Console.WriteLine("Hello World");

The Microsoft Switzerland DPE Team yesterday ran an all-day hands-on lab on the subject of Silverlight 2 Beta 1 in Zürich. This blog post's purpose in life is to share the lab with you in case you want to try it for yourself to quickly get started with Silverlight 2.

Goal of the lab was to build a full featured Silverlight application from scratch that acts as a rich, interactive data-driven car-finder application, based on the Comparis Silverlight Challenge sample solution. This challenge runs until June 22, 2008 and will award the best Silverlight solution that implement new and creative ways to use a RIA to visualize automobile advertisements.

The lab can be perfectly run without taking part in the challenge, but gives a great start to everyone looking to get up to speed quickly and to build a solution and participate in the competition.

The finished Silverlight CarFinder application built in the hands-on lab.

The lab itself consist of a 50 page document, explaining everything from installing the Silverlight SDK on your computer to building the entire application, step by step and a sample solution containing the necessary sample-data and web services.

The lab teaches the use of Expression Blend 2.5 from ground up to create Silverlight 2 XAML user interfaces, build custom controls and create skins and templates for the controls. Visual Studio 2008 is then used to create the C#-based application-logic, consume the WCF based web services and data-bind them to the Silverlight user interface.

The English version of the complete lab as well as the slides and the demo code that we presented before the lab can now be downloaded from the Swiss MSDN Site or via the following, direct links:

• Silverlight Hands-On Lab & Manual
  
• Silverlight TechTalk Part 1: Intro & building a data-driven application - Demo Code
• Silverlight TechTalk Part 1: Intro & building a data-driven application - Slide Deck
• Silverlight TechTalk Part 2: Control templating, isolated storage & Deep Zoom - Demo Code
• Silverlight TechTalk Part 2: Control templating, isolated storage & Deep Zoom - Slide Deck

Enjoy!

Hehe, arriving at TechEd Developers EMEA in Barcelona, I walked by the delegates laptop work area and I see WoW everywhere. Everybody is doing their daily quests. Then, in the keynote, a demo is shown of a project that takes Visual Studio 2008 Shell and creates an integrated IDE experience for LUA/Add-on writers for World of Warcraft. Amazing.

Some other, interesting topics announced include the availability of Visual Studio 2008 already in November this year and today’s availability of Popfly Explorer Alpha for Visual Studio./p>

And I didn’t bring my WoW client with me! *sigh*

Update to the previous post: If you want to try the Outlook 2007 UI clone in your browser (Internet Explorer) and have the .NET Framework 3.0 installed, just click here for the XBAP version.

Build a working Outlook 2007 UI clone in WPF!

Our team - namely Ronnie Saurenmann and our intern, Ruihua Jin - have built an end-to-end hands-on lab for Expression Blend and WPF, that takes you through building a working UI clone of Microsoft Outlook 2007, done 100% in WPF/XAML using Microsoft Expression Blend.

I get a lot of questions from people that want to make their software look like the latest generation Office suite which can be quite a pain using regular Winforms-controls. So this hands-on lab is a great start to learning how to building business applications in WPF.

The lab was successfully run with a public audience two weeks ago and we have now published the lab manual and full source code for you to download and try out.

Download links:

• Hands-on lab manual
• Source code

If you are interested in anything related to developing and designing web applications and live anywhere near Zurich, make sure you don't miss the Swiss edition of Remix 2007!

Remix is the two day conference that rounds up the best of "Mix 2007" content with great speakers including Scott Guthrie, Wayne Smith, Dave Webster and many more.

The event is free of charge and there are still a few seats available!

World Trade Center, Zurich, Switzerland

Web developers and designers will get tons of information at the just announced Mix07 conference in Las Vegas from April 30 to May 2, 2007.This webside tells more: http://www.visitmix.com/

A visitor reports that the TechTalk slides posted by me yesterday show up in the heuristic scan engine of Symantec Antivirus 9.0 Corporate Edition (with signature files from October 11) as infected with the "Bloodhound.Exploit.84". My eTrust antivirus software can't verify this and I already have reports that today's virus signatures do not report these files as infected anymore.

Trojan horse (Wikipedia)

Symantec's description: Bloodhound.Exploit.84 is a heuristic detection for Microsoft Office Malformed Record Memory Corruption Vulnerability (as described in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS06-62). An attacker who exploits this vulnerability could perform a denial of service attack against a vulnerable version of PowerPoint, or potentially execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the logged-on user. The exploit is triggered by viewing a specially-crafted PPT file.

For safety reasons I have however pulled all the slides from CodeZone and replaced them with Zip-Archives containing only PDF versions of my decks.

Thanks for all the reports! I will keep investigating...

I just managed to upload the slides that were presented at the TechTalk on Microsoft ASP.NET Ajax, Windows Live / Vista Sidebar Gadgets, and Cardspace yesterday. The download is here:

• AJAX Applikationen in ASP.NET 2.0
  http://www.00001001.ch/download/techtalk/2006-10_AJAX/aspnet_ajax.zip
• From "Username and Password" to Windows CardSpace
  http://www.00001001.ch/download/techtalk/2006-10_AJAX/cardspace.zip
• Windows Live- und Vista "Gadgets"
  http://www.00001001.ch/download/techtalk/2006-10_AJAX/gadgets_intro.zip
• Windows Live- und Vista „Gadgets“ an einem praktischen Beispiel - Futurecom
  http://www.00001001.ch/download/techtalk/2006-10_AJAX/gadgets_sample_futurecom.zip
• Roadmap der Entwicklungsplattform von Microsoft
  http://www.00001001.ch/download/techtalk/2006-10_AJAX/technology_roadmap.zip

The next TechTalk on Windows SharePoint 2007 Technologies is coming up on November 14, 2006, here in Zurich and will be announced here soon...

October will bring the first unConference to Zurich - the "Barcamp" held on October 28 at the ETH in Zurich. I am looking forward as I have heard good things about this form of conferencing / networking.

I am planning to attend and speak at this historical event. What an unConference is, you ask? Watch this video...

In November we will be hosting another Microsoft IT-Forum conference. The date is November 15 though 17, 2005 and the place will be Barcelona.

