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!

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.

VISUG Session on ASP.NET Membership, ...

Today I delivered the VISUG Back To Basics session on ASP.NET Membership, Role Management and Profiles.

Download slides and demo stuff here [zip file : 13MB].

I will also do a follow-up post to show you how to use the Membership features in non-web applications : for example WinForms, WPF, ... Some people do think that the features can only be used in Web applications. Not!

After being sick for a few days I didn't have the optimal preparation for this session, but I'm glad I pushed through and didn't postpone it. Maybe my voice wasn't always steady, but I managed to keep it going until the end! Next please?! No, not really. It has been extremely busy with all the presentations and other stuff that's going on. I need some time to recover and to focus on my new challenge : Sparkles.

VISUG : mocking session with Maarten Balliauw online

The last VISUG session about Mocking at RealDolmen with Maarten Balliauw is online at Chopsticks! Good stuff!

Community Update

• Next VISUG Session on April 29 : ASP.NET caching & State Management
• Mocking session on May 7 will take place at RealDolmen in Huizingen - capacity increased to 100 people!
• Domain Driven Design session is rescheduled to June 16 instead of June 18. Still some free seats!
• Community Day will take place on June 25 at Utopolis in Mechelen. VISUG will deliver 3 sessions at this joint user group event in Belgium.

Update : I will be speaking at the MSDN ALM Roadshow in Belgium next month. 3 sessions on 3 occasions ... Hope to meet you there!

Next VISUG Events

Busy months to come for the VISUG! I've been planning lots of new events for the coming period. Together with Microsoft Belgium, we are also announcing some Back To Basic afternoon sessions. More info on all the sessions can be found on our website.

• April 15 : LINQ (Kurt Claeys)
• April 29 : ASP.NET Caching (Gill Cleeren)
• May 5 : Mocking (Maarten Balliauw)
• May 27 : ASP.NET Membership (Pieter Gheysens)
• June 18 : Domain Driven Design (Yves Goeleven)
• June 30 : IronRuby (Ivan Porto Carrero)
• September 10 : ORMs - NHibernate & Entity Framework (Davy Brion & Kurt Claeys)

Be sure to register and drop me an email if you have suggestions for other sessions later this year! Note that a new big event will probably be scheduled in the week of October 5 with another great international speaker! More details on this soon!

I noticed that the session about ORMs is getting a lot of attention/attraction and I just want to make sure that you get the right information on this session. It is absolutely not the intention to start a war between advocates of NHibernate and advocates of the Entity Framework. The purpose is to make our members aware of the main benefits you get out of using an O/RM tool : productivity! Attendees will have the opportunity to see how to get started on using NHibernate or the Entity Framework. Both tools have their place on the current marketplace and it's up to the decision makers to make the right decision which tool to use. There are of course some important differences between both tools (domain driven approach vs data driven approach) but in the end they deliver a similar set of services to developers.

new VISUG branding

Yes, finally! After we showed the community the new VISUG logo on our last event with Juval Lowy, Gill put the new restyled website live! Please have a look at it and tell us what you think!

VISUG email addresses have also changed and you can reach all board members at board@visug.be or send a dedicated mail to one of us at firstname@visug.be.

Our next event will take place at SD Worx in Antwerp :

Live Mesh: Data synchronization and storage in the cloud

Live Mesh is a data synchronization system that allows you to share files and folders across multiple devices or even store them in the cloud. This piece of technology is part of the Microsoft Cloud Computing initiative, Windows Azure. Next to sharing data, Live Mesh also provides the possibility to run Mesh applications in the cloud and provides news feeds to notify you from changes in your files or application. All of this can be controlled by you as developer when using the Live Framework API. This presentation offers an introduction on Live Mesh and the Live Framework from both the user as the developer’s point of view.

Register here.

Too bad I will miss the upcoming event because it looks very promising. In two days time - without sending out a newsletter or other promotion of the event - we already have 40 registrations! A lot of people seem to have set visug.be as their homepage!

