On March 28 we organizing another VBevent. The thema of this evening is... new stuff! The first presenter is Jacqueline van der Holst (Avenade). She will talk about LINQ. After a short break Alex Thissen (Class-A) will do a session about Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).. As always... attending of this event is free! This event is hosted by Oosterkamp Training | Consultancy.
 
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Jeffrey Palermo (MVP C#) organizes a great party on the Sunday night befor the Global MVP Summit.... and you're invited! Beside our friends from .NET Rocks! are Telerik, DevExpress and DataDynamics sponsors. Great!

Party with Palermo: MVP Global Summit edition
website:  http://partywith.palermo.cc
March 11th, 2007 @ 7PM - 11PM
Jillian's Billiard club - www.jilliansbilliards.com
731 Westlake Ave N
Seattle, WA 98109
(206) 223-0300

Grand prize:  1 XBox360 Free to attend Free pool Free food Free drink Free t-shirt Free swag

 Party with Palermo 

After announcing Dino Esposito, Ingo Rammer and Mark Miller, has also Francesco Balena confirmed to come to Amsterdam to speak on the DevDays 2007. On the blog of Arie Leeuwenstein, a Dutch DPE of Microsoft, you are invited to select your top 3 of sessions/topics which Fransco will give. So... use your voice!

http://blogs.microsoft.nl/blog_arie_leeuwesteijn/archive/2007/02/08/10122.aspx

I'm tagged by my good friend Alex Thissen, so now it's my turn to share some facts about me, that you probably don't want to know....

1. Since the age of 14, I'm really a big fan of computers. The first computer I bought, was a Commodore VIC 20. In the weekends and holidays I worked very hard in cafetaria, to earn that *big* amount of money. Finally I had enough and I took the train to a bigger city with a computer shop. The shopowner asked me if I needed a datarecorder too... "Ehh... A what? Duh....". He said: "Without a datarecorder, nothing will be stored. So, actually a computer is worthless.."
   I took the first train back, without a computer or datarecorder. First I had to work for a couple of weeks to spare for the additional part..... :-((
2. During my study I started a software development company, named Obisoft. But after my study I worked for about 5 years in a non-technical environment: I was teacher at a couple of elementary schools. I really loved to last three years when I worked on the St. Joris shool in Lichtenvoorde.
3. After 10 years active for the Dutch Visual Basic Group, I decided to start, with my fellow Willem van den Broek, a new community VBcentral.nl. After a year, we are quitte successful.. we have already more the 1.000.000 pagevies and about 1600 registered members.
4. I like playing golf on our local golfcourse 'de Voortwisch' or in a local indoor golfcentre Hole in 1.
5. I'm married with Miranda (6-6-96)  and we have two beautiful kids: Marenne (8) and Yorick (almost 6). Since a couple of months Yorick wins the most of the times when we are playing Midtown Madness on the X-Box.. :-((
   
   

 I tag Damir Tomicic, Dennis Vroegop, Sander Gerz, Jackie Goldstein en Arie Leeuwesteijn.
 
 Blog-Tag: A game for Virtual Party

I wish you all a merry X-mas and a happy new year! As special gesture I've prepared a little dance for you. See the link below... :-))

 My special dance for you

On the website of SubMain you can download a free copy of the ebook: C#/VB.NET Coding Guidelines. This 100+ page book can help you to write better readable and structured code.

Topics covered:

• Naming Guidelines
• Class Member Usage Guidelines
• Guidelines for Exposing Functionality to COM
• Error Raising & Handling Guidelines
• Array Usage Guidelines
• Operator Overloading Usage Guidelines
• Guidelines for Casting Types
• Common Design Patterns
• Callback Function Usage
• Time-Out Usage
• Security in Class Libraries
• Threading Design Guidelines
• Formatting Standards
• Commenting Code
• Code Reviews
• Additional Notes for VB .NET Developers

 Downloadpage C#/VB.NET Coding Guidelines ebook

Yesterday Microsoft released the long awaited Service Pack for Visual Studio 2005. Many bugs are fixed and there is also new support for processors or for for example SQL Server Compact Edition.

• Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite SP1 (Standard, Professional, and Team Editions of Visual Studio 2005);
• Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server SP1;
• Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions SP1;

It is currently installing on my machine... Unfortunately, the service pack which fixes issues with Windows Vista is still in beta and isn't available yet. Expected 2007Q1...

Two days ago Microsoft released to the web the Microsoft Printer Compatibility Library 1.0. The Printer Compatibility library is a new Visual Basic 2005 PowerPack and will help you with migrating your Visual Basic 6.0 projects to Visual Basic 2005. By simply adding a reference to the Library, declaring a Printer, and making a few minor syntax changes, your project will be able to print using the Printers collection and Printer object as it did in Visual Basic 6.0. This will give you more time to focus on enhancing your project with Visual Basic 2005.

 Get it now

Yesterday I have booked my flight to the MVP Summit in March 2007 in Seattle.... That means that I've decided to visit this event!! As a first year MVP I don't know exactly what to expect from this event. I was a bit in doubt to go. But after a chat with Sander Gerz, I decided to go. He is a C# MVP and also board member of INETA Europe. He runs in the Netherlands with Dennis Vroegop (also a C# MVP) the .NET User Group (dotNed.nl). They both decided to stay a couple of days longer to do some sightseeing. And, unfortunately for them, I will join them :-).
The plan for after the MVP Summit is to rent a car, do some sightseeing in neighbourhood of Seattle and then drive to Vancouver in Canada. We will fly back from Vancouver to Amsterdam. I'm really looking forward to this trip!

 Microsoft MVP Summit
 Seattle, site, maps and some pictures
 Vancouver, site and a nice promo video

Since a year I'm a real fan of RSS feeds... Instead of browsing and searching for news about my favourite topics, the news comes automatically to me! I tried also a couple of feedreaders... FeedDemon, RSS Bandit etc.. Last month I've found FeedReader and since that moment I'm really happy with it.

• It's lighweight, so very fast;
• It's very easy and simple to use;
• It's localizable;
• It's free!

 Feedreader website