I am organizing one of the ten technical tracks, namely "Connected Systems Infrastructure". I have 9 sessions to fill in which the latest and upcoming versions of BizTalk Server, Host Integration Server, Internet Information Server and the announced Windows Communication Framework (codename “Indigo”) will be discussed alongside with some architectural topics.

Today was "75% content complete" milestone and I thought I would share my list of sessions and speakers that I am working on incorporating so far. This list is incomplete - a working draft - so expect to see differences to the final sessions that will be held at IT-Forum.

If you have any comments or feedback, please feel free to post them to the comments of this post or mail me at "saschac at microsoft dot com".

        Friday, June 24, 2005 11:41 PM      1652224 ASPNET_HOL_Introduction.ppt

The FSHO (Fachhochschule Solothurn Nordwestschweiz) will be hosting a conference on the topic of "Testing Distributed Software Systems" on May 12, 2005.

I will have a speech on the testing elements in the upcoming Visual Studio 2005 Team System from the perspective of the developer writing tests, the tester managing and running them and the team/project lead reviewing test reports and assigning work-items to developers and testers.

If testing in the context of distributed systems is of interest to you, you may still sign up for the one-day event. The detailed agenda can be found here.

Two good articles on the testing-side of VSTS can be found up on MSDN:

• Visual Studio 2005 Team System: Enabling Better Software Through Better Testing and
• A Unit Testing Walkthrough with Visual Studio Team Test

Here are the slides for my two speeches at TechDays, "A5 DSI Visual Studio 2005 Team System Tools: mdelling, testing and profiling (English)" and "I14 Microsoft Technologien für den Sicheren Einsatz von mobilen Geräten in der Unternehmung (German)":

  Thursday, March 17, 2005  5:29 PM   8228864 techdays2005_saschac_architects_teamsystem.ppt
  Thursday, March 17, 2005  5:26 PM  14500352 techdays2005_saschac_itpro_mobility.ppt

I hope you liked the sessions :)

I just got feedback from attendees, that the free MCP exams, offered here at TechDays 2005 were all booked really quick and people have to sign a waitlist.

This is hot: Ben has created an aggregation page for bloggers at TechDays 2005.

For my two speeches at TechDays 2005 I have planned to show many demos and only few slides. Especially "Team System" will be demo-packed. Today however, trying to test my demos once more, I ran into tons of trouble. Let's hope this will run well tomorrow - It will certainly be interesting - not just for the audience :)

Yesterday I promised to publish my slides I used for the x.days speech "Innovation: Mobile Devices, Hardware and Software Roadmap" here on my blog. You can find the deck at the following URL:

• http://www.corti.com/downloads/Microsoft/Events/2005-03_xdays/xdays_saschac_mobile_innovation.ppt

Thanks for attending :)

As you may know, I have invited Kimberly R. Tripp to speak at the TechDays conference coming up next week here in Switzerland.

We have now cooperated with the dotMUGS user group to host an evening together with Kimberly, where she will present the topic "SQL Server 2000 Performance Best Practices and Getting Ready for SQL Server 2005" and which should leave room for some very interesting discussions.

Make sure to sign up for the user group while you're at it - both the event and the membership are free!

Especially funny: "double-pain" and "armageddon-mode". Don't ask!

The PainStation

The Results

As announced in my presentation at LOTS today, I am putting my slides and demos online:

    Friday, February 18, 2005  4:00 PM      6336512 lots_win_sfu_35_saschac.ppt (slides)
    Friday, February 18, 2005  4:06 PM      2304539 tideproject_files.zip (demos)

Other interesting OSS frameworks for .NET include:

• NUnit - for unit testing,

• NDoc - a documentation framework that generates documentation from source code which looks like Visual Studio documentation / MSDN-online-content and is well integrated in SharpDevelop,

• NAnt - for building projects and

  • Draco.net - automatic continuous integration based on NAnt for automated build processes. (Martin Fowler writes interesting articles on "continuous integration").

• CruiseControl.net - continuous integration

• #ZipLib - part of SharpDevelop, but can be used separately

• NHibernate - O/R mapping framework (currently in beta)

• Gentle - another O/R mapping framework

• iBATIS.net - data-mapper and data-access tool, part of the Apache incubator framework

• iTextSharp - PDF generator based on the Java iText

• Report.net - another, simple PDF generator

Did you know that we will be offering free MCP exams for participants of our TechDays 2005 in Interlaken? The registration will open shortly at the following URL: http://www.microsoft.com/switzerland/de/techdays/mcp.aspx

Yves has given me the heads up in my comments by asking if TechDays 2005 were replacing DevDays as an event altogether and if we had planned an event in Geneva as well for the French-speaking part of Switzerland.

I am happy to being able to disclose the following information:

Although we haven't got an exact date yet, we will be holding Tech Days 2005 in Geneva this year. Expect the date to be somewhere in the middle of April 2005 (I am guessing week 16 or 17). Tech Days is replacing last year's Dev Days with additional tracks for IT-Professionals. In Geneva, we will be adding the IT-Pro track to the existing developer track as well.

If you don't speak German but would still like to go to Interlaken, we tried to put the schedule so that there is at least one English speech for any timeslot.

I've been creating some slide templates and web-banners for the event today:

I love doing this stuff from time to time - and regard it as office-Zen :)

I fabricated two blog buttons for TechDays 2005. Are these still "hip"? Or do they rather provoke a "Dude, that's so 2004!"? Anyway - feel free to use them at your liking :) and, if you do, please consider linking them to our conference site: http://www.techdays.ch

The official Tech Days 2005 conference site is live now - including the detailed agenda. I like our segmentation in 4 half-days, each starting with a joint keynote, followed by two sessions consisting of one architect- two developer- and two it-pro-tracks. We encourage the attendees to freely switch between the tracks based on their preferences. We also try to balance the English and German sessions for attendees that prefer one of the languages.

Here is the first version of our agenda - for the most up-to-date version, visit the conference site.

Hope to see you there! :)

I wanted to read up on what's new at Macworld Expo only to find the site down atm - and an amazing picture on Spiegel.de:

Wait, is this what I think it could be? Googling for the "iHome Media Centre" tells me that the name exists. More pics are on Gizmodo.

