A major part of being an Microsoft Regional Director is to be visible in the developer community, give presentations, write articles, give Microsoft feedback on products, attend conferences and so fourth. So when ever I do one of these things I report it to Microsoft, so that they can keep track on how the RD program is doing, and what impact we're making around the world. Based on your reporting you earn points, who give you and indication on your global reach.

So in my first year as a Microsoft Regional Director I received the Bronze Global Reach Award! It takes some time to figure out how to use your RD title, but I'm starting to get the hang of it, and have several speaker opportunities lined up. Next year I'm aiming for the next level, silver!

 

I'm currently attending the Microsoft TechEd Developers in Barcelona. Me and Hege arrived Friday at noon, so we speed the weekend as tourists Barcelona with Gøran and Astrid, who arrived Thursday noon. During the weekend we've visited some of Gaudis famous buildings, such as Sagrada Familia and Casa Milà. We spend Saturday trawling the shops down town in the Larabla street. Lots of fun for the girls, horrible for my feet…

We spent Sunday checking out the Zoo, which was tons of fun, even though the famous albino gorilla Snowflake passed away a few years ago. We saw all kinds of crazy animals and Hege took a ton of pictures that probably will be available on Flickr once we get back to Trondheim. On the evening we visited the Aquarium where they had a 70m under water tunnel with sharks and all kinds of other big fishes.

Monday was the first day of TechEd. Well, actually Monday it's the pre-conference day. I attended the first two parts of the architecture track held by Ron Jacobs and Scott Hanselman. I had to leave before they got really deep into the material, but Ron gave some interesting "stories" about the different role of an architect. As an explorer, designer and advocate. Scott gave some concrete tips on how to measure and plan for security, scalability, performance and availability. Interesting in deed.

I had to leave after the two first parts of the pre-conference track for the RD meeting. Great to finally meat many of my fellow RDs in person. During the meeting the winners of the photo contest where announced. And guess what; I won! Big thanks to the photographer Hege. The first price was an Xbox 360 and a Zune Player (once available). So that was tons of fun. After the meeting we had an RD party down town Barcelona. The food was excellent, and I had squid fish for the first time!

Today, Tuesday, was the real opening day of TechEd. During the morning key note the Norwegian team and our project was mentioned, in front of approx 3500 developers. Awesome! The key note was pretty much what you can expect from an key note like this. Some cool end to end scenarios on how to use .NET 3.0, Windows Vista and Office 2007 to build new business solutions. Anders Hejlsberg did his LINQ magic, which continues to blow me away by it's power and elegance. This is definitely something I'll explore further and blog more about.

We've also been busy at the Imagine Cup stand, where we've been demoing MediWatch for press, developers and other interested people. I also took part in a "press round table" discussing "young developers of the future". The theme for the discussion was some of the challenges for young developers, which part universities should play in providing the students with the skill set needed in the "real world", and how universities and companies could encourage more young students to learn information technology and go on to become entrepreneurs them self.

All in all the first half of my Barcelona stay has been a blast, and there is so much more to come. Lots of great sessions to attend, and fun parties to be at. Tomorrow is the Norwegian party at Hard rock cafe, and Thursday is the student partner evening.

I'll be back with more. This is Jonas, reporting live from TechEd ;)

 

 

I've uploaded the slides from yesterdays user group presentation in Trondheim. There wasn't really much example code worth uploading, so I just uploaded the Power Point slides. The example code that ships with ATLAS shows most of the stuff I demoed yesterday.

The presentation I gave was about a project me, Gøran and Espen have been working on since early spring. The project is an application that runs in 8 hospitals in the region helping them to track post surgery infections. In the application we used allot of Atlas to improve the user experience. So during the presentation I show cased some of the areas where we used Atlas, and demoed how to implement stuff such as the update panel, the auto complete textbox and the modal popup extender.

I also talked about contentious integration and Cruise Control .NET and how that was a success factor in our project. It turned out that very few knew about CC.NET, so I spent some time discussing it.

