Wouter Devinck - Blog

A week of student entrepreneurship events in Ghent

2012-04-28T16:05:00.000+02:00

I am a bit late to blog about this, sorry for that!

Last week I was invited to two events for student entrepreneurs. Not that I would call myself an entrepreneur, but apparently I match some people's definition of the phrase.

On Monday I attended Student Ghentrepreneur, an event that was collectively organised by Ghent University and two university colleges. The event took place on the top floor of the Artevelde Hogeschool building (Campus Kantienberg, for the locals). They have a view on Ghent that makes me jealous! After all the presentations and activities, there was a reception where about 40 students had a poster showing off their "company". I had this poster about vikingapps.be, which is off course ridiculous, but I could hardly refuse a one meter high poster, now could I? Anyway, while I did have some interesting conversations, my general feeling about the event is that the three institutes are trying way to hard push their respective student entrepreneurship programs forward. I understand that they like to brag with numbers about how many entrepreneurs they already have after the first year of the program (about 60, they said), but lets be honest: if they even count vikingapps as a company, it is easy to come up with figures like that. Next time, let's focus on the few real companies led by students that are doing really well, alright? I ended up leaving the event a bit disgusted by all the (false?) hyper-optimism of all those students who think they are going to change the world.

More info: http://studentghentrepreneur.be

On Tuesday night, I was invited to speak at another event about student entrepreneurship, organised by the Ceneka student club. My introduction was quite surprising. The professor who was introducing the speakers showed an e-mail, once send to me by a professor, stating that said professor would not let me move some lab sessions to attend a conference (which he compared to a skiing holiday). Apparently his suggestions in that mail have later played a role in the creation of the student entrepreneurship program at our university. The professor continued to show a screenshot of yelper in an online newspaper and part of my resume. After this EPIC introduction I did a ten minute presentation, slides included below. Other speakers at this event included Frank Bekkers, the CEO of Mobile Vikings. His talk was inspiring! I had some interesting conversations at the reception afterwards as well. I left this event with a good feeling.

More info: http://student.ugent.be/ceneka/?q=node/148
Pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ceneka/sets/72157629855620783/

Presentation at Students to Business Day 2012

2012-02-17T21:35:00.000+01:00

My presentation at the Students to Business day 2012 in Braine-l'Alleud, Belgium.

Keywords: RIA development, client, HTML5, Javascript, CSS, jQuery, jQuery UI, jQuery mobile, Twitter Bootstrap, KnockoutJS, SignalR.

My review of the Nokia Lumia 800

2012-02-09T13:42:00.000+01:00

Click here to get a PDF version of this review.

A couple of weeks ago, Nokia has given me a Lumia 800 device to try. The only condition was that I had to share some feedback. So here it goes…

The Lumia 800 is Nokia’s new flagship smartphone running Windows Phone 7 Mango. It has been almost a year since Microsoft and Nokia announced their partnership. Nokia still is the largest manufacturer of mobile phones, but their smartphone department was not doing well. The Lumia 800 has been available for a couple of months in several countries and seems to be doing quite good so far. In Belgium it is available since February 1st for 499 euro.

Reviewing this device was not an easy task. I have done my very best to do it as good and as complete as possible. Should you buy it? Is Windows Phone mature enough? Does it work properly? Read on to find out what my opinion is.

Disclaimer: I am writing this as an independent consumer, gadget-enthusiast and app developer, not a Microsoft or Nokia poster boy. Some of my thoughts about this device might surprise you.

Hardware

The hardware of this device is very similar to the N9, so similar that usually it would be unacceptable for any manufacturer to copy itself like that. However, the N9 was born dead, the OS will not be developed any further. It is a very good thing that the innovative design and body of the N9 live on in the Lumia. The looks of the Lumia 800 are nothing short of stunning. One could argue that it is the most beautiful phone ever. It is definitely the prettiest Windows Phone available today. It is available in black, cyan and magenta (white will be available soon). The front is curved Gorilla glass with a capacitive touchscreen and three buttons: back, home and search (as required by Microsoft).

The body is crafted out of a single piece of polycarbonate by using the same techniques that others use to carve blocks of aluminum. It is curved on the sides and slightly tapered at the top and bottom. It is pleasant to hold and the ergonomics are great, the weight and size are just about perfect. It feels solid, but is transparent to radio waves, which greatly improves reception. I absolutely love it, it is so different from just about any other phone I have ever tried. It is pleasant and warm, not cold and impersonal like most other handhelds.

Screen and buttons

The 3,7 inch AMOLED screen has Nokia’s ClearBlack technology, which is big plus, it makes the dark colors really dark by being less reflective. The ClearBlack technology really shows when watching a very widescreen movie with black bands, you don’t even notice the bands, you simply cannot see where the screen stops. The screen has 800x480 pixels (WVGA) and because it is AMOLED, the colors are very rich. One beef I have with the display is that the whites are, well…, not very white.

The three buttons under the screen are capacitive and while that is really pretty, I still prefer a real buttons, I keep pushing these accidentally. The backlight of these button acts a bit weird: while watching a movie in the dark it was on at full power (annoyingly) and when you switch of the automatic brightness adjusting of the screen, the backlight of the buttons is disabled when selecting medium or high for the backlight of the screen. According to Nokia Belgium, this is intended behavior, although I still don’t see why anyone would want that.

On the right, it has some buttons: a volume rocker, a power/sleep button and a dedicated camera button. Sadly, there are a few problems with these buttons. The power button is placed terribly, right under the volume rocker. I often lock the device when trying to lower the volume, very annoying. The camera button on my device sits a bit loose, when shaking the device you hear the button make a ticking sound. I have read reports of other people having this issue with the power button. Also, the camera button doesn’t feel as good as it should. You can press it half way down to focus, but that stop half-way down is a bit too soft and easy to miss.

Audio

On the top you’ll find a standard 3,5 mm audio jack, a USB port (under a stupid hatch) and a Micro-SIM slot. That is right, the Lumia 800 is one of only three devices that uses Micro-SIM. The iPhone 4 and the Nokia N9 are the other two. It shouldn’t be too hard or expensive to get a Micro-SIM card (the Belgian provider Mobile Vikings charged me 5 euros), but this may cause some inconvenience. The holder for the SIM card is made of aluminum and should be solid enough. The hatch is a bit wiggly, but should be fairly strong as well.

Edited 9 feb 2012: A reader pointed out that the Nokia Lumia 710 uses Micro-SIM as well. I stand corrected.