My next, upcoming public speech will be at LOTS 2005 (Let's Open the Source). LOTS is a three day event taking place at the University of Berne on February 17, 18 and 19. I will be speaking about "Windows Services for Unix" and tending a booth during the event.

/ch/open is hosting an "Open Business Lunch" in Berne on the topic of "Cooperation between open source organizations and Swiss government". Interesting - I will be there.

Date: Tuesday January 18th, 2005
Time: 11:45 - 13:30
Location: Fédéral Entrecôte Café, Bärenplatz 31, Bern/BE (vor dem Bundeshaus), Tel.: 031 311 16 24
Info and registration: http://www.ch-open.ch/events/lunchbe.html

In this series, there are monthly open business lunches taking place in Berne and Zurich which I didn't know before. Luckily, /ch/open has a mailing list for information on their events and I can highly recommend becoming a member in their user group.

Tech Days 2005 will be among the hottest events for IT-pros, developers and software architects from Microsoft Switzerland this year. The 2 day conference will take place on March 16 and 17, 2005 in the Mystery Park in Interlaken.

I am responsible for the two IT-pro tracks with a total of 4 keynotes and 16 speeches. Today, I was able to confirm Kimberly L. Tripp as a speaker for a keynote and a few breakout sessions. Kimberly has topped the ranks of the speeches held at IT Forum 2004 in Copenhagen and her knowledge of SQL server, wits and charm is unmatched.

I am now trying to get Jesper M Johansson, Security Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation as a speaker for security-related topics at our conference.

Of course we will also be featuring lots of great, local speakers - as soon as we finish the agendas for all tracks, I'll post them here.

Metablogging via InfoWorld: We just announced a 2nd Longhorn-focused developer-conference to take place in September 2005 in Los Angeles!

Two weeks to go until IT Forum 2004. This year, I managed to be an international speaker for the first time! I will be hosting two chalk & talk sessions together with Jason Langridge:

• CHT032 The Business Value of Mobility in the Enterprise (2004-11-19, 10:15-11:30) and
• CHT033 Enterprise Security and Management for Mobility (2004-11-18, 16:30-17:45)

Furthermore, I will be accompanying the Swiss IT professional delegation to the event. Very exciting times!

Ken Levy, brilliant speaker, product manager and master of Visual FoxPro who is now working on the Visual Studio 2005 project will be visiting Switzerland on June 25 to speak about both technologies. This event will be a great opportunity to meet him and get the latest news on these upcoming technologies right from the source.

I am just finalizing the agenda for the day and am thrilled to have him visit again.

Exact details and registration will be published on the Swiss MSDN events page and on CodeZone soon.

Today is our "Security Summit" with two separate tracks for IT-pros and developers in Zurich. If you missed the event, you can still have a look at the slides on CodeZone (slides from the event in Lausanne are here, slides for the event in Zurich and Bern are here).

The TechEdBloggers.net site has gone live today. I for myself hope that there will be an equivalent site for the European TechEd that runs from June 29 to July 2, 2004 in Amsterdam which I will attend - even though I have never been a very good conference-blogger.

Interesting bit (found here): TechEd Europe will contain some additional info on mobile Development from the MDC:

New this year! Additional Mobility Content
Microsoft Mobile DevCon (MDC) Europe will join forces with Tech·Ed Europe to create a unified conference offering delegates a strong line-up of MDC content – covering the latest platform advances for mobile technologies.  The ‘Mobile PC & Devices' track will provide the latest information on how to develop and implement solutions for the fastest growth IT sectors: laptops, Pocket PC, Tablet PC, Smartphone, and notebooks.

The first x.days conference by Microsoft, HP and Orange is over and I liked the event. The prominent international speakers presenting the various topics were interesting but my favorite part was all the networking that took place in between. I met a lot of business-partners and customers that I haven't seen for awhile and enjoyed speaking to all of them again. For future x.days I would love to see even more customers participating and a dedicated developer track...

I talked to Arvindra Sehmi today, one of the creators of "The Microsoft EMEA Architects Journal". He hosted a brilliant software architects forum today at the x.days in Interlaken together with Clemens and a third speaker who took over for Carl Bate (sorry, his name escaped me).

Obviously, issue number 2 of the above mentioned Journal is in the making, so you may watch this space for its release. One of the topics will be Pat Helland's evolved "Autonomous Computing" theory he calls "Metropolis".

I also learned that MSDN will be adopting the Journal in the future, so we might even be able to read it outside the Acrobat Reader (absolutely nothing against the Reader here, but I never got comfortable reading large documents using this tool).

Metablogging: Tim writes about his optimal target ratio of 70% code and 30% slides in presentations. For a long time I too replaced slides with code until one day Urs and I tried to do presentations with almost no slides at all. Result: mediocre marks. Why? I think that by building a presentation by mostly sticking to code, it gets very tough for people to follow once you loose them. (for either reason - the may be inattentive for a moment or the program being written simply is too alien for them)

My personal optimum now is to divide the topic into many small logic units, each containing one or two explanatory slides (few text and many logical diagrams) and then to do a short and simple demo that anyone can follow (the audience may always contain non-developers) and that proves how the explained sub-topic works, preferably built from scratch or even building on the previous demo.

If a complex demo was to be included in the speech, I would put it in the very end so that subject-savvies may see something new and that people new to the matter don't get shocked if I lost them (after all, it's the end of the presentation).

Roughly 200 developers gathered in the Ramada Park Hotel in Geneva for DevDays 2004 on January 28 and for the PDC highlights tour on January 29. This two-day conference gave the audience a good view on today's software development paradigms based on topics around the released Visual Studio .NET 2003 technology discussed on day one as well as a bold outlook into the future on day two, where topics around the pillars of Longhorn were discussed, namely the Longhorn vision, Avalon, Indigo, WinFS and an overview of the next generation of Visual Studio .NET codename "Whidbey". The conference featured Swiss and French regional directors as well as international speakers such as David Chappell or Clemens Vasters. The CodZone community party offered some excellent networking opportunities.