After the main presentation I fired up XNA and used the Spacewar starter kit for a friendly competition giving away Francesco Balenas book "Programming Microsoft Visual C# 2005: The Base Class Library".

I've added a set of links relevant to the presentations, including a link to the excellent book "Ship it! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects", which discuss continuous integration and other techniques to ship your software project on time.

• The Official Microsoft "ATLAS" Site
• ScottGu's post about the new Atlas names and the feature delivery plan
• Ship it! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects
• The Microsoft XNA Framework
• Martin Fowlers article on Cuntinuous Integration - Great intro stuff if you're new to CC
• Cruice Control .NET

Oh, and I have to mention that the Norwegian .NET User Group just released a brand new site which looks really promising. Now we just have to fill it with content.

We need more speakers to keep NNUG going, so if you'd like to give a presentation at NNUG Trondheim, drop a mail to trondheim@nnug.no.

If you have any questions or comment related to the presentation just add them as a comment to this blog post.

This weekend I was in Oslo for the final round in the “Microsoft days spring 2006” event. I’ve been traveling with Microsoft to the four largest cities in Norway giving presentations on .NET, Gadgets and Windows Presentation Foundation.

 

The presentations in Oslo went well and there where quite a few people who showed up for our “latest news” developer track. The slides and code are available on a previous post.

 

During the Oslo event I also recorded a trimmed down version of my Gadget presentation. I’ll write a new post as soon as the recording is available online. Be sure to check out Sondres ASP.NET 2.0 and RSS slides over at his blog.

 

Thanks to everyone who showed up, and good luck in the Gadget competition!

I’ve finally gotten around uploading the sample code and presentation slides from the MSDN Live presentations I’ve been doing with Microsoft over the last couple of weeks. For those of you who didn’t get a chance to attend MSDN Live / Microsoft days this spring we’ll be recording some of the content in Oslo may 15th. I’ll write a blog post as soon as the content is available online.

In the mean time you can download the slides and Gadget code, and perhaps throw together something your self for the Gadget competition.

Introduction to the .NET Framework
I’ve only uploaded the slides from this presentation. The demos are fairly straight forward, a simple web service and a simple client retrieving data from this service. If you attended this session, and want to learn more, my suggestion is to download the SDK, install VS2005 and play with some of the introduction tutorials. I also have two book recommendations:

• Microsoft® Visual C#® 2005 Express Edition: Build a Program Now!
• Microsoft® Visual Web Developer™ 2005 Express Edition: Build a Web Site Now!

These are easy to read, short, fun, and colorful introductions to web and windows development on the .NET platform. It walks you trough a full program, or a full website trough out the book.

The slides from the presentation is available here: Introduksjon til dotNET.ppt

Gadgets, Gadgets, Gadgets
I’ve uploaded the sample code, VS2005 code snippets and slides from this presentation. The sample code contains the “Bussoracle” for the Live.com platform and the Vista Sidebar. If you only want to run the gadget you can download the Sidebar version or click this link to add it to your Live.com start page.

There are a few things you have to keep in mind when doing gadget development for Live.com:

• For gadget development you need to add live.com and localhost to your trusted sites list.
• If you’re doing gadget development on IE7 Beta2 you need to add the following registry key: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\FEATURE_XMLHTTP_RESPECT_ZONEPOLICY] "Iexplore.exe"=dword:00000001

By default IE7 Beta 2 will ignore your trusted sites for XMLHTTP requests, so in order for you to do local development you need to tell IE to look at your trusted sites before allowing/disallowing an XMLHTTP request.

To use the Visual Studio 2005 Code Snippets I showed during the presentation you need to copy the files to your local snippet folders. By default this is located under “Document and Settings\Your User\My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Code Snippets\XML”. As I mentioned during the presentation, Visual Studio only supports code snippets for XML, C#, VB.NET and J#. How ever, you can create JavaScript code snippet as XML snippets, and add them to your code inside an XML comment tag, and then cut/paste into your JavaScript file. I’ll show this trick in the recorded version of the session.

