Plunging into .NET Development - Weblog Pieter Gheysens

No more postings here

2010-01-05T22:26:00.001+01:00

I decided to discontinue this development/community blog at blogspot and I will now focus entirely on my dedicated Visual Studio Team System blog at www.intovsts.net. If you haven’t done yet, subscribe here.

If you want to follow what’s going on in the Belgian Developer Community, go and subscribe to our VISUG newsletter at www.visug.be to be up-to-date with our upcoming events for 2010.

Thanks for all visits in the past!

Dino Esposito comes to Belgium!

2009-09-14T21:36:00.003+02:00

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, ...

2009-08-20T21:53:00.005+02:00

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

2009-08-12T21:11:00.005+02:00

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 :

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

Windows 7 RTM for MSDN Subscribers

2009-08-06T22:04:00.003+02:00

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!

2009-07-01T23:26:00.001+02:00

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

2009-06-17T21:00:00.000+02:00

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

2009-06-08T21:51:00.002+02:00

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

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

VISUG Session on ASP.NET Membership, ...

2009-05-27T21:44:00.000+02:00

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

2009-05-13T12:02:00.003+02:00

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

Community Update

2009-04-20T20:09:00.004+02:00

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!

MVP Team System + new career challenge

2009-04-01T22:41:00.005+02:00

A mail in my spam-folder on April 1, 2009 :

Congratulations 2009 Microsoft MVP!

I checked and double checked and ... it's real! I'm rewarded with the MVP Team System award for my engagement in the community. Nice! Thanks Microsoft and all those who supported me along the road to this award! A while ago I started a dedicated VSTS blog (intovsts.net) and this may have pulled me through ...

Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) are exceptional technical community leaders from around the world who are awarded for voluntarily sharing their high quality, real world expertise in offline and online technical communities. Microsoft MVPs are a highly select group of experts that represents the technical community's best and brightest, and they share a deep commitment to community and a willingness to help others.

Currently there are 26 MVPs in Belgium and I happen to be the only Team System MVP in Belgium.

Last month I also decided to leave Compuware and head for a new challenge in my career. More on this in a later post! Exciting times!

Speed up session recordings

2009-03-29T23:04:00.002+02:00

This weekend I've been watching some sessions recordings (.wmv) of TechEd US 2008. To win some precious time I speeded up the recording in Windows Media Player : moving from normal to fast play speed.

Try it out if you also have a big backlog of sessions you still want to see some time, someday. A minute in fast speed equals 45 seconds in normal speed, so a one hour session boils down to only 45 minutes! However, it's still not as good as the Matrix!

Next VISUG Events

2009-03-24T20:54:00.003+01:00

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.

Keyboard Shortcuts

2009-02-28T09:53:00.006+01:00

Keyboard shortcuts are cool and really help to boost productivity for power users. For me, using keyboard shortcuts is almost the same like using an external mouse on a laptop. Without an external mouse, I loose too much time with that stupid thing in the middle of my keyboard or with the slow touchpad.

From Wikipedia :

Keyboard shortcuts are typically an alternate means for invoking one or more commands that would otherwise be accessible only through a menu, a pointing device, different levels of a user interface, or via a command console. Keyboard shortcuts generally expedite common operations by reducing input sequences to a few keystrokes, hence the term "shortcut".

Here's my top 5 of most used keyboard shortcuts used on a Windows operating system and in Visual Studio!

Windows shortcuts

Windows key + E to launch Windows Explorer
Windows key + L to lock my computer
Windows key + M to minimize all running applications and to return to my desktop view
Alt + Tab to navigate between running applications (on Vista you can also use Windows key + Tab)
Windows key + R to open the Run Window

Visual Studio shortcuts

Ctrl + Shift + B to Build a solution
Ctrl + J to list members for statement completion when editing code
F4 to display the properties window, which lists the design-time properties and events for the currently selected item
Ctrl + . to open up the SmartTag options for the focused element. I use this all the time to import missing using statements for example or to do some kind of refactoring.
Ctrl + K,C or Ctrl + K,U to comment/uncomment the selected line(s) of code

What I also didn't know from the beginning is that you can use Ctrl + C or Ctrl + X without selecting the line of code in Visual Studio. Visual Studio will copy or cut the current line of code without needing you to select it!

You can also visit the doFactory that gives you a nice overview of all available shortcuts in Visual Studio.

Recently I also discovered (by accident actually) a new shortcut that's only available on Windows Vista. You need to press the Windows key and a number (1, 2, 3, ...) : that key combination will open the Quick Launch shortcut (Quick Launch toolbar) that is in the position that corresponds to the number you've chosen.