Links to more information and slide materials:
DevDays 2004 Switzerland Geneva: http://www.00001001.ch/FutureEvent/527.aspx
Microsoft Longhorn Developer Preview: http://www.00001001.ch/FutureEvent/700.aspx

I did a rerun of my "Microsoft InfoPath for Developers" speech, that I had prepared for DevDays 2003 in Zurich. The feedback was good and I was happy to see that people are starting to use InfoPath forms for XML data manipulation/gathering.

I also received some interesting questions on the localization of InfoPath forms. The forms themselves can be "localized" by simply creating multiple views on the same data that each represent a different language. But what about the localization of custom scripts that are attached to DOM events?

Another plus was the WIFI network that I deployed (again). This time I only had to set up my firewall/nat/dhcp-server and two WLAN access points. The Ramada Park hotel must be built of styrofoam as the signal went right trough the lower floor, accross multiple doors and even to neighboring floors - nearly lossless. Network usage was high as people are slowly starting to bring their computers to events, download slides during presentations and take notes online. That's how I like it :)

January 28 & 29 2004, we will be hosting DevDays 2004 in Geneva, consisting of one day of up-to-date information on the .NET platform and one day of PDC highlights tour, where renown speakers such as David Chappell or Clemens Vasters will speak about upcoming technologies like Longhorn, Avalon, Indigo, WinFS and Visual Studio .NET "Whidbey".

I will be speaking on day one about Microsoft InfoPath from a Developer's point of view, a speech that was perceived very well by the audience last December at DevDays in Zurich.

We went out to the SkyPro studios to record a set of new web-casts today. Topics include "Service oriented architectures" by Urs, "ASP to ASP.NET migration" by Olaf and an update on "Smart client applications on mobile devices" by myself - again with Andreas as the host of the show.

These web-casts will be broadcast on CodeZone (web-cast section) in the next couple of weeks, where you can currently find an archive of our earlier shows.

the camera team	Olaf
myself getting some makeup	Urs and Andreas

It's great to see that bloggers are picking up on the subject of DevDays! Fabian, Daniel, Ben and Urs have already written about it. Will I ever learn to blog "live"?

Update:

Craig, one of the speakers, adds more comments of our DevDays. Thanks for the compliment, Craig!

Dev starts his own blog and his first post is on DevDays as well. Cool!

Craig rocks. I have no clue about 3D software development, but his way of presenting the topic is HOT. I ended up installing the DirectX 9 SDK right during his speech and I will look for a good book on managed DirectX this weekend. So, do I want to write a game? In my next life maybe ;)

And - bummer - Craig's birthday was last week and I only learned about it reading his blog after saying "good bye" to him and returning from DevDays. Happy birthday, Craig!

Craig on managed DirectX in front of a packed room.

In a talk I had with Rafal Lukawiecky today, I may have convinced him to start a weblog! ;)

He told me he had given it a thought to start one, but wanted to know if I would recommend him to do so. Yes please!

People who know him - probably one of the most brilliant speakers in Europe and a great eVisioneer(tm) - will appreciate this piece of information.

His speeches at DevDays were brilliant once more - and the slides will soon be downloadable with all the others from CodeZone.

I work with Powerpoint far too much, but it took me until today to find out about this ultimate Powerpoint hint, told to me by the famous Rafal Lukawiecky:

• If you know the numbers of your most important slides (like for example the summary-slide, you can immediately jump to this slide by simply typing this number and hitting Enter during the running presentation.

This will save me in the future if I should run into a terrible "out-of-presentation-time" situation again like I did yesterday in my "Introduction to Whidbey" presentation.

Yes! I have finished my preparations for the presentations at DevDays next week. I have cooked up 9 demos for Visual Studio .NET Whidbey and an agenda as follows:

• Microsoft Developer Tools Roadmap
• Language Enhancements
  • Visual Basic .NET
  • Visual C#
  • C++
  • Visual J#
• .NET Framework Enhancements
  • Windows Client Application Development
  • Device Based Development
  • Innovations in Data Access
  • SQL Server „Yukon“ Integration
  • Advanced Web services
• Dynamic Systems Initiative
• The Road to Longhorn

I will dedicate this weekend to again reduce my slide-deck to a bare minimum - leaving as much time for the demos as possible. I want these 75 minutes to be absolutely valuable to all the attendees.

At the moment, there is hardly any time left for blogging as I am currently preparing my "Introduction to Visual Studio .NET Whidbey" speech for DevDays 2003 in Zurich. I want to put all the good info I heard about the topic at PDC into one, 75 minute presentation - including a ton of demos of the hottest new features. Mission: Impossible.

I decided to abandon many details for an "as complete as possible" view of the upcoming enhancements to Visual Studio .NET - especially as the session is planned to be introductory, level 100 / 200. Furthermore, I have skipped all the details on ASP.NET 2.0, as this topic will have its own session at DevDays - which it well deserves!

Still there are +/- 70 slides in my deck and I am battling with myself, trying to reduce them to only the absolute relevant ones.

If you want to know what's new in Whidbey today (and you can't wait for my speech :), I recommend reading the following superb article on msdn:

Roadmap to the Future: Visual Studio Enterprise Roadmap

Little teaser: Visual Studio .NET "Whidbey" & "Orcas" roadmap

It's amazing. Today, all of the 500 seats that we have available for the Swiss DevDays 2003 were sold out and we had to switch the registration to a waiting-list.

There has been some confusion around this topic and I already got asked about this offer twice today. So, here is the (hopefully accurate) information:

• MSDN Universal, Enterprise, Professional, and Operating System Subscribers can request a copy of the Longhorn and Whidbey PDC bits by calling their local MSDN Subscription Center - http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/phone/default.asp. (MSDN IC Switzerland phone numbers: German: 0800 836 725 French: 0800 836 726)
• MSDN will not automatically ship the PDC bits to subscribers. Subscribers must call their local MSDN Center and request the software.
• Currently, the Yukon bits are not downloadable from MSDN.

It may look a little cumbersome, having to go through the phone-call to get to the bits, but it's really new that alpha-bits are made available so broadly. I have been playing with these bits a little now and must say they work really well for me!

