B# .NET Blog : Personal, TechEd 2006 Europe

TechEd 2006 Developers - The Last Day

bart — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 14:25:56 GMT

The last day at TechEd 2006 Developers. Let's put a little report online.

First of all I'm on the Virtual Side (Live code wins the day) for my Speaker Idol survival. I didn't dare to look at it myself yet, but if you want to see it (on your own risk), take a look over here.

Last night I felt how it was to be famous. On the metro, I was sitting in front of another TechEd attendee coming from Germany and working on SAP who invited me to join him for dinner last night together with his colleague. Thanks Siddharta for the wonderful evening.

Today I've been attending some SQL Server 2005 sessions by Bob Beauchemin (which was great!) and Don Vilen (needless to say he's great too). And of course the ATE duties on PowerShell are a great learning experience while being there together with Jeffrey. Next week I'll be on the PowerShell booth again, so feel free to jump by and have a little chat.

In the meantime I've been chatting with a couple of Belgian community guys in the ATE Lounge, while writing some TxF wrapping code in C# :-). I had an interesting discussion with Wim on how anonymous methods work in C# 2.0. I'll post about that later on.

On to TechEd 2006 IT Forum next week. See you on my blog!

PS: This weekend automatic posting will take over, providing you with information on cool Windows Vista APIs including Application Recovery and the Restart Manager.

TechEd 2006 Developers - Day Four

bart — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 16:10:31 GMT

Damn God, what a busy day this was. Yesterday at our Belgian country party, organized together with Luxembourg and France, I didn't make it that late to go back to the hotel and implement my next (big) idea. Let's tell you the complete story...

For Speaker Idol I had to present today in the semi-finals with a topic of choice, so I took the great Windows Vista Application Recovery API for my five minutes demo. Nevertheless, yesterday night I thought about creating another presentation too on another great technology and lots of things popped up in my mind, including dynamic WF adaptation, Windows Live Messenger plug-ins and the Windows RSS platform (otherwise known as the Microsoft Feeds API). The latter one, on which I blogged some time ago (post 1, post 2, post 3), made it to further consideration and so I sat down in my hotel at 1:30 AM in the morning, writing a simple RSS viewer in Windows Forms for a 5 minutes presentation with 4 slides (one saying "Demo" and one holding the title). Exactly what people like to see I thought, lots of code live on stage.

In fact I do have to mention that yesterday, before the country party, I was at the Speaker Idol Theatre to set up my demo projection which didn't work out with Vista RC1 (I'm outdated I know, luckily it RTM'ed today) due to known projection errors. The solution we came up with was RDP-ing in to the Vista machine from the computer on the desk. A few network connectivity problems later, I joined the fellow Belgians for a drink at Havana Club.

So right, there I was at 12:30 at the Speaker Idol Theatre with the decision to leave it up to the audience to choose one of both presentations. Apparently I had a bunch of gurus over there who wanted to see interop with the Windows Vista APIs, and even beter they liked it. I've posted the code sample about the Windows Vista Application Recovery API for download.

Demo instructions:

Download, extract and open in VS2005.
Set #define DEMO disabled (just comment the first line of Program.cs out).
Press CTRL-F5 and let the app crash.
Now turn #define DEMO on.
Press CTRL-F5 again, and see Vista calling the recovery handler and restarting the application.

So I won the semi-finals in Wave 3, somewhere around 1:30 PM. Have to say I was pretty warmed up with lots of adrenaline pumping through my veins. Which was required since I had to go back on stage a few hours later in the finals at 2:45 PM. I'd like to give the audience the choice again, and in that case I'd try to convince them to choose for the cool RSS demo. Or, even better, why no additional item of choice... So I went back to my PowerShell booth to open my laptop and start to do some coding on Windows PowerShell: Your first Windows PowerShell cmdlet in 5 minutes. With the time ticking, only 1 hour left, 45 minutes left, 10 minutes chatting to other folks out there, 35 minutes left, ... (well, you get the idea) I managed to come up with a very compact code sample in my fingers, ready to go.

Again I gave the audience the choice, this time between the Windows RSS Platform stuff in IE7 and the Windows PowerShell cmdlet, putting the live coding pressure on. Guess what they chose, exactly: the Windows PowerShell cmdlet development which I posted right here. Thanks to my ATE colleague Jeffrey Snover (yes, Mr. PowerShell himself!) to point out I could make life easier by deriving from PSSnapIn instead of CustomPSSnapIn to build the snap-in for my cmdlet. No plumbing around with configuration entries and stuff, PS just reflects against the assembly adding all cmdlets and providers to the shell.

