Dino Esposito comes to Belgium!

With my new company Sparkles I managed to set up the .NET Design Master Class in Belgium with Dino Esposito.

Dino Esposito is an architect and trainer at IDesign and one of the world's authorities on Web technology and software design and architecture. Over years, Dino developed hands-on experience and skills in architecting and building distributed systems for banking and insurance companies and, in general, in industry contexts where the demand for security, optimization, performance, scalability, interoperability is dramatically high.

More information about the .NET Design Master Class. There are still a few seats available! Don't miss this unique opportunity!

On top of that Dino Esposito agreed to also give a free evening session for the Visual Studio User Group on October 8, 2009 in Antwerp. Dino will talk about C# 4.0 and Testability.

VISUG : update events, locations, # of registrations, ...

 
The VISUG website was updated (thx Gill) to reflect all latest information up to today! What's new?

• The ORM (Entity Framework / NHibernate) event will take place at AE in Leuven and we increased the capacity of the event so there are some extra seats left! Please only sign up when you're able to come and unregister when you're unable to attend this session in Leuven.
• Another BIG event has been added to the website : Brad Abrams from the book Framework Design Guidelines is coming to Belgium for ReMix09 and was so kind to schedule an event with the VISUG on September 28, 2009. Event will take place at Ordina in Mechelen
• In the week of October 5, 2009, another top international speaker (Dino Esposito from IDesign) will be in Belgium for the .NET Design Master Class at Sparkles. Dino immediately accepted the offer to give a free evening session for the VISUG on Thursday, October 8. Vote now for your favorite session!

Win free IDesign training with Michele Leroux Bustamante

Update: The Microsoft Technology Roadmap with Michele Leroux Bustamante is now also announced as a PDC Workshop at PDC09 in November. The workshops at PDC deliver exclusive access to content not available to the general public. Another recognition and reason why to attend this unique event in Belgium!

Yes, the IDesign architects Michele Leroux Bustamante and Dino Esposito are coming to Belgium.

Sparkles organizes two events in Belgium in October 2009 :

• October 2, 2009 : Microsoft Technology Roadmap
• October 5-9, 200 9: .NET Design Master Class

Until August 31 you have to chance to win a free ticket for the Microsoft Technology Roadmap event!

Windows 7 RTM for MSDN Subscribers

I've used Windows 7 RC for a few months and I must say that I'm impressed. That's why I'm happy to download Windows 7 RTM which has been released today for MSDN subscribers!

Sparkles : new challenges!

Today was my first working day for my brand new company Sparkles. I'm ready for the challenge and hope this will be the start of a new inspiring adventure! In the coming weeks I will also be working on extending the consultancy offering Sparkles will provide.

For now, it seems that the Sparkles Development Assessment will be quite interesting. I already got a few requests for this job and companies tend to like the fact that it's a short assignment that delivers a roadmap for the future to improve their current software development environment step by step according to their priorities.

The Sparkles training events are also getting attention in the community and the first registrations are coming in! Dino Esposito and Michele Leroux Bustamante are of course very well known names in the software development industry.

Community Update

Yesterday I was present at the VISUG session where Yves Goeleven gave a very good introduction about Domain Driven Design. It was good to see that so many people showed up for the session : 60 people in total! It seems that Domain Driven Design is getting the attention of more and more developers nowadays and Yves did a good job to increase the appetite of the audience. All slides can be downloaded here and a video screencast will soon be available at MSDN Chopsticks. Note that previous VISUG session can also be found at MSDN Chopsticks. Shortly we will also update the VISUG website with some new events later this year, so be sure to register on time or subscribe to our feed to be the first to know!

Only one week left to Community Day 2009! The third edition of Community Day was quickly sold out and I'm looking forward to be part of it! Great agenda with lot of good local speakers! Very promising! Gill Cleeren, one of the organizers of the event, published a blog post with all the prizes that will be given away.

using ASP.NET Membership in non-web applications

It's quite easy to use the ASP.NET Membership feature in non-web applications.

1. Create a new WinForms / WPF application
   
   
2. Import the System.Web assembly
   
   
   
   
3. Configure app.config instead of web.config to use the membership feature
   
   
   
   
4. Use the Membership class to query for information