Make sure to look at the readmes, The Whidbey help system does not like the one installed with Visual Studio .NET 2003.

I recommend not installing alpha-bits on a production system - Virtual PC / VMWare are a great choice for such purposes.

Incredible amounts of information on ASP.NET 2.0 (Whidbey) have been published on the ASP.NET site.

Topics include:

• ASP.NET “Whidbey” Overview Whitepaper
• Visual Studio “Whidbey” Whitepaper
• PDC Presentations and Hands on Labs
• Get involved with the “Whidbey” Forums

The site also states that if you have not gotten the Whidbey bits at PDC, there is no publicly available download for them yet.

Seems like a great deal of conference material from the PDC 2003 is available for download at MSDN. So, if you missed the show, you can at least get your hands on many of the slides and some of the demo code.

Another area that impressed the heck out of me. Working with data binding in Windows Forms applications in Whidbey has drastically improved compared to Visual Studio .NET 2003. Creating a master-detail-view for example requires no code to be written and the possibilities of binding any control to an underlying XML data source is becoming a lot easier - not even mentioning the major, major fixes applied to the datagrid..!

Unfortunately, a lot of this is not yet in the released PDC bits of Whidbey - but I heard that updates will be supplied soon. Let's hope!

There is just more and more that I will have to add to my DevDays speech...

As you may have noticed :) I have not been to active blogging about PDC yet. Well, the conference is so busy with sessions lasting until almost midnight every day, I hardly find time to write about any of the great stuff that I am hearing...

Well, so far, I have been attending the Whidbey-track to prepare for my Whidbey presentation at DevDays in Switzerland and I am absolutely fascinated by the enhancements to the Visual Studio IDE and the languages.

It is however strange that when looking at the features inside the IDE, like for example edit-and-continue, the insertion of code-snippets or the support for refactoring, there is quite a difference between the features available in VB.NET and those available in C#...

I'll try to compile the best of the best for my DevDays session - even though it would be easy to fill a whole day with this stuff...

Aw, it looks like there will be too many good presentations in parallel this year at PDC. I can't make up my mind on which track I should follow!

I will have to get my hands on a post-conference DVD!

Tomorrow, we will be launching Office System here in Switzerland. I have agreed to do a demo on XML in Office at the launch event - so I will be talking again on how to use Excel 2003, Word 2003 and InfoPath as standard front-ends / rich clients for any XML data.

If you are interested in resources on the topic, you may refer to the slides, Urs and I created for the MSDN TechTalk on XML in Office last month. The Office Developer Center on MSDN is another great well of resources.

Other points of interest:

• The Office 2003 Editions Resource Kit site can be found here.
• The Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003 SDK can be downloaded here.
• Visual Studio Tools for Office System information is located here.
   
• Ah, and don't forget to update your Office installation from time to time...

It is also noteworthy that Visual Studio Tools for Office System is not a free download (as I thought it might become), but an add-on that can be purchased for Office Professional 2003.

It seems to be "migration week"!

The ASP to ASP.NET Migration Assistant Alpha has been made available for download on http://www.asp.net.

If migration is a topic that interests you, the MSDN TechTalk on Visual Basic 6.0 to Visual Basic .NET migration might be something for you! It will take place on Tuesday, October 21 here at Microsoft in Wallisellen, Switzerland - admission is free.

The software architect forum with Bill Gates was a huge success and I got some quite positive feedback on our work. Thanks, everyone! I am very glad that everything went fine. I have to admit that even though I have been speaking at numerous events by now and I feel quite confident in doing so, this time I was nervous as hell.

For the Q&A session with Bill I was given a deck of cards containing the questions. My reaction: "Deck of cards? Hey, I have a Tablet PC!". So I wrote them all down on my Tablet and used this - definitely more hi-tech - tool as a guide during the session.

Ben gave me good feedback in his blog, but during a discussion today he told me about some possible improvements for my talk on WSE 2.0 for software architects. And I agree with him, instead of going technical on SOAP header extensions I could have simply painted a scenario on how to use these technologies.

I did however point to a superb article on msdn during my presentation that contains a detailed description of the scenario that was built for the joint IBM-Microsoft demonstration of WSA technology held on September 17, 2003. The scenario shows how the WS specifications can be used together to create Web services that solve real-world needs. It provides an example of the powerful functionality available to developers because of the composability of the different WS specifications.

The whole event will soon be released as a web cast on 00001001.ch - I'll post an update, when it is available.

<Update>The web cast is live! You can find it here!</Update> 

Bill, myself and my Tablet PC in action

My task will be to speak about the new features in Whidbey (the next generation of Visual Studio .NET) - especially the language enhancements and the news in Windows Forms. Ronnie Saurenmann will talk about the next generation of ASP.NET (due in the Whidbey-timeframe) in a separate session. Second, I will have a talk on the "Speech .NET" technology that allows the development of web-based, speech-controlled applications which can be accessed either using a phone or a web browser. My goal is to build a working speech-application from scratch during the talk.

So, here are the details of the agenda (in German):

We are just putting the finishing touches on the schedule of this year's Developer Days, taking place December 3 & 4 here in Zurich in the Kongresshaus (just putting up all the info again as a reminder). This means, the official DevDays page containing schedule and info should go live this week...

But that alone can't be the reason for this post, can it?

No. The really cool news is that Craig Andera has accepted to be a speaker and he will be presenting two absolutely hot topics:

1. Advanced Graphics Programming using Managed DirectX9.
2. Multithreading and Thread Synchronization in the .NET Framework.

Craig works for Develop Mentor and is an MIT alumni. This will be an unique opportunity to learn from him and network with him during the DevDays party.

• XML In the Enterprise
• Introducing the „Smart Client“
• The InfoPath Vision
• How does InfoPath work? (+Demo)
• XML Structural Editing (+Demo)
• Data Validation in InfoPath (+Demo)
• Advanced Features in InfoPath (+Demo)
• InfoPath Security Features (+Demo)
• Data Interoperability & Web Services (+Demo)
• InfoPath Form Publishing (+Demo)
• Summary

An important part was to add a demo to each topic and keep the slides to an absolute minimum. I am trying to get the whole idea behind InfoPath across as clearly as possible. I was asked about the product at last week's trade show (Orbit) a few times and people were puzzled by the fact that InfoPath is not just needed at design-time but also at run-time when filling out InfoPath-based XML forms. So I'll spend some time explaining these facts.