The audio quality is terrible. I know that that is putting it quite strongly and that it contradicts some other very good reviews, so let’s be clear about it: the audio quality in phone calls is good and the speaker on the bottom is about as good as a tiny build-in speaker gets. However, if you plug in some good quality headphones, the first thing you hear is noise. If you like music and you would like to use your phone as music player, that is a real deal breaker. I have compared the noise levels for the same audio files and for some YouTube clips on an iPod, an iPad, a Samsung pre-production Windows Phone 7 device, an LG E900 and the Lumia 800. I have no remarks about the audio quality of the Apple device (although I have a lot of other remarks about them, but I will save that for some other time). Sadly, of the three Windows Phones I have tested, only the Samsung delivers the same audio quality, and the Samsung is the only one that you can’t actually buy. I always considered the LG just a cheap device, with pieces falling off after a year of use, so the disappointing audio quality was to be expected. I had much higher hopes for the Lumia, being almost twice as expensive and definitely having been designed with a lot of attention to detail. Today I am still carrying two devices: an iPod for music and the Lumia. That is quite sad indeed.

Camera

On the back: an 8 megapixels camera with a wide-angle Carl Zeiss lens that can do 720p video and dual LED flash, which is very, very bright. A front facing camera would have been nice, especially with Skype coming soon to Windows Phone, but I don’t consider the lack of it that much of an issue. Video calls on a mobile phone still are not very commonplace anyway. The quality of the rear camera is alright: the colors are good, the flash is bright but it adjusts well to the lighting of the scene and the autofocus is speedy (considering it is a phone and not a DSLR, of course). I have made some test shots (most are taken inside, sorry for that):

A problem I have with the camera is a reddish mist in the middle of pictures. It really shows when taking a picture of a white sheet of paper. I don’t know if this problem is isolated to my device and whether it is a hardware or software issue, but it is unfortunate.

And yes, I already had this issue before putting the device on a red background for the photos.

The camera can also do 720p video. Like the stills, the colors are good, but the video suffers some motion blur. Also, these days a lot of competing devices are offering full HD (1080p) video. Still, I think the camera is sufficient for what I think is its most important task: taking a quick picture of a funny or memorable situation and sharing it instantly.

Inside

Inside this slab of plastic and glass are locked some good components, although nothing spectacular. The Qualcomm processor runs at 1,4 GHz and has 512 megabytes of memory to work with. You get 16 GB of flash to store your apps, videos, music, email… If that does not cut it, you are out of luck, no other options are available and like most Windows Phone, there is no slot for an SD card. All expected sensors are present: an accelerometer, ~~a gyroscope~~, a GPS (which is pretty good, but more about that later), a compass, proximity sensor, light sensor and an FM radio. The expected 3G, WiFi and Bluetooth are available as well. Also locked inside is the battery, which is not user replaceable, sadly. There has been some buzz about the battery running out to fast and Nokia has pushed out some updates to address this issue. I had no problems though, the battery drains just as fast as on any other smartphone I have: very fast. My golden rule of thumb is that it has to make the end of a long busy day and the Lumia does that.

Durability

The Lumia 800 is fairly durable as well. The Gorilla glass should be quite scratch resistant, although, to be honest: I have already found a tiny scratch on mine (after two weeks of use) and I am really careful with it. The polycarbonate is scratch resistant as well and the mate finish makes a big difference one you manage to get it scratched anyway. The only part that is a real scratch magnet is the little silvery, shiny piece of plastic around the camera. That makes me weep deep inside.

Accessories

In the box you will also find a very cute USB charger, a USB cable, headphones (which, frankly, I haven’t even tested) and a silicone cover, matching the color of your phone. Whether you like silicone covers or not, it is nice to have one included that perfectly fits your phone.

In general, the hardware is pretty standard these days, but the design is simply stunning and the build quality is excellent.

Software

Windows Phone 7

Windows Phone is a young operating system that has to compete with some pretty good software like Android and iOS. In some ways it still lags a bit behind, but it has some pretty cool and innovative features as well. Let me walk you through some of my favorites.

After hitting the power/sleep button on a Windows Phone you get to the lock screen, with a background photo of your choice. This screen shows time and date, the next item in you agenda and the number of items (calls, messages and emails). Unlocking is done by sliding this screen up.

After unlocking, you land on a screen that shows your favorite apps. You can pin apps to this screen and arrange them to your personal preference. The color of these so-called “tiles” can be changed, this accent color is used all over the OS and even in third party apps. The background is either black or white, but black works best on the ClearBlack display of the Lumia. Except for apps, you can also pin contacts, groups of contacts (“friends”, “family”…), pictures and so on to the start screen. Some of these tiles are “live tiles”, tiles that show useful content instead of just an icon. The phone tile displays the number of missed calls, the contacts tile shows some pictures of you contacts (this tile constantly changes), the Facebook tile shows the number of unread notifications, … There even is a tile about you: the “me” tile switches between your profile picture and the latest notifications on your social networks. Developers can enhance their apps by making the tiles more dynamic. In the screenshot above you can see my Mobile Vikings app showing my account balance and Niels’ UGent Resto app, showing todays menu in the university restaurants.

Swiping to the right brings you to the full list of installed apps, where you can also pin them by pressing and holding for a couple of seconds (this is the equivalent of a right click on Windows).

The build-in messages app is very interesting. It combines text messages with Facebook chat and Live Messenger. You can, for example, start a conversation on Facebook and continue via text messages. There is a button at the bottom of each conversation that allows you to switch.

To be able to chat on Facebook and Messenger, you have to add those accounts to you phone. You can also add Twitter and LinkedIn (and email accounts: Google works fine for contacts, calendar and mail, so does Exchange), but they don’t support chat. The contacts app tries to link the accounts people have all these networks and combines their information. If it was not able to do that (e.g. because differences in their name), you can link them manually.

The email app overrides the background color with white. It supports threaded conversations and does a good job in general, as you would expect from any smartphone. The calendar app combines calendars from all your accounts, including Facebook events and birthdays. The Office hub lets you open and edit Word and Excel files, open PowerPoint presentation (including the animations!) and to take notes that get synched to the cloud using OneNote. Good stuff!

The sharing feature allows you to share pictures on social networks or via mail really quick. This is also one of the menus that developers can extend, as WhatsApp has done in the screenshot. Microsoft is also active in the gaming business and the Windows Phone does a good job connecting you to your Xbox LIVE account. You can tweak your avatar, send messages to friends, compare achievements, … The little guy on the screenshot –my Xbox avatar– is actually a moving 3D model that you can interact with, he even starts dancing if you are listening to some music. To put music and video on your phone, you use the Zune application, which is very good. One of the features of Zune that I particularly like is that you can simply drag a video to your phone and it will automatically convert and resize it. That may not seem to be a big deal, but I also own an iPad and getting videos on that device is actually rather tricky (except if you buy them from Apple, of course).