For those of you who want to compete in the Gadget competition I’ll write a new post with content rules and details.

The code and slides are available here: Gadgets.zip

Better user experience with Windows Presentation Foundation 
For this presentation I’ve only uploaded the slides. The demo is basically a walkthrough of the Fabrikam tutorial that ships with the Expression Interactive Designer. I would strongly suggest walking trough these tutorials your self to get a feel of what Expression Interactive Designer can do.

The presentation is available here: WPF.ppt

I hope you all had a good  time at the MSDN Live / Microsoft Days Event. Any feedback is appreciated!

I gave three presentations in Bergen last Thursday. The presentations went fine, except there could have been a bit more people attending the sessions. I’ll upload the Powerpoints and example code once I get back from the Microsoft days event in Stavanger next week. Stay tuned!

I’ll also be publishing some more information on the Gadget Xbox 360 competition we’re throwing together.

I’ll be giving three presentations at the next round of the “Microsoft days”, a quarterly event held in the four largest cities in Norway. The event has three target groups; PC-users, IT management and technicians (TechNet) and developers (MSDN). The MSDN part of the event has two tracks, one on Team System and one on “the latest and greatest” in development for Office 2007 and Vista.

My first session is a breakfast seminar on “.NET introduction” for totally beginners. The next session is on “Microsoft Gadgets” (Sidebar, Live.com and SideShow), and my final session is on improving the user experience using Windows Presentation Foundation.

My good friend and fellow RD Sondre will be giving three presentations as well. An introduction to Team System, how to improve user experience online using Atlas, and finally “information to the people” using the RSS platform in Vista.

After the sessions there will be an “after tech” where you can hang out with fellow developers, get some food and beer and listen to some live music. All in all the agenda looks great!

The dates to spare are as follow:

• Bergen 26.april
• Stavanger 04.may
• Trondheim 08.may
• Oslo 15.may

You can read more about the event and sign up at http://www.microsoftdagene.no/. Oh, allmost forgot to mention: the event is absolutely free! Hope to see you there! 

The Microsoft Connect Event in Nice was amazing. There where approximately 80 attendees from more than 20 countries. I got a chance to speak to so many interesting and skilled people. I traveled with the people behind some of the local .NET User Groups and Petter Schatvet from Microsoft Norway. We arrived at the amazing Four Season Hotel Monday evening. The welcome reception was held at the clubhouse in connection to the golf course at the hotel. It was a nice start of a great event, and the entire evening was spent talking to the attendees and getting new connections.

The evening activities Tuesday started with two hours of outdoor activates before we had to take a 45 minute buss drive to a medieval inspired restaurant. The restaurant was amazing, and the food was great. Inside they had a stable separated from the restaurant with a glass wall. You could look directly into the stable where they had a small pony, some goats, rabbits and a guinea pig. 

In addition to connecting to new people Microsoft had put together an interesting program. On Tuesday Alexander Holy and Hans Varbeeck gave a presentation on security from Microsofts perspective. Rafal Lukawiecki gave an amazing presentation on “Holistic Security”. Clements Vasters gave a nice introduction to the Windows Communications Foundation. His newtellivision application looks amazing. I’m defiantly going to download the code and play around with it.

Alex Taylor, from Microsoft Research in Cambridge, wrapped up the second day of content with a presentation of “Surface Ecologies in the Home”. Basically he talked about how we organize everyday items in hour homes, and how a computer not necessarily lets us organize content the same way. He also showed up some really cool demos from their research apartment. One of the demos was a “digital bole”, where you could throw your phone or camera into. What ever media content you had available on your device got projected onto the walls of the bole.

All in all it was a great event! Thanks to Microsoft for inviting, and to all the great people I meet during three fantastic days in Nice, France!

I’ve uploaded my pictures from the event to my Flickr page.
 

