U2U

Join U2U at TechEd Barcelona

Peter Himschoot — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 00:13:00 GMT

I'm looking forward going to TechEd Barcelona with a whole bunch of my collegues.

And if you want to join us:

"U2U will send a team of about 15 staff members to Tech·Ed Barcelona. And also this year U2U has reserved 20 seats and 20 hotel rooms in Barcelona especially for the Belgian developers who wants to join us to Tech·Ed."

Visit http://www.u2u.be/TechEd.aspx for more information!

Amazing XAML

Peter Himschoot — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 05:06:00 GMT

My article on XAML is finished. In this article I discuss how you can use XAML for your own applications, and of course the XAML syntax.

Would it amaze :) you that I totally ignore WPF in this article? Most people associate XAML with WPF, but WPF is just one of many platforms that use XAML.

Soon to be published, I'll let you know when it is available.

And tomorrow I hope to tackle another article, well starting one that is.

Advanced DataBinding

Peter Himschoot — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 04:41:00 GMT

I've been thinking on creating a new course, that covers all kinds of advanced databinding techniques...

Would you be interested? Any topics you would like to see covered?

Network again

Peter Himschoot — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 04:37:00 GMT

Strange, after returning from Portugal I couldn't access my home wireless network anymore. I couldn't even see my wireless, although I could see the U2U network.

Looking and looking I finally disabled UAP (see previous post), restarted my portable, and presto network again... Even stranger...

And to add to the ghost story, now I don't have glass anymore ... Eagerly awaiting Vista RC !

Presenting internationally

Peter Himschoot — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 18:40:00 GMT

Giving a presenation is quite fun and always a learning experience. Giving a presentation in a foreign country even more. Because to give a good presentation you have to know your audience. And every audience is different. For example, presentations in the US typically have a very enthousiastic audience, with "Wohooo!" and other sounds of excitement.

Giving this same presentation in Belgium would probably be met with silence. Not because they are less impressed, or less enthousiastic, but Belgians are typically silently happy. A little joke will get you a laugh though...

What kind of audience do you have in your country?

Training developers

Peter Himschoot — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 18:28:00 GMT

When I do training for developers, I like to build the demo's live, meaning I start from an empty project and build the demo live. This has the advantage that the trainees see the demo being built alive, they can follow along and build the demo themselves, and if I make a mistake they learn even more, because you learn a lot fixing an error.

The only disadvantage this way of training has, is that it takes more time. I do think this way of training is superior to just showing the demo with the code, because you get less insight in how to build the actual thing. What do you think?

On the subject of labs, I like to give labs that tell you what to build, and might give some hints, but that's all. This way you have to think your way through building the lab. Many MOC (Microsoft Official Curriculum) labs don't do this, they give labs that tell you step by step what to type, what to click, etc... I call these "Monkey" labs, because you could actually sleep during the session and still make the lab without even understanding what you're doing or why.

These last couple of weeks giving Vista training again confirmed my conviction of doing training this way, because some people told me they don't like the "Monkey" labs that came with this training (although they actually do illustrate the concepts very well). They wanted to do more of the hands-on building of samples.

Phew, 3 weeks of vista touchdown training completed

Peter Himschoot — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 17:55:00 GMT

There last three weeks have been amazing! Delivering Vista to over 50 developers and trainers has been fun. It's always nice to meet people who share the same passion for developing stuff.

First two weeks of Vista training were held at U2U in Brussels:

And the third week was held in Portugal! Yes! I love Portugal! The first three days I never ever saw a cloud in the sky. Living in Belgium this means something!

Nice food, nice people, nice atmosphere... And today I am going windsurfing in Cascais. If the wind will co-operate of course.

Uploading as I type, I put a whole range of pictures on my blog, so go and have a look! Especially if you attended of course :)

http://www.u2u.info/Peter%20Blog%20Images/Forms/AllItems.aspx

Learning Windows Presentation Foundation

Peter Himschoot — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 21:07:00 GMT

So it's "What I've been reading this summer" time again.

If you want to learn about what it means to do Windows Presentation Foundation, I recommend this book about WPF (aka Avalon): http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/avalon/

It's written by Chris Sells and Ian Griffiths, who I count among those authors who's books I buy without thinking. Which was confirmed after reading this book.

Currently doing WPF training, I also recommend this book to all my students.

O'Reilly also has a more of a reference book called XAML in a nutshell, which you might like to keep next to you while exploring more about XAML and WPF.

Hmm, loving Office 2007 Beta 2

Peter Himschoot — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 03:42:00 GMT

I took a big leap today and installed Office 2007 Beta 2 on my Vista Beta 2 machine.

One of the things that I really love is that it automatically detected my old Office 2003 outlook settings.

I actually dreaded having to re-configure everything in Outlook, and this made my day.

Silence @ last

Peter Himschoot — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 04:17:00 GMT

I have a Toshiba Tecra M4, and while I love the machine, its fan can get really load (with people starting to look at me :) )

Thanks to Jan, I now have a little tool I'm running on Vista which reduced the heat a lot on my machine, while keeping performance high:

Check it out! http://weblogs.asp.net/jan/archive/2006/06/12/Reducing-Fan-Noise-on-my-Tecra-M4.aspx