This is all I wanted to share about the Windows Phone 7.5 (a.k.a. Mango) operating system, but of course there is a lot more to tell about it. The Verge has a well-balanced and more elaborate review of Mango.

Nokia apps

Nokia has made some little tweaks to the OS, they have added some ringtones and the Nokia blue color, nothing very shocking. Let’s hope that because of the partnership between both companies, someday, some of the user interface of the N9 makes into Windows Phone.

They have added some extremely nice apps though. Bluetooth contacts transfer allows you to transfer contact from your previous phone over Bluetooth. Handy! Nokia Music sells music.

Nokia Maps is like Google and Bing maps, but from Nokia. It is a good app, but nothing shocking. Nokia Drive, on the other hand, is a really adding value. A lot of it. Navigation with a 3D map, spoken instructions and downloadable maps and voices that works properly and doesn’t cost a fortune (still looking at you, TomTom for the iPhone), perfect! I have tested it next to a TomTom and it works well. The GPS receiver is very good, I have very good reception, even inside. This can mostly be attributed to the polycarbonate body, which is very transparent to radio waves, unlike aluminum or steel. A little remark: please let us download maps over 3G, instead of just WiFi, warn us that it is going to be expensive, but a least let us decide to do it anyway.

About third party apps, adoption and maturity

Just like the other two big mobile platforms, Windows Phone 7 has an application store, which they call Market-place.

Marketplace has over fifty thousand apps al-ready, but does that really matter? I would argue that it is more important to have the apps you really want instead of just thousands of crapps. To some degree the Marketplace has the apps you need the most: Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, Skype (coming soon), Angry Birds… But then, once you have installed those, it is a bit underwhelming. Some good games are available (though they are bit expensive), but I simply can’t spend hours browsing apps in the Marketplace finding new apps to get even more out of my device like I can in the Apple AppStore.

Of course, this is easy to explain: Windows Phone has virtually no market share. According to Gartner, Windows Phone has 1,5% market share (based on sales third quarter 2011). Compared to Android (52,5%) and iOS (15%) that is a bit low. So the platform is not very attractive for app developers (or at least their companies) and few apps are built.

However, I am developer myself and one of my main reasons to use a Windows Phone is that is has a very good platform for developers. Silverlight and C# are a delight compared to Apple’s Objective C. Lack of market share is the only thing that makes the platform unattractive, everything else about it is excellent for developers. I believe the Lumia 800 and the “Microkia” partnership in general may the start of a serious raise in market share and popularity of the platform.

When the first version of Windows Phone 7 was released, over a year ago, a lot of reviewers stated that it was a step in the right direction, but lacked maturity. With over 500 new features in the Mango release it has grown up and is -in my opinion- equally capable as the iPhone or Android, except for the lack of good apps.

Conclusion

The Lumia 800 is a wonderful piece of engineering. The design is unlike anything we have ever seen: plastic, but premium. It is pretty, it will not fall apart, the ergonomics are better than any other device I have ever tested. Windows Phone 7 Mango is a good operating system, it is refreshing and beautiful. Live tiles and deep integration with social networks are real timesavers.

Does it work properly?
Yes, both the software and hardware work well, only the audio quality is disappointing.

Is Windows Phone mature enough?
The operating system feels a lot more “finished” than the first version of Windows Phone 7. Having said that, the Marketplace still is a bit disappointing compared to the competition.

Should I buy it?
If you want to buy a Windows Phone, buy this one. It is the best one I have seen. If you want to buy a smartphone, well…, you might like Windows Phone, it is something different, but there are some downsides.

The Lumia hardware may even be so good that it makes you forget some of the problems with Windows Phone and ultimately allows the platform to grow and prosper.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Nokia Belgium for giving me the opportunity to review this device and Microsoft Belgium for recommending me to Nokia.

I have done my best to add some good quality photos to this review. For a more complete photographic overview I refer to The Verge.

Third place in VRT mashup competition

2012-01-24T22:46:00.001+01:00

Over the past few months the VRT have opened up their APIs for developers to play with. They hosted a competition challenging webdevelopers to come up with interesting uses for their data and implement those ideas in the form of a mashup. And they do have a lot of interesting data: electronic programming guide for all their radio and television stations, a music database, traffic information, ...

My idea was to build a website that shows the current song and playlist for a radio station and add extra information and link it to social media. I had a lot of possibilities in mind (iTunes, Spotify, deep Facebook integration, Twitter integration, searching songs on YouTube, ...), but little time. I integrated it with Spotify and iTunes and added a player for the live stream. For the social aspect I was aiming for, I added AddThis (because that is only 5 minutes of work and I was running out of time) and chat (again, because I could do that really quick). The result is available on http://nowplaying.be

I used a few technologies and services I had never tried before and learned a lot: SignalR, HTML 5 audio, KnockoutJS, ...

The winners were announced during VRT Barcamp last Saturday, I couldn't be there but @greyscarlet on Twitter was kind enough to share a video of the announcement:

Bekendmaking winnaars #vrtmashup staat online: ow.ly/1EuDVY. Proficiat@wouterdevinck, @MatthiasDVr en @ikbenmartijn! #bcvrt
— Karen (@greystarlet) januari 21, 2012

And this is the video:

I got a third place and won an iPad, vrtwebradio.be is second and the winner is @hoeishetverkeer. I especially liked hoeishetverkeer, a deserved winner!

Honorable mentions (the few I have seen on Twitter): Radiofy and Stubrify. If there are any others that deserve a mention: let me know.

Nokia Lumia 800 launched in Brussels

2012-01-23T18:14:00.000+01:00

Friday night I was invited to an exclusive event in Brussels: the Belgian launch of the Lumia 800, Nokia's new flagship smartphone.

About a hundred bloggers and other "influential" people from the community were invited to come take a look at this new device. I already new most of what they had to say, because of course the Lumia 800 has launched in several countries over the past few months and because I have been using Windows Phone 7 devices since before they were released in Belgium (over a year ago). Nevertheless, it was a fun and interesting evening. Nokia has given me a Lumia 800 device to review, so stay tuned! I am still in the middle of the exam period, so I will post my full review in about two weeks, but I promise that it will be a very thorough one. By then the device will be available in Belgium for 499 euros (release date: February 1st).

