Community Day 2012 is getting closer

Last week the registrations opened for Community Day 2012. This (completely free) event joins all the Belgian usergroups to offer you 6 tracks with over 40 deep-technical sessions and the best networking opportunities available.

Together with Bart Wullems I will give a session about Git and GitHub for .NET developers.

Register here.

Below you can find all the details of the event:

Location: Utopolis Mechelen (Map)
Address: Spuibeekstraat 5 2800 Mechelen
Event date: Thursday June 21th
Start & end time: 8.30 – 19.00
Add Community Day 2012 to your agenda: Outlook *.ics file

Techdays 2010, day 2

It’s over :( And I wrote this post too late.

Day 2 was good. Interesting sessions about the CLR (Bart De Smet) and about MEF (I forgot the guy’s name but he was hilarious).

Now for me this means more programming in the future. I really thing I made my job out of my hobby.

And lastly: nerd dinner! With a hole bunch of people!

Kristof Mattei and Scott Hanselman

Me and Scott Hanselman :D

Techdays 2010, day 1

Alright, my boss allowed me to go to the Techdays 2010 in Belgium :D . And day 1 was good! Very good actually.

I went to the following sessions:

The keynote (wasn’t that interesting, more of an introduction!).

Next session was about Silverlight 4 tour de force with a little WPF 4 on top. Nicely presented, good show, bottom line: unless you need WPF specific features use Silverlight. Why? Easier to deploy and Silverlight encourages to use Service based architecture.

Next up was C# 4.0 and beyond. While the future looks good, and dynamic sure has it’s powers with COM interop I feel like it’s a step back (no intellisense on those objects e.g.). I don’t know why but I’ve always liked the compiler time checking of static languages. But interop with Javascript sure is nice, as is with COM. But you have to find the right balance.

Compiler as a service on the other hand (compared to PHP’s eval (read: evil) is horrible. I already can see code written by beginners (I’m a beginner too, but I’ve seen so much PHP code with eval that I don’t like the language at all anymore…). So I really hope that this feature stays well hidden.

After that I went to EF in .NET 4.0. That was awesome. It really showed the power of EF, so I have a good start to dig into it (I don’t know why, but I like it A LOT).

Application Mangement with Visual Studio 2010 was next on my schedule. Merging, reports, installing TFS 2010 basic… All a breeze. Nothing much to tell about this, will post more when I have Visual Studio 2010.

Lastly: Test Driven Development in 2010. (don’t know why in 2010, it works the same in 2008…). it was good, but it cumbersome to start a project like that.

Now for a coffee and some surfing. First session today starts at 0900, so I need some coffee before that!

-Kristof

QFrame WTC Contest: The code

As promised: The code Peter and I wrote last Thursday.

Please keep the following guidelines in mind:

  1. Attach the database to a SQL 2008 database (no 2005 does not works. If you really want it I can convert it for you).
  2. Change the connection string (changing ‘LAPTOP-SNAKE\SQLEXPRESS’) to your database provider
  3. Run it :)

Good luck, should you have any questions, please post ‘m down here.

QFrame WTC Contest: I won!

A while ago there was a request in the class to persons who want to participate in a .NET contest. Ofcourse Peter and I signed up.

Yesterday was the day of judgment. After waking up at 0500 I drove at 0545 to school, to pick up Peter at about 0620. At 0607 I arrived. Fortunately Peter was also on his way (he told me that he didn’t sleep that good the night before), and off we took, to Kontich, to the office of QFrame.

After driving an hour and 15 minutes we arrived at the building, at about 0730.

10 minutes later our teacher arrived, and the other students. At 0800 we entered the building, drank some coffee, and at 0835 the introduction started. We got the assignment and we started programming.

There was a small lunch at 1200 to 1230. I ate 2 sandwiches and we (Peter and I) were the first to go back for our laptop to continue the task, but we had to wait :P

We programmed our application until 1530, then we got an introduction to Extreme Programming.

At the same time we presented our programs to the jury (1 team at the time).

Finally they told us who the winners where. 3th place for another school. 2nd for the PHL, and 1st for the PHL (Peter and me).

So Peter & I won a BEAUTIFUL laptop, and the year price. But we gave that one to our teacher Mrs. Sporen!

The laptop we won: It’s a Sony VAIO VGN-FW11S:

:D Just great.

After that we went bowling and eating, but that was just cool, but not too interesting to post on my blog ;)

Tech·Ed 2008: It’s over!

A bit late, but I’m back in Belgium :) Haven’t found the time to post so I’ll summarize the last events:

  • Tech·Ed 2008 ROCKED!
  • The last session on Visual Studio 2010 made code writing much more useful in terms of ‘I want this to implement like that here’, and then to write the actual implementation.
  • Then we took the bus to the airport (at 1730), and the plane to Brussels (at 2100).
  • I had a cold in the evening, and the result was that when the plane landed I was deaf as a post because of the pressure difference.
  • My dad & my sister picked me up at the airport (Thanks!)
  • Today I went to my girlfriend :) Very nice to see her again (yes, I actually missed her ;) )

That’s it (not to mention the knowlegde I’ve gained :P

Tech·Ed 2008: Speech Recognition!

Attending a session on Speech Recognition!

It’s a bit hard for the speaker to speak because there is a lot of echo here :)

Next session I have to choose, and it’s VERY hard.

My possibilities:

ARC309 Using WPF for Good and not Evil
Room 116

WIN309 The Windows Vista Bridge: How Managed Code Developers Can Easily Access Exciting New Vista Features
Room 113

Still don’t know :P