To reset your shortcut settings for Visual Studio, you need to go to Tools > Import and Export Settings. To customize key bindings go to Tools > Options > Environment > Keyboard.

Any other important shortcuts you use all the time?

India (Part II)

2009-02-21T21:29:00.002+01:00

Just back from my second trip to India (India - Trip 1). Again I didn't find any time to do other things than working/sleeping/eating, but I still found it a very interesting week. In total I have now trained almost 40 .NET developers how to work with Compuware DevPartner. I tried to convince them of the fact that DevPartner must be seen as a tool that can help them to deliver quality software applications. One of the misunderstandings is that DevPartner is solely a troubleshooting tool that can be used to troubleshoot issues in a production environment. Well, it's not! Actually it's a tool that should be used pro-actively in a development environment. DevPartner looks over the shoulder of the developer how things are implemented and can be seen as the virtual expert that increases code quality. Also the consultancy job went pretty well and all that was promised to the customer was also delivered in time and with the appropriate documentation. The in time factor was really important and that's why I've chosen for a solution with LINQ to XML and especially the Entity Framework. Why should we still keep writing our own Data Access Layer? The O/RM tools out there have evolved quite a bit these days and do we really think we can do a better job than the NHibernate team or Microsoft? The main benefit I get from using an O/RM tool is productivity! NHibernate may be the best free OR/M solution on the market for now, but I'm more familiar with using the Entity Framework and it was the perfect match for the requirements I was faced with.

On the other hand I finally learned why India has a GMT +5:30 timezone. Until I travelled to India I actually did not know that certain countries/areas have timezones that only differ 30 minutes from an adjacent timezone. India is quite a large country : the country's east–west distance of more than 2000 km covers over 28 degrees of longitude, resulting in the sun rising and setting almost two hours earlier on India's eastern border than in the far west. So, India spans almost exactly two time zones, but their government decided that they wanted one time for the entire country. Their solution was to split the difference between what the time would be if they used two zones. Instead of the time being 10:00 in Bombay and 11:00 in Calcutta, the time is 10:30 in both places and also for all other areas in India.

Just as a side not : this download may be handy if you travel a lot between timezones or if you schedule a lot of meetings with people in different timezones : Microsoft Time Zone. It installs a small tray icon that allows you to specify a number of cities to watch the different times at those places.

new VISUG branding

2009-01-27T21:17:00.004+01:00

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!

India (Part I)

2009-01-24T21:24:00.004+01:00

Last week I've been in India (Chennai) for a business trip. From Monday to Friday I did only see two places : my hotel and the office ... so I didn't had the opportunity to visit the country as a tourist, but it has certainly been an interesting week and I'm very satisfied about the outcome of my Indian week. Part of the job was a training workshop I had to give about Compuware DevPartner and the other part was a consultancy job to integrate code coverage results on distributed integration tests that were fired with NUnit. Those unit tests called several web services which were the real target for code coverage. The solution I came up with at the end of the week was to combine NUnit results and code coverage results. With LINQ to XML and the Entity Framework in .NET 3.5 (SP1) I was able to quickly store all these metrics in a SQL Server database to make them available for further reporting.

It's quite easy to hook up Compuware DevPartner to track the code coverage of unit tests written into NUnit or to track the code coverage of assemblies that are hosted in a website on IIS. Afterwards, LINQ to XML and the XElement class were my friends to easily query all result files and upload the required information to a datastore using the Entity Framework. Actually, not that much custom code was involved to set it all up.

I'm writing this wrap-up in the Chennai airport, waiting for my 9h30 flight to Brussels. I hope to get some sleep on the plane and to have a nice week-end with my family. Another trip to India is planned next month to give similar workshops on Compuware DevPartner and to further extend the solution I worked out for the integration tests.

I may not have picked up a lot of the Indian culture and atmosphere, but one thing that will remind me is the fact that traffic is insane over there! You just have to see it with your own eyes to believe it. In Europe I don't mind to drive in busy cities, but I don't see me driving a car / motorcycle / bike in the middle of Chennai. Really amazing!

To be continued in a few weeks!