Bill Gates is going to be in Switzerland for the ITU Telecom World 2003 conference in Geneva in October. We were able to get him for a talk to a group of invited software architects during this time.

I have the honor to start the event with a one hour talk on the current status of Web services, giving a roundup of the work done by WS-I including Basic Profiles and GXA and introducing Web service enhancements 1 and 2, the current implementation of these SOAP protocol enhancements by Microsoft. After that, Bill will speak about the future of Web services  and we will conclude the event with a Q and A session where I will ask Bill the questions that were collected from the audience and submitted to 00001001.ch by the developer community. The event will btw. be broadcast on 00001001.ch as a web cast.

Thinking of this event makes me a little nervous. Need to get prepared asap..!

As of today I am working the Microsoft Business Solutions booth at our local IT tradeshow, the Orbit Comdex 2003 in Basel until Friday afternoon.

So far, the top questions that I have been asked by customers are:

• Windows 2003 Server, what's new?
• Internet Information Server 6, what's new?
• Windows Sharepoint Services 2.0, what's new?

...mixed with the usual calls for help from people that are having trouble with their Word or Excel.

So - if you visit the event, make sure to stop by to say hello :)

The characters from the Xbox shooter "HALO" are getting ready for PDC in this funny video on GotDotNet. I wonder if they will actually make an appearance at the event :)

After finishing my server installation, I am back to my normal life. This weekend, Irmgard and I visited the Playstation Experience Party here in Zurich. I think it's a great idea from Sony to open the location where they host the home entertainment business expo / meeting to the public in the evening and have an amazing party there.

Tons of Playstations everywhere running early bits of upcoming hot games. Lots of people, still not too many so it was still possible to walk from console to console and try game after game. Great video-projections mixing art and preview movies of upcoming games. Special areas for the Playstation 2 online-service, the eye toy and dance games. And, last but not least, two floors with two really good DJs.

We had a great time even if we were approximately ten years older than the rest of the crowd :) You think "geek-only-event"? Think twice. I was blown away by the number of female visitors.

Dancefloors	Screen of Death! on PlayStation 2. Hello Beta Software
Michi and a Sony-Girl. (He was impressed by her cell-phone, not her hair, btw.)	Irmgard working the Eye-Toy.

Yesterdays blogger meeting was a great event and we had great dinner and a very lively conversation. It all culminated in a very philosophical discussion on NGSCB and security. Thanks to Alma, Ben, Dani, Ingo, Irmgard and Martin for coming!!!

Ingo and I had a chance to give the upcoming DevDays another thought, regarding speeches, organization and the party - organizing this event now fills up quite a portion of my daily work-time.

The pictures that I took of the meeting are unfortunately beyond hope or repair, so I can only refer you to Ben's set of photos.

Today we decided to host another blogger meeting here in Zurich, taking place tomorrow, September 11, 2003. Sorry (again) for the short notice, but these things seem to happen quite spontaneously around here :)

People that will be there include Ingo (who had the original idea), Ben, Martin, 12 o'Clock Flasher Girl and myself.

We have (so far) reserved 12 seats in the "12 Apostel" and if you decide to join in, please send a quick note to Ben who is organizing the reservations.

Location: 12 Apostel in Zurich, Switzerland
Time: 7pm on Thu, 9/11/2003
Location info: http://www.12apostel.ch

12 chairs inside the 12 Apostel for 12 bloggers...

My general quietness results from my current workload. First, the recording of the web casts on Monday was great. We changed the current setup from monologue style to a moderated discussion. It makes the whole thing much more lively! Watch out for these new web casts to be published on 00001001.ch later this month!

Right now I am matching speakers and speeches for the upcoming DevDays 2003. I have lots of inquiries from great people who would like to have a speech at our humble event - I am overwhelmed! I hope I can accommodate as many of them as possible to create a broad diversity.

Then, I learned that UPS is ready to ship my new server to finally replace my failing, heat-damaged, old systems - I wish I could start setting it up tonight!

Here are the specs:

• Easy-access server chassis
• ServerWorks GC-SL chipset
• 1 Intel Xeon 2.8 GHz Processor with 512KB L2 Cache (Support for Dual Intel Xeon processors with Hyper-Threading technology)
• 1GB ECC DDR SDRAM (2x512Mb 266MHz DIMMs) (Max. 4GB)
• Raid CERC ATA-100 IDE Controller (Raid 0,1 and 5)
• 3 * 120GB EIDE 7200 rpm, hard disk
• Integrated Intel Gigabit 10/100/1000T PCI Ethernet network chip
• Second NIC: Intel PRO/100S
• 2 redundant power supplies
• 6 PCI slots: 2x64bit/100MHz (PCI-X), 2x64/66 & 2x32/33
• DVD-ROM 16x EIDE

The PDC 2003 agenda and sessions are coming online. Time to start planning :)

I admit that I have deliberately copied a good idea. :) I feel guilty.

I have taken the "PDC 2003 - we'll be there" button-idea and created the "DevDays 2003 Switzerland - we'll be there" version.

So here are my two versions, feel free to use them if you like (please be good to my bandwidth and copy them to your server - thanks!).

Currently there is no event-site to link it to, but I'll post updates as soon as one becomes available.

Save the date! We have now finalized the date and location for the Microsoft DevDays 2003 here in Zurich, Switzerland.

It will take place on December 3rd and 4th 2003, at the Kongresshaus Zürich.

The event has its focus on software development on the Windows platform. It's a chance to get a first look at development for Longhorn, some technical sessions on Yukon and a look at the next version of Visual Studio .NET. We will be hosting three parallel tracks on two days, two of them with developer-focus and one with architect-focus. We will invite a lot of very good, international speakers like for example Rafal Lukawiecki from Project Botticelli (still no weblog, I think), Ingo Rammer, brilliant author, consultant and the new RD for Microsoft in Austria or Meinrad Weiss from Trivadis - many of them deliberately not being Microsoft internal to give the audience the broadest possible view. On the evening of the first day we will be hosting a party for everyone to network.