VISUG : Juval Lowy and the .NET Service bus

Last chance to register for the VISUG event with Juval Lowy on January 15, 2008 at Utopolis (Mechelen - Belgium).

The .NET services bus is part of the new Microsoft Cloud Computing Windows Azure initiative, and arguably, it is the most accessible, ready to use, powerful, and needed piece.

The service bus allows clients to connects to services across any machine, network, firewall, NAT, routers, load balancers, virtualization, IP and DNS as if they were part of the same local network, and doing all that without compromising on the programming model or security. The service bus also supports callbacks, event publishing, authentication and authorization and doing all that in a WCF-friendly manner.

This session will present the service bus programming model, how to configure and administer service bus solutions, working with the dedicated relay bindings including the available communication modes, relying on authentication in the cloud for local services and the various authentication options, and how to provide for end-to-end security through the relay service.

You will also see some advanced WCF programming techniques, original helper classes, productivity-enhancing utilities and tools, as well as discussion of design best practices and pitfalls.

Registration at the VISUG website.

Geek Dinner after VISUG Event with Hadi Hariri

I'm trying to setup a Geek Dinner for after the VISUG Event with Hadi Hariri on December 16, 2008. All who's interested in joining for the Geek Dinner with Hadi Hariri may leave a comment on this post. You are not obliged to follow the VISUG session if you only want to come for food and informal discussions, but the session of Hadi Hariri is highly recommended! Post a comment before December 14 to be sure of your spot in the restaurant!

Place to be for the Geek Dinner [20h30] : Mexican Restaurant Pablo's Brussels.

There's a public parking in the neighborhood : Parking 2 Portes Brussels

VISUG Session with Juval Lowy : vote now!

The VISUG poll is now live! Please let us know which session Juval Lowy should give on January 15, 2009.

• Introducing the .NET Service Bus
  The .NET services bus is part of the new Microsoft Cloud Computing Windows Azure initiative, and arguably, it is the most accessible, ready to use, powerful, and needed piece. The service bus allows clients to connects to services across any machine, network, firewall, NAT, routers, load balancers, virtualization, IP and DNS as if they were part of the same local network, and doing all that without compromising on the programming model or security. The service bus also supports callbacks, event publishing, authentication and authorization and doing all that in a WCF-friendly manner. This session will present the service bus programming model, how to configure and administer service bus solutions, working with the dedicated relay bindings including the available communication modes, relying on authentication in the cloud for local services and the various authentication options, and how to provide for end-to-end security through the relay service. You will also see some advanced WCF programming techniques, original helper classes, productivity-enhancing utilities and tools, as well as discussion of design best practices and pitfalls.
  
  
• Transactions for the Common Service
  Transactional programming has traditionally been the privilege of database-centric applications. Other types of applications did not benefit easily from this superior programming model. In addition, transactional programming has always required per-call objects, which is a non-trivial programming model. But wouldn't it be great in you could preserve the programming model of regular objects and still benefit from transactions? The session starts by briefly discussing the problem space transactions address and the motivation for using them. It then discuses the WCF approach for instance management in the face of transactions, and how you could leverage the support in .NET 3.5 for the context binding and durable services to enable any common service (or a class) to benefit from transactions, without compromising on either the programming model of state-full objects or on the transactional semantics.
  
  
• Durabel WCF Services
  Consider using WCF to implement long-running workflows or execution sequences that lasts days or even weeks, where the clients may connect, do some work and disconnect again. There is obviously little point in keeping proxies and hosts in memory, since it is not robust or scalable enough. You can deign around this by persisting the state of the service between operations, but that implies some ability to connect back to that state in each operation. The session starts by discussing the challenges of writing such a durable service and the design options, and then demonstrates several ways of managing and binding to the service state, using message headers, or the new .NET 3.5 context binding, contrasting and evaluating the alternatives. Through a series of conceptual demos, the session demystifies the WCF-solution of persistence providers, and even how to write a custom provider or use the built-in SQL provider. You will also see some advanced .NET and WCF programming techniques.
  