Demo instructions:

Download and extract.
Compile in VS2005 with CTRL-SHIFT-B.
Open a command-line with the environment path set to the .NET Framework tools (the Windows SDK or VS2005 prompt will do) and (on Vista) run it elevated as administrator.
Run installutil.exe -i DemoCmdlet.dll from the bin\debug folder where you compiled to.
Open Windows PowerShell.
Execute get-pssnapin -registered to make sure your snap-in is present.
Execute add-pssnapin Greetings.
Now run get-greetings -Name Bart and see your cmdlet in action.

The judges apparently liked the coding on stage with no strings attached and I seem to have won the competition (hopefully no radio alarm clock will wake me up, luckily I didn't brought one to Barcelona). So, come and see me next year presenting some session on some topic at some timeslot.

Right, I'm off now to the last session of the day (and the only one for me, I arrived rather late at the conference this morning :$) on How to Make Managed Code Fly? by Claudio Caldato Building Web Parts the Smart Way by Belgian community fellows Jan Tielens and Patrick Tisseghem. Tomorrow will be another great day. I'll catch up a bit on my ATE duties in the forenoon and hope to be able to join some sessions as well.

PS: Let's not forget about the really important things: Windows Vista went RTM today.

Oh my god, I'm on Wygwam

bart — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 11:19:58 GMT

If you want to see a short interview with me at the ATE booth, take a look at this (interview of 07/11/2006 entitled "Bart De Smet - MVP C# Belgique). Rédo was so kind to ask me (and I was allowed to speak English instead of my horrible French), I couldn't resist :-). Great iniative for the community once more. Check out the other interviews as well of course.

The October 06 Month Report

bart — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 13:00:00 GMT

One month after the start of the Daily Blogging Mission I'm happy to see I survived yet another month: "a post a day keeps the ... away". And again the comments and feedback have been great, so thanks everyone for the active participation. Furthermore, I'm proud to be re-elected as an MVP on Visual C#. Needless to say, the Daily Blogging Mission is part of my commitment for this MVP year. But the community world isn't only about acronyms of course: it's great to obtain the new string(new char[] {0x4D, 0x56, 0x50}) title, but the more important thing is to spread the word and help people in discovering new technologies and working with existing ones. Last but not least, I want to thank the people at Microsoft Belux to put me in the spotlight on www.msdn.be last month.

Some highlights of last month include another series of blogposts about Windows Workflow Foundation:

I hope you really enjoyed reading these articles as much as I did in writing it. Beside my personal interest in .NET FX 3.0 (and WF as one of the core pillars), the big stimulans to write these kind of lengthy tutorial fashioned posts is my thesis research activity at UGent on dynamic and generic workflows. This month I reached a next milestone in this research, dealing with dynamic workflow instrumentation and various performance-related tests. I can't tell very much about it yet, but stay tuned for regular updates.

Technically, there has been an upgrade of my blog to CommunityServer 2.1 (better late than never). Once more a decent job of Telligent with this release. And not to forget: Internet Explorer 7 has been released last month, so allow me to congratulate the IE team with this release. Check out the Channel 9 "Internet Explorer 7: The Browser. The Team. The Tour." series of posts.

Next month, blogging will continue on the same basis but with a slight difference: from November 5 to November 18 I'll be in Barcelona for Microsoft TechEd Europe. It's my goal to report about TechEd adventures during these two weeks, instead of the typical technical daily deferred posts. However, deferred posts are already online for the weekends, i.e. November 5, 11, 12 and 18. Nevertheless, lots of great stuff will be presented at TechEd and you'll hear from it through this blog as well as through the Virtual Side. During TechEd, I'll be on the Ask The Experts booth (schedule will be posted later on), so feel free to jump in for questions or a chat. And make sure to come and see me at Speaker Idol too for a 5 minutes presentation :-). For the first round at TechEd Developers, I'll be on stage on November 8th somewhere between 12:30 and 13:30. And for TechEd IT Forum my first round presentation will take place on November 14th in the timeslot from 19:00 to 20:00.

Thanks to everyone for reading my blog. More cool stuff soon!

Bart De Smet - 10/23/06 - 8:14 PM