Just a quick post, I’m going to Provance in France this morning for the Microsoft Connect 06 event. I’ll be back late Wednesday evening. I’ll bring my girlfriends digital camera (I need to get my own soon), so I’ll post pictures and a blog post about the event as soon as I get back. Later!

The NNUG Presentation last Thursday went really well. Anders did a great introduction to the Composite User Interface Application Block. My RAS presentation went well, and I talked about how we made the client “smart” by implementing offline functionality and network awareness. I also talked about Web Service compression. The links to the Web Service Compression Soap Extension and the Hans on Lab describing the Network Awareness Component can be found in the Power Point slides. If you have any questions regarding compression or network awareness just post a comment in the blog. Next NNUG meeting in Trondheim is 20.april, and the topic is the Tablet PC SDK and Windows Presentation Foundation. Looking forward to that!

Download Power Point Slides

This Thursday I’m giving a presentation at the local .NET User group. The focus of this user group meeting is smart clients. There will be two presentations. The first one is by Anders Hammervold and is about the Composite User Interface Application Block. The second one will be my presentation where I’ll talk about RAS, a smart client application Abeo developed for field workers at Trondheim Energiverk (an electric power company). The focus of my presentation will be about some of the thinks you’ll have to think about to when planning offline capabilities, deployment, occasionally connected clients and limited bandwidth.

I’ll talk about how we built the RAS application, and I’ll also give a few concrete examples and tips you cane take home with you. I’ll show how to detect network state and implement two-way web service compression.

Sign up by sending an e-mail to nnug@abeo.no.

Last week I got confirmation from Kevin Schuler that I’ve been nominated to become a member of the Microsoft Regional Director program for a two year period. I received the Regional Director agreement and the NDA agreement yesterday, so I figured it was about time I wrote a blog post about this.

It’s a great honor to become a Microsoft Regional Director. At the moment there are 4 RDs in Norway, and only about 160 world wide (dont know the exact number).

The other Norwegian RDs are

• Sondre Bjellås (also a new RD for the 2006/2007 period. Congratulations!)
• Trond Brande
• Morten Abrahamsen

It feels a bit strange to become a member of such a highly qualified and experienced group of people. Many of the RDs have written several books and are well recognized people in the software industry. Even tough I’m not as experienced as many of the other RDs I really think I can do a good job at promoting, evangelizing and educating people on Microsoft technology, and in special .NET development. I’m really looking forward to become an even more active member of the developer community.

Thanks a lot to Petter Schatvet and the other guys in the Norwegian MSDN team for nominating me!

Microsoft Days is an event where Microsoft visits four of the larger cities in Norway. They provide interesting content both for business decision makers, it administration and last but not least developers. One of the speakers this round was Sondre Bjellås, giving a presentation on web development in Visual Studio 2005. I’ve known Sondre online for some years now, so it was great finally get a chance to meet him. I only got a chance to se the last hour of the presentation, but the bit I got a chance to see was great. All the content was home made, and Sondre had a strong focus on code and demos instead of lots of power point presentations. The cool thing about his presentation was that he showed off most of the cool parts of ASP.NET 2.0 with out using the standard demos.

Here are some of the things he showed off (and I got a chance to see)

• Portal personalization
• Making custom webparts (consuming RSS)
• XmlDataSource (consuming RSS Podcast, transcribing it using Speech Server)
• Web testing and web load testing using Team System
• Provider model, writing custom map providers for Google and MSN maps
• Administration, extending the default administration webpage to enable map provider configuration.
• Localization

As I said, I only got a chance to see the last hour, but telling by the list of things you can imagine it was propped full with cool content. If you got a chance go see him in Oslo February 15. You can download his slides and example code on his blog.

After the presentation we attended the after tech, a new thing Microsoft is adding to their “Microsoft days” program. Basically they serve beer and pizza, and you get a chance to hang out with the presenters and check out stuff like Media Center, Xbox360 and talking to Microsoft partner companies.