  

VISUG Update 2008

Next VISUG events for 2008 :

• November 27 : What’s new in Visual Studio Team System 2010 (Pieter Gheysens) @ Compuware
• December 16 : JetBrains ReSharper and Design Principles (Hadi Hariri) @ Tour & Taxis Brussels (hosted by Neomatics)
• December 19 : Geek Dinner @ Wok & Tandoor in Antwerp
• December 22 : Entities in WCF (Kurt Claeys) @ Ordina

A certainty for the week of January 12, 2009 is also the advanced WCF session with Juval Lowy, who will be back in Belgium for his IDesign Master Class. More details about this VISUG session will follow - you will have the possibility to vote for your preferred session!

Interesting to tell is that the VISUG is now also part of the JetBrains User Group Giveaway program. Each event, we will pick a lucky winner who will receive a free personal license for ReSharper, dotTrace or TeamCity. On top of that, JetBrains will fly over Hadi Hariri from Spain to deliver a very interesting talk about Design Principles on December 16. Hadi Hariri is a C# MVP and runs the Malaga .NET User Group. He’s also a very active member of the JetBrains Developer Communtiy. This event will be hosted by our sponsor Neomatics at Tour & Taxis in Brussels. I’m also trying to setup a Geek Dinner in Brussels after the session to meet with Hadi Hariri and other peers. More news will follow shortly on my blog.

What else to expect from VISUG for 2009 :

• A new VISUG branding with a brand new website
• A closer look at the new technologies/tools presented at PDC
• …

More information can be found at http://www.visug.be. Don’t forget to register for one of our next events or subscribe to our newsletter to receive all updates!

Juval Lowy back in Belgium

Great news! After his visit this year in April, Juval Lowy from IDesign will be back in Belgium. In the week of January 12, 2009, he will deliver the IDesign WCF Master Class at Compuware Belgium. I also managed to book him again for a VISUG evening session that week. More details about this session will follow soon in the next VISUG newsletter. A poll will be launched to let the VISUG members choose which hardcore WCF session he will bring!

VISUG 2008 : next events

• September 11 : Introduction to ALT.NET (Yves Goeleven)
• ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 special
  • October 14 : ASP.NET MVC (Maarten Balliauw)
  • October 21 : Dynamic Data, Data Services, Entity Framework (Gill Cleeren)
• November : Best of PDC / TechEd (date not final yet)
• November 27 : What’s new in Visual Studio Team System Code Name “Rosario” (Pieter Gheysens)
• December 19 : Geek Dinner (location not final yet)

More information at http://www.visug.be

VISUG TFS Session cancelled

I've cancelled my second Team Foundation Server session on Wednesday (first session was held on May 7, 2008) because I managed to corrupt my TFS 2008 installation while trying to upgrade to TFS 2008 SP1 (beta) last week-end. That means that my demo pc is currently out-of-order and without the prepared demos my session wouldn't be that interesting. I will try to reschedule the session to a later date and make sure that new features of TFS 2008 SP1 will be part of my presentation. A small consolation : I've uploaded my slides for download ...

Those who want to know more about the TFS 2008 SP1 beta failure can read my post in the MSDN forum.

Working with a Virtual PC (with Undo Disks enabled) would have prevented this issue, but I like to work on a dedicated main OS on my laptop for performance reasons and this is really the first time that I managed to bring the system down with upgrading to the latest bits. Bad timing!

All registered people - with a valid email address - for the VISUG session on Wednesday should have received a cancellation email.