Earlier that day the press was invited, this is the television news report (VRT - Het Journaal 19u 20/01/2012):

Guest lecture at KHBO Oostende about Windows Phone development

2011-12-12T11:24:00.001+01:00

Another one in our series of guest lectures: this morning Sebastiaan, Alexander and I are doing a guest lecture at KHBO Oostende. I am posting this while Alexander is still giving his XNA demo, so far so good!

The content:

Introduction (slides below): me talking about the phone for 30 minutes
Silverlight demos: I did the first, Sebastiaan the others
Click here to download the source code.
1. Flickr app
2. GPS demo (more info, but slightly different code)
3. Accelerometer demo (more info, but slightly different code)
4. Worker demo
XNA demo: Alexander did this demo
Click here to download the source code.
Workshop: students working on their own projects, exploring the samples, asking questions, trying some devices

The slides (or click here to download):

Guest lecture at KATHO about Windows Phone development

2011-11-30T22:06:00.001+01:00

This morning I did a guest lecture / workshop about WP7 development with two fellow MSPs: Alexander Dooms and Sebastiaan Polfliet. It was well received and we would like to thank the audience for being so great.

The content:

Introduction (slides below): me talking about the phone for 30 minutes
Silverlight demos: I did the first three, Sebastiaan the fourth
Click here to download the source code.
1. Flickr app
2. GPS demo (more info, but slightly different code)
3. Accelerometer demo (more info, but slightly different code)
4. Worker demo
XNA demo: Alexander did this demo
Click here to download the source code.
Workshop: students working on their own projects, exploring the samples, asking questions, trying some devices

The slides (or click here to download):

Facebook Timeline privacy

2011-09-29T01:52:00.000+02:00

I have been testing the new profile page that Facebook will start rolling out next week for a couple of days now and I really like it. However, I have some privacy concerns. Of course there is the obvious concern: on the classic profile page it takes quite an effort to click the "show more button" half a million times to see what a certain person was doing back in 2006, while on the new profile page -called Timeline- the same takes, well... a single click. But technically, nothing is exposed that wasn't exposed before.

However, there is a more hidden privacy concern. Facebook has algorithms that determine how much you "like" someone, based on your interactions, both private and public. It uses this information to determine which posts to show in the news overview and who to give a prominent place in the sidebar. That is okay as long as they don't share this information with anyone.

(or is it? http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html)

Unfortunately, timeline seems to use some of this information out in the open:

Note that one picture is bigger than the others. Why? Well, lengthy private conversations seems to be the answer in this case.

Suppose I don't want anyone to know (this blog post kind'a defeats that point). I went on a quest to figure out how to hide this and it took me surprisingly long to figure it out.

On top of your "Timeline" profile page you'll find the following buttons:

On the next page you can go back in time to the year and month of your choice and hide (or give even more attention to) whatever you want, including new friends.

So, the key takeaway from this story: if you want to hide something and there is no hide button directly next to it, go looking for it in the activity log.

Viking! 2.0

2011-09-12T23:49:00.001+02:00

Today, I have pushed a major update for my Mobile Vikings application for WP7 to the marketplace. Version two is a complete rewrite from the ground up and is supposed to be more robust, more secure and above all: more feature complete. It uses OAuth for authentication. New features: live tile (experimental, as this is quite challenging), multi sim support, usage history, top-up history, vikingpoints, sim details, ...

~~It may take a couple of days/weeks for this update to appear in the marketplace.~~
Update 14 sept: Viking! 2.0 has successfully passed the marketplace certification procedure and will appear soon.
Update 15 sept: Viking! 2.0 is available
Update 17 sept: Viking! 2.1 submitted to the marketplace. This update fixes a few minor bugs and one major bug that prevented users from logging in if their password contained any non-alphanumerical characters.
Update 21 sept: Viking! 2.1 is available

Guest lecture at KAHO Sint-Lieven

2011-05-02T16:35:00.003+02:00

This morning I did a guest lecture about Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 at KAHO Sint-Lieven, a university college in Ghent.

Here are my slides:

The PDC10 samples (links to the other samples are on the slides):

The source code:

Project Yelper

2011-04-30T22:26:00.060+02:00

A lot of demos on conferences feature Twitter these days. Jeroen and I noticed that and decided to do better, what about showing the 700 hundred students attending the developers track on the Students to Business day how to build the entire Twitter ecosystem using Microsoft technology? We brought in Niels -all the way from Keiem- to take care of the WCF stuff.

The audience entering the room on the S2B day.

We named our Twitter clone "Yelper" and built it using C#, ASP.NET MVC 3, Razor, jQuery, WCF, OData, Silverlight (on the phone), ...

The website is available on yelper.eu and yelper.be
The source code is available on yelper.codeplex.com
The WP7 is available on windowsphone.yelper.eu and in the marketplace.

The slides of our three sessions are available on Slideshare and below:

Session 1 The basic features of the website

Session 2 Adding some more features to the website and building the API

Session 3 The Windows Phone application

Yelper also got an inexplicable amount of media attention. It was featured in almost all Belgian online newspapers, in a few printed newspapers and on national radio. All of that for just a demo app. I will do a separate post about the media madness and its effect on the future of Yelper.

Interview with Scott Hanselman

2011-01-28T17:15:00.001+01:00

At PDC 2010 Jeroen and I were planning to interview Scott Hanselman, but time didn't allow. But no worries! One of our new MSPs, Dirk, interviewed Scott this week while he was in Belgium for Web Camp 2011.

Here is the video:

The full list of all interviews (15 to date) is now available on interviews.wouterdevinck.be, for your convenience.

Thanks to Scott for spending some time with students, to Katrien for helping and to of course to Dirk for doing this.

Releasing vikingapps.be - Apps for vikings on the move

2010-12-20T17:36:00.000+01:00

Today I am announcing a website I have built over the past couple of months. vikingapps.be is a gallery for applications build on the Mobile Vikings API. You can already find quite some apps on this website, but I'm hoping some more will be added over the next couple of days/weeks.

This website was built using ASP.NET MVC 2. If you would run into any bugs or find language errors, feel free let me know in the comments or via email.

Spending some time with the stars at PDC10 and TEE10

2010-11-17T01:17:00.003+01:00

At the Professional Developers Conference 2010 and at TechEd Europe 2010 Jeroen, Kurt and I have been interviewing some technology rock-stars.

Update (28 jan): at PDC we were planning to interview Scott Hanselman too, but time didn't allow. But no worries! One of our new MSPs, Dirk, interviewed Scott this week while he was in Belgium for Web Camp 2011. I have added the video to this list.