It may not exactly be the PDC, but we will certainly have a good round-up of the topics presented there.

A speech including round table discussions is coming up, hosted by netcetera.ch on the topic of "middleware for distributed computing" on Monday August 25 2003, 5pm @ Café Boy, Kochstrasse 2, 8004 Zürich. I have been asked to and will be participating in the round tables. The event is public and registration is free and can be done on the netcetera.ch site.

This could become an interesting event and I'll make sure to brush up on service oriented architectures...

I am however used to networking in the US where I find it much easier to approach people that I don't already know so I didn't meet as many new people as I had hoped.

Irmgard and Ben	What did you say you call your music style?
Streaming the event online	etoy.com's event container. Amazing stuff.

Ben told me about it so Irmgard and I have signed-up and will try to be there as well. This should be fun.

I am currently looking at getting a speaker on the topic of developing high-end graphics using managed DirectX9 for a break-out session at our DevDays, taking place this December.

I have therefore talked to Craig Andera from developmentor who obviously is a genius in this area and just wanted to quickly point out his blog and his Direct3D tutorial that are great resources for everyone looking for information in this field.

I have returned from a great conference week in New Orleans - working on a hell of a jet lag and a huge backlog in email and RSS. I find I am not very efficient at doing email or weblogging while on the road.

• I still find it very hard to get online abroad. I don't like dial-up internet and wireless or wired internet are far from broadly available in public places or hotels. But I have now found a few hot-spots here at the conference.
• Blogging from an internal company conference is a tough thing. Many of the very interesting things I am hearing are all NDA and I just can't take the risk of violating that.

Internal conferences are a blogger's horror. There are tons of interesting things you hear and want to share - but you just can't. Ack.

While we were spending the weekend at the Jazz festival in Lugano, Switzerland, things have been on the move. Upon returning I learned that I have won Microsoft's "Outstanding Contributor Award" and therefore was summoned to New Orleans where I am invited to have dinner with the Microsoft executives and the other award winners. Professional photographers will be on site so I should be able to post pictures soon :)

So I re-packed my bags, made flight arrangements (to fly international on the next day during the holiday season) yesterday and am now already sitting in the plane for the US. I was lucky to be upgraded to business class as the plane was over-booked and there were not enough no-shows in coach.

And while I am there, I will be spending the coming 7 days at the Microsoft Global Briefing in New Orleans.

The last day at TechEd was filled with sessions from "Software Legends" as Don Box, Alex Homer, Dave Sussman, Billy Hollis, David Platt, Juval Lowy or Yasser Shohoud. I followed their track with pleasure and was impressed by the quality of their speeches. Especially Don challenged the non-english-speaking crowd with MSFT-jargon-terms like "Wissie" (==WSE) or "Asmex" (==.asmx; Web service). And yes, he still uses emacs.

Overall, I was noticed that a lot of people used Tablet PCs and I also saw quite a few using RSS aggregators.

I personally could not live without my tablet anymore and especially during conferences, the digital ink and OneNote are the perfect combination for taking notes without getting distracted from the presentation. (My recipe for minimal distraction: turn wireless lan off and shut Outlook down) I wish I had had this combination when I was still at the university.

I also managed to get through a whole conference day (6 sessions of 75 minutes each) on one battery by switching to stand-by as often as possible. Fortunately, Windows can be configured not to ask for a password when resuming from stand-by which reduces the time from hitting the power switch to starting to write under 5 seconds for me. The only downside is that I loose security and can never leave the device out of my eyes when in stand-by...

Finally some new public information on SQL Server Yukon. Despite my hopes that first public bits would be made available here at TechEd in Barcelona, Only a few selected customers will get access to the first, closed beta in the next few months. A public beta will be available in the first half of 2004 and RTM is to be expected in the second half of 2004.

Here is a tiny bit of the information that I picked up:

• TSQL is not going away, it's even getting enhanced.
• The SQL type system will become extensible.
• Managed code will run inside SQL server as a runtime host and only languages that produce verifiable IL will be supported. This managed code gets installed inside SQL server.
• 3 levels of code access security exists: safe (code never leaves the SQL server boundaries), external access (external resources as the file system become available) and unsafe (everything goes).
• Tight integration between SQL server and Visual Studio .NET - all APIs will be available publicly (extensibility!).
• New Visual Studio .NET project types targeting SQL server projects will become available.
• SQL tables will allow for fields that contain complex XML data. SQL statements can be mixed with Xquery to return exactly the relational- and XML-data subset that is required.
• ADO.NET V2 will add support for event notification subscription so it will be notified if cached data is updated in the database. Good-bye polling!
• Object Spaces will provide a framework for transparent object persistence.

There of course is much more to come but that's what is on top of my mind. More information will be made available publicly at PDC 2003 in October in LA and at TechEd 2004 in July 2004 in ???.

Today I attended a chat session on "Microsoft and open source". My expectations were very high and thought it was a bold idea but maybe for this reason I was a little deceived. The discussion hardly ever touched the open source topic but showed that customers are frustrated with Microsoft's licensing model and would want to see Microsoft port its products to other platforms like Linux or MacOS. Also, hardly anyone seems to be familiar with Microsoft's own shared source license, so that wasn't discussed a lot either. My question of why some of our code (like the SSCLI or the Swing libraries for .NET) can not be used commercially (==for your productive apps) but only for academic research was unfortunately left unanswered.

Rafal Lukawiecky is such a brilliant speaker that he can

1. speak about IPV6 for 75 minutes without ever making it sound boring and
2. amaze people with a demo that consists of the following line of code: ping ::1 (which is localhost in IPV6)

The fact that the Pentagon has officially announced their use of IPV6 technology on Jun 13 should speed the adoption of this not-so-new protocol.

Meeting Rafal in Barcelona.

Today's session on UML gave me the idea to use UML sequence diagrams to document some of the more complex demos (even though I am a believer in very simple demos) that I am showing at my presentations. I often find myself trying to explain in words what my programs are exactly doing, but such an UML diagram can show all that much better and in a standardized way that many people are used to look at.

