Yoohoo!

"Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2008 Microsoft® MVP Award! The MVP Award is our way to say thank you for promoting the spirit of community and improving people’s lives and the industry’s success every day. ... "

If you are an enthusiastic  RSS-feed user like me, you probably know FeedDemon from NewsGator. In my opinion it is the best, or better said, it was the best commercial Windows RSS reader on the market. Not that there is now a better commercial alternative, but NewsGator made this great program free!  It’s fast, it’s customizable and you can even download podcasts to your iPod or Windows Media Player. Check it out!

Download FeedDemon...
Blogpost Nick Bradbury...

If you were the content owner of the Visual Basic tracks at the Dutch Microsoft DevDays 2008, which Visual Basic topic would be your favorite? Let me know and I will communicate this to the person within Microsoft Netherlands who is responsible for the overall content. Let us make this a great event for Visual Basic developers!

Send me an e-mail...

Today I've added an article and a presentation to my website. For the SDN Magazine 95 from November 2007, I wrote an article with the title: Visual Basic in a Connected World. It describes various techniques for making your application more network aware. It contains examples for checking if a network is available, listing all network interfaces as well some tricks with host names and IP addresses.
Last December I had also a speaking engagement for the Software Developer Event of the SDN. I gave a presentation about OOP with Visual Basic 2005. It was a session from the practical point of view. Based on the session evaluation, we can conclude that it was quite successful. If you are interested, you can download the slides from my website.

 
..For I forget to mention… the article and the Powerpoint presentation are both in Dutch ;-)

 Read article SDN Magazine...
 View powerpoint presentation SDE...

With help of an object of the type Graphics, it is very easy to make screen capture. Add the next method  to your form:

Public Function CaptureScreen() As Bitmap

  Dim objBitmap As New Bitmap(SystemInformation.VirtualScreen.Width, _
                              SystemInformation.VirtualScreen.Height)

  Using objGraphics As Graphics = Graphics.FromImage(objBitmap)
    objGraphics.CopyFromScreen(0, 0, 0, 0, objBitmap.Size)
  End Using

  Return objBitmap

End Function

Now you can call this function as follows:

PictureBox1.Image = CaptureScreen()

Happy coding!

Since I have finished the manuscript of my second book (Visual Basic Kooboek), I have some time to play around with some new stuff. For the book I added already a chapter dedicated to Visual Basic 2008. It contains some cool VB2008 recipes, coded in beta 2 of Visual Basic 2008 Express.  But today… I downloaded the iso-file of Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite… a download of 3921 Mb. The installation took a while, but succeeded without any hassle…  I am happy!

I can recommend you this upgrade. You’re still able to write .NET 2.0 applications, but you can use the new features en enhancements of the IDE. The Visual Basic team did an awesome job, by making our favorite language even better. Congratulations… you did great job!

If you are not so lucky that you can work with full Team System edition,  please download the free Visual Basic 2008 Express edition. Install it and learn that this great upgrade makes you more productive as ever before.
I’m planning to blog about the features of VB2008 in the near future. So stay tuned!

Links:
 Members of Visual Basic Team
 More information about Visual Studio 2008 Team System
 Download Visual Basic 2008 Express

Last night I have visited the 5th anniversary of the Dutch .NET user group: DotNed.nl. For me it was the first time that I joined an event of that user group. And definitely not the last! First I wanted to congratulate the people, because they are doing a wonderful job. It is always nice to chat with some colleague MVP’s like Dennis Vroegop, Sander Gerz, Pieter Joost van de Sande and the former chairman of the group Michiel van Otegem. But there was another reason why I came up…. In my role as VP Speakers Bureau INETA Europe I was able to get Chad Hower to come over to Holland. He filled the complete evening with two great sessions. It was fun. Really fun. Ever thought you were able to connect your Wiimote to your PC and play around?…. Get some freaky numbers in Excel by moving the Wiimote around.. or even better… connect an USB Rocket Launcher…. Toys for boys.

The Dutch developer community Rocks!

For those who are interested...

Chad Hower / Kudzu
Wiimotely controlled wee litlle rockets...   Fun!
Dutch.NET User Group DotNed.nl

About ten years ago, when I was Visual Basic rooky, I was an enthusiastic reader of the Visual Basic Programmers Journal. It was the time I was calculating in months. I was counting the weeks and the days till the next issue. After two or three hours I’ve read the complete magazine. And then I had to wait again for one month… man, that was hard. In the same period I became an Internet connection and discovered Carl & Gary’s Homepage! Do you remember that website? It was the first website dedicated to Visual Basic. Now I could read my ‘Visual Basic food’ on a daily bases. That was a great improvement!
One of the guys behind that page was Carl Franklin (BTW…Who was or is Gary?).  Carl is now, with Richard Campbell, one of the hosts  of the immense popular .NET Rocks! Shows. Last year at TechEd Barcelona, I met Carl Franklin in person. I was one of the guys of the jury of Speaker Idol and Carl and Richard were the hosts of that competition. He is a really nice guy! Today I discovered Carl again… I never knew that Carl is such musical guy. He’s not only very talented in explaining new technology, he’s a profession drummer, pianist, guitar player, bass guitar player and singer. Beside the fact that I want to mention that he created an awesome HD Silverlight video, he produced his own version of Steely Dan’s, Home at Last. In one word amazing! That kind of video’s makes me happy…

 Carl's version of 'Home at Last'

Tonight Damir Tomicic announced, on behalf of our complete INETA Europe team, the kick-off of the 'European Silverlight Challenge'. We run this developer competition in collaboration with Microsoft. This competition is based on the development of a web component or application using Silverlight for its user interface and with the only condition that it to be published as Open Source (license MS-PL), being able to apply these components free of charge to the user group’s web sites and online technical communities.

Believe in your talent and join! – Dare to participate with us on the European Development Competition about Silverlight and win fabulous prizes, and of course the recognizement of wining one of the first places ;)

 European Silverlight Challenge

Scot Guthrie announced today that Microsoft will release the source code of the .NET Framework libraries later this year with the .NET 3.5 and VS2008 release. That will give an amazing debugging experience!

... "We'll begin by offering the source code (with source file comments included) for the .NET Base Class Libraries (System, System.IO, System.Collections, System.Configuration, System.Threading, System.Net, System.Security, System.Runtime, System.Text, etc), ASP.NET (System.Web), Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms), ADO.NET (System.Data), XML (System.Xml), and WPF (System.Windows).  We'll then be adding more libraries in the months ahead (including WCF, Workflow, and LINQ).  The source code will be released under the Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL).

You'll be able to download the .NET Framework source libraries via a standalone install (allowing you to use any text editor to browse it locally).  We will also provide integrated debugging support of it within VS 2008." ...

What a great news!

Read more...