This is the complete list, in alphabetical order.

Anders Hejlsberg is a technical fellow (what’s in a name) at Microsoft working on new C# features (such as async). During the interview we finally found out why C# is COOL, how they design a programming language and what’s the next big thing in programming languages.

Bart De Smet is a fellow Belgian working at Microsoft on the Cloud Programmability Team where he’s all into shaping the future of data access in the cloud. We first talked with him about how he ended up working at Microsoft. Next we got an overview of Reactive Extensions and how it relates to the new Async CTP.

Part 1

Part 2

As Senior Technical Evangelist for Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management, Brian Keller is all passionate about testing. We sat down with him and tested his knowledge of test-driven development, code contracts and how development is done within Microsoft.

For the past two years we’ve known Caroline Phillips as the Western Europe academic lead. Since she had recently switched roles, it was the perfect timing to get to know more about her new job, how she ended up working at Microsoft and her vision towards students.

Don Syme (working on F# at Microsoft Research) and Talbott Crowell (a cofounder of one of the F# usergroups) tell us what F# exactly is and some real life applications. Furthermore we asked him about the future and heading of F#.

With Gill Cleeren we find out what is means to be a ‘Regional Director’. His vision on the HTML5 vs Silverlight debate and we end with a rather tricky question!

Giorgio Sardo is a Senior Developer Evangelist working Microsoft Corporation with a strong focus on Internet Explorer 9 and HTML5. In this interview we’ll find out what exactly HTML5 is, how Internet Explorer 9 is positioned competitors and their work on HTML5 support.

Jacqueline Russell is the new Western Europe academic lead since one month. We learn more about her professional history and whether she manages to keep up with the technical aspects in her new role. What are her plans for students? Is it easy to work with an international team?

We’ve already seen Jonathan Carter on stage at the PDC keynote and after his session at TechEd Europe, we thought it was time for an interview. We learn more about his OData and how it relates to other buzzwords like SOAP, REST. Lastly we’ll find out how Microsoft is using OData in their own products.

We have talked to Katrien De Graeve about her job as an evangelist and TechEd track owner, about what students should learn and about what it is like to be a woman at Microsoft.

With Mark Russinovich, also a technical fellow at Microsoft, we explored the possibility of cloudinternals or phoneinternals, the difference between his previous job and his new job. We also ask him about the new Windows Internals book.

Michelle Fleming is the worldwide Microsoft Student Partner program lead. We actually learn what being an MSP is all about and learn more about the new MSP platform.

So now we all know that Rob Miles is ‘me’. As a lecturer at the University of Hull in the United Kingdom he made the switch from teaching Java to C#, resulting in ‘the yellow book’. We learn more about his vision on teaching programming, the use of XNA and what he’s passionate about.

At Web Camp Belgium 2011 one of our new MSPs, Dirk Schuermans, interviewed Scott Hanselman. Topics: Razor, WebMatrix. Blog: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/

Thanks to Jennifer Perret for providing us the Flip cameras and to everyone who took place in front of our camera!

Shrek and Donkey on another worldwide adventure

2010-11-16T23:13:00.001+01:00

Some heroic tales about TechEd Europe 2010…

Last week I have been at TechEd Europe in Berlin. I was there together with Jan Potemans and four other Belgian student partners: Jeroen, Kurt, Julien and Raphaël. It was my third time at TechEd Europe, but once again I had the time of my life.



I have to admit that the past three weeks have been crazy, I've traveled about 19000 km, met dozens of interesting people including some of the brightest minds in the industry, learned a ton about new technologies, got some great new ideas and just had an awesome time in general. Now I have a massive todo-list to tackle and I need get up to speed for the exams, but boy I am happy!

We flew to Berlin in a cozy Avro RJ100 airplane with Brussels Airlines. After the short flight from Brussels to Berlin we hurried to our hotel, dropped off our bags and then hurried to the Messe conference center. Despites our efforts we arrived fashionably late at the MSP Summit. Over there, we had some interesting discussions, followed by some presentations, including a presentation about the cloud -because of course that’s obligatory these days- and the usual Microsoft recruitment talk by Holly Peterson.

At TechEd we also met “the new Caroline” and “the new Leandro”. Jacqueline Russell is the new Academic Lead for Western Europe and Michelle Fleming is now worldwide in charge of the MSP program.

This year we didn’t see that much of Berlin. We went to a nice restaurant on Tuesday night, where I had Blutwurst and after that we went for a walk in the city.



In between sessions we also continued our series of interviews. Jeroen, Kurt and I have interviewed (listed in alphabetical order): Brian Keller, Caroline Phillips, Gill Cleeren, Giorgio Sardo, Jacqueline Russell, Jonathan Carter, Katrien De Graeve, Mark Russinovich, Michelle Fleming and Rob Miles. Combined with the interviews we did at PDC, that makes for quite a nice collection! ~~We will publish ‘em all in a jiffy~~. Update: watch our interviews over here. Special thanks to Jennifer Perret for equipping us with Flip cameras for these interviews.



At the Belgian county drink on Wednesday we had a good time too, we had some interesting conversations and met some great people. Good thing Luc Van de Velde introduced his team, I already knew most of them, but the new MSPs didn’t.

On Thursday, after another day full of sessions and interviews, we headed to the MSP party. After some burgers and beers we went to drop off our bags at the hotel and then took the U-Bahn to a club on the 15th floor of a building on Alexanderplatz. When we arrived there we weren’t allowed to enter; the bouncers said we needed girls. You know, with a group of student partners, that is kind of a problem! After Jan called, the lovely Jacqueline came down, but amazingly even her smile wasn’t enough to get us in! Eventually we got in and had a good time! And oh, in our opinion there was nothing wrong with the boy/girl ratio inside, but I guess one girl for every Berlin boy isn’t enough…

Friday was a sad day. In the morning we went to a last session, said goodbye to the nice folks at U2U and left the conference center. It was time to fly back home. The end of another great adventure!

PS: Donkey is Jeroen

Disclosure: I attended TechEd as a guest of Microsoft. Special thanks to Caroline Phillips, Jan Potemans, Jacqueline Russell and Michelle Fleming.

Notes about flying halfway around the world for a two day conference

2010-11-08T00:56:00.001+01:00

You should try that too. Seriously.

Last week, Jeroen Verhulst and I flew to Seattle to attend the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference. We arrived in Seattle on Tuesday afternoon, after spending several hours on trains and busses and about ten hours up in the clouds (pun intended). We stayed in Bellevue, in the quite confortable Sheraton hotel. Bellevue is a good place to stay when visiting Microsoft; it is more vibrant than Redmond -where the Microsoft campus is located- but also closer to campus than Seattle.