VISUG : Heroes Happen Here redeliveries

It will be a very busy month May for the Visual Studio User group in Belgium. 8 sessions are on our agenda at different locations :

• Heroes Happen Here redeliveries
  • May 6 : The ABC of WCF (Peter Himschoot) - Merelbeke
  • May 7 : Team Foundation Server (Pieter Gheysens) - Zaventem
  • May 13 : The ABC of WCF (Peter Himschoot) - Kortrijk
  • May 14 : ASP.NET 3.5, AJAX and LINQ (Gill Cleeren) - Lummen
  • May 21 : Team Foundation Server (Pieter Gheysens) - Kontich
  • May 27 : Workflow Foundation in .NET 3.5 (Kurt Claeys) - Merelbeke
  • May 28 : Workflow Foundation in .NET 3.5 (Kurt Claeys) - Kortrijk
• Other
  • May 20 : VSX, Extend Your Visual Studio Development Experience (Ken Levy) - Schelle

The original session of Gill Cleeren (ASP.NET 3.5, AJAX and LINQ) on May 20 is replaced by the VSX session of Ken Levy. We couldn't miss the opportunity to host this great session on Visual Studio Extensibility with Ken Levy. We will probably arrange a new date for the ASP.NET 3.5, AJAX and LINQ session in June.

More information and registration details on the visug website! Note that we will also give away some Heroes Happen Here DVD boxes with 1 year trial software of Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 ... together with a 1 year trial version of Windows Vista Ultimate (SP1). Another good reason to join our HHH redeliveries!

WCF with Juval Löwy - April 3, 2008

Last chance to register! Already more than 200 registrations so far ...

Demonstrating WCF – Beyond the Endpoints
WCF is more than just the next generation platform for building connected systems. In many respects, WCF is the next development platform for Windows applications, providing system features that are presently crafted by hand on top of .NET and Windows. This session shares the power and productivity of WCF, demonstrating it as a 'Better .NET'. The sessions will focus on the on the key system features of WCF, enabling you to make educated decisions on aligning your product roadmap with WCF, and assess its benefits and advantages. The session starts with a brief overview of what is WCF and the WCF architecture, and then proceeds to demonstrates multiple aspects such as data contract tolerance, instance management, one-way calls, transaction propagation, automatic synchronization, queued calls and automatic security.

Juval Lowy is a famous software architect and the principal of IDesign, specializing in .NET 3.0 architecture consulting and advanced .NET 3.0 training. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to meet a software legend!

VISUG : Software Factories

For the VISUG session next Thursday on Software Factories by Olaf Conijn, we had a full house (60 registrations) - but due to some unsubscriptions, we still have some free seats! Register now!

VISUG 2008

I've just sent the longest VISUG Mailing to our members (+600). If you also want to be notified of the latest VISUG news or attend one of our events, register for free on http://www.visug.be.

Hello *,

An update of what’s ahead of us and some news about our passed events …

Software Factories [Olaf Conijn] – February 21, 2008

The first VISUG session of 2008 will take place at Compuware on February 21, 2008. Olaf Conijn will deliver a presentation on Software Factories. Olaf is an independent software consultant who worked on the development team for Enterprise Library and has built up a solid experience with Software Factories. He will try to get you up-to-date on all the stuff you should know about Software Factories …

More information on our VISUG website. Registration is already possible – places are limited to 50 people!

VISUG @ TechDays (ICC Ghent) – March 11-12-13, 2008

The VISUG will once more be present at the TechDays 2008. We will have a small booth in the exposition hall, so come and see us over there. We would love your feedback on what we’re doing for the community in Belgium!

March 11 sees the official launch of brand new versions of Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008. But what the day is really about are the everyday heroes who transform our products into powerful products for solving real IT problems at work. In other words, YOU.

We are calling it Heroes Happen Here. And we're proud to invite miracle workers like yourself, not only to the launch itself, but also to our TechDays 2008. A series of technical sessions that take place on 12th and 13th March, during which IT professionals and developers alike will get the chance to go into every single aspect of each pack. So if you'd like to boost your powers even further, this is one event you don't want to miss.