The fact that both Pocket PC 2003 and Smartphone 2003 are based on the new Windows CE .NET 4.2 operating system will have quite some impact on this platform - especially for developers. Many of the APIs have received a makeover - notably the ones that interact with the device's filesystem that now allow for subscription to file changes. I like the powerful new emulator on the desktop that is even able to fully simulate radio traffic, both phone calls and sending/receiving of SMS. Finally a way to debug your telephone apps. I was also happy to see that the telephone API of the Pocket PC 2003 Phone Edition can be programmed using the .NET compact framework - and that this framework is now in ROM where it belongs.

There is also a downside to it all: Telcos may choose to restrict the use of the .NET compact framework on their devices to applications that are certified by the respecting telco. This has applied to C++ programs on the Smartphone 2002 from Orange communications already, which is understandable due to the fact that malicious C++ code can wreck havoc on the device. But with a sandboxed execution engine with advanced security features as the .NET cf is one, developers should be able to at least write code without any certificate that runs with limited permissions. If needed, restrictions could be applied to code that for example wants to interact with the telephone API. I wonder if Java code that targets mobile devices suffers (or will suffer) the same restrictions...

With the 2004 release, BizTalk will evolve remarkably. Beyond the orchestration of web services, human workflow services allow for business processes that include human intervention (as replying to an email) to be orchestrated and to show the progress of the current process instance as a Visio-diagram inside Outlook. So if for example you notice that the process is stuck at a certain point because someone does not respond to their email, you can right-click his representation in the diagram and choose "escalate" to report the problem to him or any other person configured to resolve such issues.

I have to admit honestly that I didn't attend any conference sessions today, except for the keynote session. Instead, I had the chance of attending internal meetings with folks from Microsoft EMEA and the US. That's a great chance to do some networking and to pick up new ideas / share my own ideas.

The Barcelona subway with a public display, undecided what file to show to the passengers.

After checking in and collecting the usual new piece of conference-luggage (I call it "baggage claim") the first day of the conference started for me with an interesting all-day-session of David Solomon and Mark Russinovich talking about Windows internals - things like reverse engineering Windows to find out how to change the registry in two places to make Windows 2000 Professional into Windows 2000 Datacenter edition. Ouch. Cool information and quite useful if you really want to learn how to debug Windows at the kernel level. ;)

The interesting links in that respect are: http://www.microsoft.com/ddk/debugging and http://www.microsoft.com/ddk/debugging/symbols.asp. Windbg will allow you (among other debugging stuff) to closely analyze the crash-dumps of your system and help you analyze the exact cause of system instabilities.

Other things of interest that can be found on the sysinternals site include filemon and regmon. These tools can be used to exactly monitor files and registry-keys that applications are accessing. In combination, these two tools are perfect to find out what an application is exactly doing and why it may be misbehaving.

Unfortunately the conference wireless network is not yet too stable. Today, the DHCP servers are not always giving out ip-addresses on request. I wonder how they will tackle the SNR (signal noise ratio) dilemma this year with all the attendees trying to use WiFi at the same time.

Techies, attracted by power outlets

We arrived in Barcelona yesterday for the 2003 TechEd Europe conference. Air travel was smooth but ground-transport was bugged as there were 3 major events taking place on this day in Barcelona - a major Harley Davidson meeting, a Rolling Stones concert and a ton of techies arriving for TechEd. Taxis were totally unavailable so some of us ended up walking the approx. 5 miles from the restaurant to the hotel in the middle of the night. Extreme sight-seeing!

Sibylle discovering Barcelona

After closely following the RSS feed generated by TechEdBloggers.net - an aggregation of conference-related weblog entries written by attendees of TechEd in Dallas - I have now added myself to the list of bloggers at TechEd in Barcelona. I am looking forward to an interesting conference and hope that I will find enough time to post to my weblog while I am there.

Do you think there should be a weblogger roundtable / meeting during the conference or is this topic already too "main-stream"? I certainly would like to hear the makers of TechEdBloggers.net speak about this particularly interesting way of using / aggregating weblogs.

PS: I am pleased to read that Urs Bertschy will be there as well.

Yesterday evening a "Pirate Party" took place at our friends Garry & Gloria Isler's (both not blogging, I think) estate, "The Little Lake Ranch" - a hell of an event! 150 pirates, brigands, rogues, rats and corpses added a touch of Caribbean to the already hot climate we are currently having. It felt like monkey island :) I met a few very interesting people, among them the former CEO of Microsoft Switzerland, Peter Blum, who I hadn't seen for quite some time now.

Myself, desperately trying to look like an admiral	Elena & Irmgard, suspiciously dangerous-looking
Paolo my faithful shipboy	Peter & friends with liquid loot.

Note to myself: don't get an admiral's costume for a costume party that takes place in summer...

Readers of the Swiss edition of the MSDN Flash newsletter already know: We are hosting a live chat session on Tuesday, June 8 on security in Windows 2003 server and the .NET Framework 1.1. The Swiss Developer and Platform Group (== me and friends, including the development-security-guru Urs) and the managing Swiss security officer will be online, ready for your questions, be they IT-infrastructure- or developer-specific.

The chat will be hosted in German (sorry!) on Tuesday, June 8 from 5pm to 6pm, Swiss time (== GMT+1).

URL: http://communities2.microsoft.com/home/chatroom.aspx?siteid=34000080

Anyway, I usually don't like seeing the same movie too often, but this time, it paid off - especially to see how the oracle and the architect's dialogues fit the whole picture.

Of what I saw in the trailer of the Matrix Revolutions that is shown after the credits of the Matrix Reloaded, the Matrix will be flooded by Agent-Smith-Worms this time. He truly must be the unchallenged Nimda of the future...

For now I am waiting for the release of Animatrix on DVD in June...

It looks like I am going to be at Tech Ed 2003 Europe in Barcelona in July. Are any of the other bloggers going to be there? Would this be an opportunity for a blogger-party? There's at least a few very popular bloggers among the speakers! (Rafal, are you blogging yet?)

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