On Wednesday, the day before the conference, Bart De Smet showed us around in Seattle. Bart is a young Belgian who currently lives in Bellevue and works for Microsoft. We visited the classic tourist spots: the first Starbucks, the Space Needle, the monorail… Click here for some more pictures.

After this quick visit we headed to campus. After a quick tour we headed to building one, where we had a meeting with Jennifer Perret. Jennifer gave us both a flip camera and a mission: we had to go interview some speakers. Later that week we have interviewed Anders Hejlsberg, Don Syme and Bart De Smet and we plan to interview some more speakers at TechEd Europe next week. ~~I am still busy processing and uploading the videos, but I will make sure to post the links on this blog when they are available.~~ Update: watch our interviews over here.

Thursday was day one of the conference. The keynote was delivered by Steve Ballmer and Bob Muglia. The main topics of the keynote were IE9, HTML5, WP7 and a lot about Windows Azure.

You can find some more info about the announcements here and on the SQL Azure Team Blog.

We expected Microsoft to demonstrate a real world application running on Azure to demonstrate its potential. However, we didn’t expect Steve Jobs’ Pixar to bring us that application. Apparently Pixar doesn’t only make animation movies; they sell the leading animation movie rendering software RenderMan as well. According to Chris Ford from Pixar, who appeared in the keynote in a Wall-E shirt, animation studios usually need large render farms with hundreds of processing units to render a movie in an acceptable time (think weeks or months). By running RenderMan on Azure, Pixar hopes to enable smaller companies to use their software as well. The interesting part of their implementation is that they allow their user to select how many instances to start. The more instances a user starts, the faster the job is done, but this of course comes at a higher price. Long Zheng and Nick Eaton also blogged about this.

The recordings of the keynote and all sessions are available here.

We also expected Microsoft to announce the next version of Silverlight. Apparently we weren’t the only ones who were expecting this. Microsoft however barely mentioned Silverlight in the keynote. Then, Mary Jo Foley published a blog post, based on an interview with Bob Muglia who said that Microsoft’s strategy with Silverlight has shifted. Bob did not announce the end of Silverlight, however, on the internet a storm broke loose.

I regret Microsoft is didn’t make any Silverlight announcements at the PDC, but here is why I think the rumors of Silverlight’s death are greatly exaggerated:

Releases are slowing down, that’s true, but isn’t that normal as a product matures? Furthermore, the Silverlight team must have spent a lot of time on Windows Phone 7.
Microsoft is hosting a Silverlight Firestarter event, keynoted by Scott Guthrie, December 2.
This interview with Scott Guthrie.
This blogpost by Bob Muglia and this one by Tim Heuer. Update: this one by Scott Guthrie.

Lunch was in a tent outside, where you had to choose a table by discussion topic. I don’t know who came up with that idea, but it was rather annoying to have to talk to people working on product X about their product while having lunch.

After lunch we headed back to building 33 -the conference center- to pick up our phones. During the keynote Ballmer had said that all attendees would get a free Windows Phone 7 device. The way he said that was actually rather funny. As it turned out, everyone who (or who’s company) paid the full conference fee got an LG device and people with a discount (e.g. academics like us) got a Samsung preproduction device (SGH-i707, a.k.a. Taylor).

I am not going to write a full review of this device, just some thoughts. Let me be clear, I love WP7 and I’m going to use one as my primary phone. However, the battery life of this device is the worst I have ever seen (but then again, it is a prototype), I really miss copy/paste (but that’s coming early 2011), it should have app notifications (e.g. the Facebook app notifying you about a new comment) and it’s a pity developers can’t make dynamic tiles (yet?). There aren’t quite as many apps in the Marketplace so far as on competing platforms, but I honestly don’t care about that. It is a matter of quality, not quantity!

After lunch we had to choose between Bart’s session and Ander Hejlsberg’s session about new language features. Not an easy choice! Bart assured us that he would summarize Anders’ session on one slide, so we both went to see his session. Bart’s session was a mess, but in the best possible way. And oh, he said the word “brainfuck”! Learn more about the new keywords (await and async) that Anders and Bart have introduced over here. I won’t discuss the other sessions I have attended this first day and the second day.

On Saturday we attended a workshop about Windows Phone 7 at the Microsoft Platform Adoption Center (building 20). It was okay, but way too crowded. On Sunday we flew home.

Disclosure: Microsoft Belgium sponsored this trip by paying for our flights. Special thanks to Jan Potemans for making this possible.

Imagine Cup 2010 worldwide finals in Poland

2010-07-12T00:29:00.014+02:00

What an amazing week we had…

I’m just back from the Imagine Cup worldwide finals in Warsaw, Poland. Jan Potemans, our awesome Belgian ADE -the person at Microsoft Belgium who takes care of the relations with the academic world- took two teams to the finals of this huge technology contest. I led the Belgian Software Design team (Niels Derdaele, Jeroen Verhulst, Sebastiaan Polfliet and myself). The other Belgian team (Leslie Van Den Broeck, Jeroen Tavernier, Rob De Reycke, Jerry Verhoeven, their mentor and two other faculty members) took part in another competition, Game Development.

The Imagine Cup is the world’s premier technology contest for students. There are three main categories –software design, game development and embedded development- and some awards. Software design is the biggest category -68 countries were represented by a team in Warsaw- and the winning team in this category wins the Imagine Cup (I mean the actual cup) and USD 25 000. A total of about 325 000 students participated in the Imagine Cup 2010, about 400 of them made it to the worldwide finals. It was our honor to represent Belgium.

Most students stayed in the Novotel hotel, where Microsoft had installed a registration desk and replaced all Macs with PCs (yep, I noticed). Presentations in the first rounds took place in the Intercontinental hotel and the Palace of Culture and Science (pictured below), where all teams could showcase their projects too. On Wednesday the showcase moved to the opera building where the finalist presentations and the closing event were held.

The opening ceremony on Saturday evening took place on a stage in front of the Palace of Culture and Science. Jon Perera -GM of Microsoft Education- did most of the talking, together with Waldemar Pawlak -Polish Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy- and Jacek Murawski –GM of Microsoft Poland. Zakopower, a Polish folk music group, added some music to the opening. Video below, courtesy of Microsoft (yes, I have seen me too).

Sunday morning we had a few briefings by awesome people like Lisa Harper and Rob Miles (our captain). Something that was immediately clear during these briefings was that the event was very well organized. Picture courtesy of Niels Derdaele.

