Jan Tielens.
• 16th place for Jelle Druyts.
• 20th place for Gregory "Rédo" Renard, one of the two Microsoft Regional Directors for Belgium and Luxembourg.
• 22nd place for me.
• 37th place for Patrick Tisseghem.
• 50th place for Joris Poelmans.

Not that I care a lot about this ranking, I do have to admit that I like to read such lists. It does seem a little strange that some popular Belgian blogs seem to be missing from this one. On top, this ranking does not really represent the value that I would assign to the different Belgian bloggers. The previous one - that was using only Technorati numbers - was better, IMHO.

After some articles were published containing incorrect information, Scoble says that we need to be vigilant against bad journalism. He's right. I'm surprised to see that there are still "journalists" that write articles containing statements that can easily be countered by simply looking up information on the web.

Readers expect to get trustworthy and qualitative news from a journalist (especially if he's paid for the job), and not just his "personal wish fulfillment fantasies" as someone described it in the comments on Scoble's post. Sadly it is not only the journalist's credibility that is on the stake, but also the one from his readers. When a reader is not familiar with the topic and just believes what is written, he can end up making a fool of himself or even worse: he might make decisions based on incorrect information. Indeed, one shouldn't believe just one source. Problem is that many news sources (such as blogs, but also newspapers and news websites) tend to take over stories without checking them. If nobody checks the story, incorrect information may spread easily and very fast.

Luckily, till now, such bad journalism is more an exception than a rule. And journalists or bloggers who write incorrect/incomplete stories regularly are quickly identified as non-credible and should be ignored.

VISUG, Belgium's Visual Studio User Group, is having a meeting next Thursday (March 30 at 18:00) in Leuven Zaventem, as reported by Steven Wilssens, the user group's president. Topics of the meeting:

• discussion on presentation topics for upcoming meetings,
• discussion on membership conditions,
• discussion on Developer & IT Pro Days,
• presentation of advanced generic in Visual Studio 2005.

Did you know that VISUG together with MSDN Belgium offer a limited number of free memberships to the user group? Register for the Belgian MSDN Connection program and claim your free membership now. There are only a few free memberships left.

I'll do my best to drop by, but there is also the Dutch spoken MSDN Belux webcast on ASP.NET 2.0 running at that time...

Update: Steven had to change the location to the Compuware offices in Zaventem, because of the high number of attendees.

From time to time I'm discovering some nice (not so obvious) features of the Live.com beta website. It's easy to add syndication feeds to the Live.com website. You can click on the headline, and you're transferred to the full post on the website. However, if you hover over or click on "[more]", you get a preview of the content in a popup window.

Reading the MSDN Belux RSS feed on Live.com

Using that same technique you can also listen to your favorite podcasts, straight from within Live.com. Just click [more] and a small Windows Media Player appears so that you can start, pauze or stop the podcast. You don't have to keep that popup box open; the podcast keeps playing as long as you stay on Live.com.

Playing podcasts directly from Live.com 

This also seems to work in Firefox, although there was a difference. Instead of Windows Media Player, QuickTime was loaded as media player when I clicked on the [more] link using Firefox.

I'm using Live.com for somewhat more than 2 weeks, and I'm still impressed. Especially Windows Live Search and the "infinite scroll" are a real treat. On top I see so many opportunities for building gadgets. If only there was some more time in a day...

A few weeks ago, I blogged that the renewed Beta Experience was open for registration. If you also like the  "pleasure of testing" software, you should definitely register for this new Beta Experience. You'll receive a newsletter once every 6 weeks during the beta period, and once available, you'll be able to download the public beta's/CTP's of the software. This allows you to get hands-on experience with the new Windows Vista and 2007 Office System.

Find the sites:

• Beta Experience (Belgium - Dutch)
• Beta Experience (Belgium - French)
• Beta Experience (general)

Gérard Leblanc, respected professor in Belgium, recently sent me a copy of his updated French book on C# and .NET for version 2 of the .NET Framework. It's nice to see that one of the successful books on .NET was written by a Belgian..

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."