Seven things you didn’t know about me

2009-01-11T20:55:00.004+01:00

Katrien's tag hit me ... so here I go :

I didn't study informatics and only headed towards information technology the year [1997] I had to choose a side track when I studied Applied Economics in Leuven. Since then it became obvious that I finally found what I was looking for. The person who hired me at Compuware in 2000 (my first job interview) was convinced that my lack of programming experience and technical background wouldn't matter in the long run. Eight years later, I'm still working at Compuware Belgium ...
Before I went to university I was heavily involved in sports [Tennis / Soccer]. During high-school I was an internal student at a professional tennis academy in Belgium where I was trained 5 days a week and because I couldn't let go soccer, I kept on playing soccer as well. I had some talent for both sports but in tennis I belonged to the top 12 players in Belgium for my age category. Due to some injuries and a lack of time in the years to come in that period, I had to let it all go. I still miss the competition rhythm and I still hate to lose in whatever game I take part. My idols from that period were John McEnroe and Marco Van Basten.
In Leuven during my university period, I was member of a regional student club and our main occupation was slowly getting drunk in our favorite pub. Going home on time wasn't easy in those days and I was always afraid I would miss something when leaving early. I did not have a GSM and wasn't addicted to a computer, so I needed to go out and meet my friends in person with a perfect drafted Stella Artois. It still is my favorite brand of beer, but over the years I became to appreciate a good glass of red wine and since then I'm increasing the number of bottles I stock at my parents cellar.
Playing all kind of card games was also very common when I studied, but since I got to know Texas Hold'em Poker, there's only one card game that still gets my full attention. Just before the birth of my first daughter, I sneaked in on a trip to Las Vegas with some friends to gamble a bit.
My ex-colleague Steven Wilssens - who now works at Microsoft in Redmond - pulled me into the board of the Visual Studio User Group in Belgium.
A while ago I was a huge fan of 24 and Jack Bauer pushed me to see the first three seasons as fast as possible, but I still need to find the perfect time to start with season four.
Some people keep telling me that I have two left hands, so don't ask me to help you with practical jobs.

My turn to tag some people :

Here are the rules if you are tagged:

Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
Share seven facts about yourself in the post - some random, some weird.
Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
Let them know they've been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter

Microsoft Press Book of the month

2009-01-11T13:58:00.004+01:00

Microsoft .NET: Architecting Applications for the Enterprise

I bought this book last year at PDC and I can really recommend it to all people who are into .NET development and want to take the next step into Enterprise development. I haven't finished the book yet, but so far it's already a keeper and it has earned its spot on my bookshelf!

If you happen to live in Belgium, you get a 40% discount when buying the book in January 2009 because it's the MSDN book of the month!

VISUG : Juval Lowy and the .NET Service bus

2009-01-08T12:20:00.002+01:00

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.

Passing parameters in public signatures

2008-12-14T09:10:00.003+01:00

Passing List<T> in a public signature is generally not a good idea. Consider this simple example :

MyMethod accepts List<string> as a parameter and the method just iterates through the list to write all strings in the collection to the output window. The code will compile and it will work, but it's not good design. If code analysis was enabled for the project this method belongs, a warning/error would definitely pop up ...

CA1002 (Microsoft Design) : Change 'List<string>' in 'MyService.MyMethod(List<string>)' to use Collection<T>, ReadOnlyCollection<T> or KeyedCollection<K,V>

The rule explains that List<T> was not designed for inheritance (no virtual members) and another generic collection should be exposed instead. In fact List<T> also contains too many irrelevant members : searching, sorting and manipulating the list. The best choice in the example above would be to expose a ReadOnlyCollection<T>.

Let's go a little bit further here. One of the first principles of object oriented design is to program against interfaces and not to an implementation. And for passing a list of strings as input parameters, we should always try to start with IEnumerable<string> and increase the amount of responsibilities (ICollection<string> --> IList<string>) only when required. In the example above IEnumerable<string> should be used because we only need the list for simple iteration. If it would for example also be necessary to get the number of elements in the list, then ICollection<string> should be used ... and so on ...

In conclusion it must be said that it's very important to review the public signatures of your classes. You don't want to expose more members than you need to expose. For returning objects from a method, you should only return the simplest working object (ReadOnlyCollection<T> --> Collection<T> --> List<T>) and for passing input parameters always start with IEnumerable<T> and go up the stack only when it's really needed. To help you with this review you can rely on some rules of Static Code Analysis in Visual Studio. Basically there aren't any good reasons to turn off Static Code Analysis completely for your development projects!

Geek Dinner after VISUG Event with Hadi Hariri

2008-12-06T16:21:00.003+01:00

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

Dedicated VSTS blog

2008-12-02T21:45:00.004+01:00

A while ago I was thinking about setting up a new blog, 100% dedicated to Visual Studio Team System. After test running the blog for some time with some initial content, my VSTS blog is finally live at http://www.intovsts.net. Subscribe if you are also into Visual Studio Team System! The slides from my VISUG presentation (What's new in VS2010?) are also available for download!

VISUG Session with Juval Lowy : vote now!

2008-11-28T21:15:00.003+01:00

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.