After these briefings we received a timetable that said we had to do our round one presentation at the Intercontinental at 4 pm. This was a huge relieve, because we had still some work to do on our presentation. A few days earlier we had had a coaching session at Microsoft Belgium, where general manager Phillip Vandervoort and director of DPE Luc Van de Velde had given us a ton of very useful feedback on our initial presentation. We had been working late at night to implement most of this feedback and were happy to have a few extra hours to practice the revamped presentation.

Then it was time to present. We checked in at the Palace of Culture and Science and were escorted to the Intercontinental hotel by a Polish MSP. While we were waiting and having a coffee in front of the presentation room, a girl came to us screaming that we had betrayed her. We looked at her a bit flabbergasted, wondering who she was and why she was looking more nervous than us. It turned out that she was another Polish MSP who was supposed to escort us to the room. But still, thank you, Kamila and all other Polish MSPs, for helping with the organization of this giant event, good job, well done. In the presentation room we had some time to set everything up with the assistance of the MSPs and crew and then the judges appeared. In round one we only had to present for seven people: four very kind judges; Kinga -an MSP who was keeping track of time; Jan -our ADE- and Caroline Phillips.

Our presentation went well; the judges were kind and asked good question, we gave good answers. Our project was a bit underwhelming and too basic to stand any chance in the competition, but we did a good job presenting it. After the presentation Kinga –one of those very kind MSPs- shot a video of our first reactions when leaving the room. The excitement of the moment made Sebastiaan unable to summarize the project he had just been demoing, made me talk already about going to the finals and left Jeroen unchanged (he was still talking about beer). That makes for one funny video, for your viewing pleasure (courtesy of Kinga Sysiak):

On Sunday evening we already knew we were out of the competition. All we know is that out of the 68 teams, we didn’t make it to the final twelve.

Monday, we decided to explore Warsaw. We did a little walk and found a war museum; they were closed but had an impressive collection of planes, helicopters and tanks in their “garden”. Just one of many pictures I took, so you get the idea.

Monday afternoon we had to be at our booth, because the press was visiting the showcase. Big names like Jon Perera and Kimberly Voltero visited our booth (that reminds me that if we are ever again at the Imagine Cup finals we need to practice a short demo for the showcase too, those first tries weren’t very good).

Monday night the other Belgian team -the gaming team- was selected top three. From then on it was up to them to defend the Belgian honor -something they’ve done great, but more on that later.

Tuesday was the culture day, when we visited the castle of Pultusk. A great pianist kicked off this day of relaxation with some music and some jokes. Then we were free to choose what activities to do: making cheese, pottery, wood sculpting, kayaking, traditional Polish dance… It was a great and sunny day. Although, on the way back to Warsaw we discovered what a Polish thunderstorm looks like: very wet…

Living picture with Daniel van Soest; Tom Verhoeff –the mentor of the Dutch team, in orange– and some people of Kenyan and Ugandan national TV.

On Thursday, we attended over eight hours of finalist presentations in the opera building. Three teams in gaming, six teams in embedded development and six teams in software design each did a 20 minute presentation, followed by a 15 minute Q&A. The quality of these projects was really, really high and a lot of the presentations where incredibly good. I’ve seen speakers who are a lot better than most keynote speakers on events like TechEd. I’ve seen presentations that could easily compete with those presented by top presenters like Al Gore and Steve Jobs. I was blown away by what these students managed to do in their spare time. I’ve seen projects and listened to stories that moved me deeply. For the first time I was truly convinced that students really can change the world and that technology really can help solve the world’s toughest problems.

On Thursday we had to spend a few more hours at the showcase, in the opera building this time. Quite some people stopped at our booth for a short demo of our project. Some of the judges came to say hi too, pictured below is the team with Sally from Argentina and Felienne from The Netherlands, two very kind judges. Picture courtesy of Sally Buberman.

Then it was time for the big award ceremony, the World Festival. First the award winners were announced; then the winners in gaming, embedded and software and finally Poland passed the flag to the USA. The Imagine Cup 2011 finals will be in New York. My team is hiring, if you think you can help, if you have a great idea, if you have a real talent (does not have to be technical, we need designers/artists too, male/female, Flemish/Walloon…) and want to go to New York and have the experience of a lifetime, let me know.

Before the flag was passed, we received a video message from Michelle Obama, the First Lady. And oh, Jon Perera announced that all 400 finalists are getting a Windows Phone 7 as soon as they are available, the crowd went nuts. The entire ceremony was streamed live and is still available here.

Message from Michelle Obama:

The winners

Software Design

1st Place: Skeek, Thailand
They film a lesson using a webcam, do facial detection and speech recognition and translate what is being said to sign language. The text is displayed in a speech bubble on the video and the signs are shown on a 3D model. Impressive!

2nd Place: TFZR Team, Serbia
An interface to control the PC with your brain: send text messages, use Facebook… This team told the story of how they enabled someone who had never been able to communicate before to use a PC to do just that, communicating. Wow

3rd Place: OneBeep, New Zealand
Developed a protocol to broadcast files (for example applications for OLPC) over AM radio. How is it possible no one has thought of that before?

Embedded Development

1st Place: SmarterME, Taiwan
They developed a meter that can detect what devices are switched on in your house. Why you ask? Well, this is what their software can tell you: “Device x has been on for y minutes, that costs USD z. You might want to replace it with device u, which costs USD v and it takes w days to return the investment”. Amazing.

2nd Place: MCPU, Russia
A robot, talking Russian, driving around and moving arms up and down. Supposed to teach children exercises and stories/songs. Not that enthusiastic about this one…

3rd Place: GERAS, France
An intelligent floor. The system automatically calls the emergency service if the (elderly) occupant falls on the floor and is unable to get up again. Good idea, but I see some deal-breaking issues with their solution.

Game Design

1st Place: By Implication, Philippines
Best presentation. Ever.

2nd Place: NomNom Productions, Belgium
Well done guys! And M’Boko.

3rd Place: Gears Studio, France
Maybe try to avoid the shooting next time? I liked the level editor.

At the same time of the Imagine Cup –the world cup for technology-, the football world cup was happening is South Africa. A video:

Oh, are you wondering what we’ve built? We’ve built a social network for partnerships. Learn more on www.biamori.be. Here are the slides of our presentation:

My pictures are available here and below.

I would like to end by thanking everybody who made this week so wonderful: Phillip Vandervoort, Luc Van de Velde, Jan Potemans, Lisa Harper, Jon Perera, Rob Miles, my team, the Polish MSPs, all other competitors and many, many others.

Keep changing the world!

