Dan Fernandez blogs that Visual Studio Express is completely free, not just till November 2006, but permanently. He also has some nice other Visual Studio Express related announcements over at his blog.

The new Beta Experience program is about "the pleasure of testing" Windows Vista and 2007 Office System. That's why we needed a new set of Windows Mobile themes to replace the theme of the previous Beta Experience (that was about Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005). I've already had a few people asking for it.

Installation of the new theme is easy:

• Download your copy of the theme that you want to use.
• Unzip the file and copy the unzipped file onto your Smartphone or Pocket PC (version 2003 or 2003 Second Edition only).
• Use the device's Explorer to navigate to the file and "click" the file.
• You'll probably get a warning for the installation; after acknowledging the message, your theme will be installed.

Click the image to download the version you want:

Windows Mobile Smartphone

Pocket PC

Note: unfortunately these themes do not work on Windows Mobile 2005 devices at this moment...

Quite some people at Microsoft Belgium & Luxembourg, including me, have been hoping for people in our management team to start blogging. The first one with a blog was Michael Kögeler, our marketing director. Michael has been blogging for quite some time already. I was very happy to see that on April 1st, Bruno Segers, our general manager, also took up blogging. If you want to know what's going on in the life of a general manager of a subsidiary of an American multinational software company, this is your chance...

I'll have to check if he already has a copy of Scoble & Israel's book Naked Conversations; if not, I'm going to give him one.

PS. Bruno did consider to blog in English or dual Dutch/French, but in the end decided to write in Dutch.

Last Monday, we had 2 guys from the Microsoft Visual Basic product team in Belgium for the MSDN Event: "Visual Basic On Tour". During 5 presentations Todd Apley and Paul Yuknewicz gave an overview of the new features in Visual Basic 2005. OK, one presentation was also given by Alexander Holy, developer evangelist at Microsoft EMEA.

In my previous life, I've did quite some Visual Basic development and I'm still proud of that. I'm also still convinced that Visual Basic is the perfect language for doing rapid application development. Combine the easy-of-use of Visual Basic with the advanced capabilities of the .NET Framework and you've got a application development tool on steriods. But before starting a religious language war, let me just say once more that - given my VB background - I was very happy to welcome the guys that actually worked on Visual Basic in Belgium.

Here are some links that may be of interest to Visual Basic developers:

• Jacob Cynamon lists the webcasts in the Visual Basic 2005 Today! series that he'll be doing...
• Tobin Titus writes about 202 Visual Basic samples (for version 2003 and 2005)
• Brad McCabe says the free eBook "Introducing Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 for Developers" was recently updated.
• And there is a lot more on the Visual Basic Developer Center at MSDN.com.

www.flickr.com

Every quarter, Microsoft recognizes people for their participation in the technical communities by honoring them a Microsoft MVP award. There were 2 new MVP's nominated this quarter for Belgium. One of them has already updated her information and is now visibile on the MSDN Belux MVP page.

Congratulations to Mieke Verburgh (a.k.a. Miekemoes) for being awarded as Security MVP. Besides being active on several security related forums, Mieke is also running her own website and forums (in Dutch) where she fights malware: http://www.bluemedicine.be/ and http://www.bluemedicine.be/forum.

I also know the second Belgian MVP, but he didn't announce his MVP award yet. Therefore I can't reveal the second Belgian MVP for now.

The second new Belgian MVP also revealed his nomination: Steven Wilssens got nominated as MVP for Visual Developer - Team System. He is now one of the 18 Team System MVP's worldwide (at least that the number of MVP's that made their profile publicly available.)

From the marketing trenches about the MVP program:

The Microsoft MVP Program is a worldwide award and recognition program that strives to identify amazing individuals in technical communities around the globe who share a passion for technology and the spirit of community. Microsoft MVPs are recognized for both their demonstrated practical expertise and willingness to share their experience with peers in Microsoft technical communities.

Very very late notice, but the .NET User Group Brugge has a meeting tomorrow on ADO.NET, focussing on the differences between Visual Studio .NET 2003 and Visual Studio 2005. The meetings are held in Dudzele (near Bruges).

Unfortunately I won't be able to join them...

Some time ago we launched a website and campaign to increase the security awareness amongst the Belgian computer users. No dull/boring webpage, but a fun movie should generate your interest and the interest of your friends. Yes, you can also customize the movie and send it out to your friends, family, colleagues... Great for April fools day, not? Find it at http://www.misterjefferson.com/ (link contains information in Dutch and French).

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...