We also have a free ticket for one of our VISUG members. More details how to win this free ticket will follow soon!

Because good traditions must be kept, we will organize again the VISUG Geek Bowling on March 12. Don’t miss this social event after the technical sessions at TechDays. Register online now!

Did you know that 6 VISUG Members are speaking on TechDays?
- Steven Wilssens (Applied Service Oriented Architecture + VSTS Application Lifecycle Management)
- Bart De Smet (What’s new in Windows PowerShell 2.0 for IT Pros? + WPF Futures + LINQ To Anything + …)
- Yves Goeleven (VSTS Application Lifecycle Management)
- Gill Cleeren (Next Generation Web Applications with Visual Studio 2008)
- Peter Himschoot (An Overview of Visual Studio 2008 + The ABC of building services with WCF)
- Wim Verhaegen (Building Rich Web Experience with Silverlight using Expression Blend and Visual Studio)

Windows Communication Foundation [Juval Lowy – IDesign] – April 3, 2008

On April 3 we will have the pleasure to present Juval Lowy as a speaker on a WCF evening session. The date and topic have already been fixed, more details about the location and exact time will be communicated in the coming weeks. We will host this event together with Microsoft Belgium.

Juval Lowy is a famous software architect and the principal of IDesign, specializing in .NET 3.0 architecture consulting and advanced .NET 3.0 training. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to meet a software legend!

Demonstrating WCF – Beyond the Endpoints

WCF is more than just the next generation platform for building connected systems. In many respects, WCF is the next development platform for Windows applications, providing system features that are presently crafted by hand on top of .NET and Windows. This session shares the power and productivity of WCF, demonstrating it as a 'Better .NET'. The sessions will focus on the on the key system features of WCF, enabling you to make educated decisions on aligning your product roadmap with WCF, and assess its benefits and advantages. The session starts with a brief overview of what is WCF and the WCF architecture, and then proceeds to demonstrates multiple aspects such as data contract tolerance, instance management, one-way calls, transaction propagation, automatic synchronization, queued calls and automatic security.

Juval Lowy is in Belgium that week for delivering his Architect’s Master Class at Compuware Belgium. People looking for the best training on Software Architecture can still register for this course at http://www.compuware.be/training.

Other VISUG news

Good news for those who were planning to participate in the European Silverlight competition : The contest end date is moved! The final date for uploading your entry is now February 14th! So, it’s still not too late to win one of the fantastic prizes.

Winners JetBrains ReSharper license (VISUG VSTS Event December 2007) - Tom Pester - Kristof De Causemaeker

Best regards and see you at one of our next events!

Pieter Gheysens
vice-president VISUG

Heroes Happen {here}

	Today I registered for the Launch Day on March 11 and for the TechDays (former Dev & IT Pro Days) on March 12 & March 13. As a VIP Community member I received a free Technical VIP Community access pass for the conference. Great! Like last year, the event takes places in Ghent (ICC). The VISUG will again have a booth, so don't forget to drop by!

I'm looking forward to the event because of several reasons :

• A time to look at the new products Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008. So far I was only interested in the new release of Visual Studio and I didn't find time to check out the CTPs of the other products
• Watch my colleague Yves Goeleven present the VSTS Application Lifecycle management
• Attend interesting technical sessions on the latest technologies
• Connecting with the VISUG Community
• VISUG Geek bowling on March 12
• ...

Last but not least - not officially confirmed - Steven Wilssens will probably come back to Belgium for the first time after his departure to Redmond in October 2006. He will most likely deliver two sessions on TechDays. So, the chances are really big that a small party will be kicked off after the sessions. It has been a while since we've met and we need to catch up on all the things that happened up till now. I think I'll have to book a hotel in the neighborhood to be on the safe side. Ghent : here we come! He will certainly have missed the Belgian beer and the great food over here ...

What's your reason to attend the TechDays?