Guest lecture at KAHO Sint-Lieven

2010-05-10T19:32:00.003+02:00

Today I was invited to do a guest lecture at KAHO Sint-Lieven, a school in Ghent.

My lecture consisted of two parts: the presentation I did at the Students to Business day and an overview of some real-world Silverlight applications and some demos.

For the slides and demos of the first part: please refer to this blogpost.

And here are the links to everything I showed during the second part:

Real-world apps

Siverlight Toolkit

Demos from the PDC

Techdays 2010: Wrap-up (part 3)

2010-04-04T18:49:00.002+02:00

Looking for part 1 or part 2? Or maybe just looking for my Silverlight demo?

Thursday April 1st, last day in this three day story.

First up, Scott Hanselman about .NET 4. Scott was not as good as on Wednesday, I guess the downside of a great speaker like this is that things that are funny the first time you hear them are already less funny the second time. By the third time you see him, you might even start hating him. His content was good, I learned a lot and in the end that’s what matters.

Bart De Smet talked about the CLR 4. There was some overlap between this session and previous sessions I had seen, but Bart was good as always and told about all those things just that little bit extra. There was a session about MVVM I wanted to see at the same time, remember me to check the video later.

During the lunch the same problem as Wednesday, not one, but two talks I wanted to see. Blogging tips by Scott Hanselman or WP7 development by Charlie Kindel. I chose Scott, but I should have chosen Charlie. Gimme that video!

After the lunch I joined a huge crowd to see Sara Ford giving some VS2010 tips. The talk was even delayed a few minutes because they could get everyone in the room in time. The tips were useful, but unfortunately Sara was very nervous. So Sara, no reason to be nervous, you did great!

Then Peli the Halleux tried to bore us to death with a session about Moles and Pex. No offence, the speaker was fine and his subject interesting, only I was really tired and I already knew most he talked about from TechEd.

After that I decided to take a break in the speakers’ room and start writing this series of blog posts. That's where Arlindo introduced Jeroen and I to Julie. That’s all I’m going to write about that… ever

John R. Durant closed the conference with a few words about developing on top of Office 2010. Good presentation, but I would have liked to see some more code (e.g. the code of the “backstage” example)

This was the last post in this series about the Techdays, I hope you enjoyed it!

Techdays 2010: Wrap-up (part 2)

2010-04-04T18:17:00.001+02:00

Find part 1 of this post, about the Students to Business day here.

Now something about the actual Techdays. Wednesday and Thursday, while the other students were back at school, we attended the Techdays. This year’s Techdays where really, really good. Look at the list of speakers: Anders Hejlsberg, Scott Hanselman, Sara Ford, Rafal Lukawiecki, Charlie Kindel, our own Bart De Smet, …

Anders Hejlsberg kicked off the developer part of the conference with a keynote about trends in (and the future of) programming languages. He talked about things like dynamic and functional programming. The video is already available on Channel 9 and I’ve embedded it below. Definitely worth an hour of your time!

After the keynote I’ve seen Katrien De Graeve and Gill Cleeren’s session about Silverlight 4 and WPF 4. First Gill talked about Silverlight. I liked the fact that he talked about some more business oriented functionalities in SL4 (e.g. printing) too. I would have liked to see Katrien talk a bit longer about WPF 4.

During the lunch I had to choose between two sessions I liked to see. Something about XNA by a former Imagine Cup winner, Timothy Vanherberghen and something about the Surface application in Belgian TV show “De Kinderpuzzel”. I chose to see the Surface application, although in the end I didn’t get to see it. The speaker, Boris Rogge, showed some of the code and ran out of time. It was interesting to hear the story behind the application though. Too bad I couldn’t see Timothy’s talk, but I’ll certainly watch the video. They should hang the person who has invented lunch sessions, during the lunch break, just let me, you know … eat!

Then I went to Giorgio Sardo’s session about HTML5 and IE9. He didn’t show anything really shocking, check out the platform preview and you’re back up to date. One thing I really liked was Giorgio’s opinion about the Acid 3 test. I agree that this test is mostly a marketing thing and that its relevance as a tool to test whether a browser is standard-compliant is very low. The number of test-cases in Acid 3 is low and the things that are being tested are very often rather unrealistic scenarios. What I did not like was that he kept on talking about improving the performance of IE by making it render pages faster. I don’t care you make my page render ten milliseconds faster, I only care a little that you can make a bunch of browser logo’s spin at over 60 frames per second (by the way, he demoed that Chrome only runs the animation at 3 FPS, but apparently the current version of Opera can do the trick just as fast as the preview of IE9, take a look at the screenshot or try it yourself).

What I do care about, is how fast a browser feels. When I fire up Chrome or Opera or even good old Firefox, I can immediately start typing and the browser will immediately be responsive, making suggestions about where I might want to go. When I fire up Internet Explorer I often find myself waiting for the browser to load that start page I don’t really need to see and while not being able to type or while not (yet) getting any suggestions. I’m talking about seconds, not milliseconds. I’m talking about a long and deep sigh, not about the blink of an eye.

Next was the session called “A day in the life of a Silverlight/WPF integrator” by Laurant Bugnion. If you don’t have a clue what an integrator is, neither did I. Apparently an integrator is someone who takes a design from a designer (Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, …) and turns it into XAML using Expression Blend, Expression Design, a calculator and some rulers. Laurant showed some great features in Blend I didn’t know about (did you know there’s a tool to copy a gradient from anywhere on the screen?). Having that said, I’m not entirely sure whether I like the role of “integrator”. They had designers who used to work with Adobe tools, they started to develop things in Silverlight and WPF and because they didn’t want the designers to learn how to use Blend (a tool built for designers…) they created an entirely new role, the role of integrator. These “integrators” then had to learn the basic features of the Adobe tools and how to use the Microsoft tools only to create a scenario where the designer still can’t control the final result of his design and the integrators spend their days measuring and translating bitmaps into XAML. This doesn’t sound very efficient to me. I like to design (I’m not saying I’m good at it), I like to write code, but I’m afraid I would really hate to “integrate”.

Scott Hanselman then tried to teach us some “ASP.NET MVC 2 ninja blank belt tips”. Good tips, great speaker. Loved it. Giorgio Sardo took the last session slot with a talk about Windows Phone 7 ~~Series~~ (why you can drop that last word). This was (correct me if I’m wrong) the first public WP7 demo in Belgium. It’s pretty hard not to like that.

Then I had Chinese food with Jeroen. (many people told me not write about the food, so I really had to write that…)

~~Part three coming soon …~~ Move on to part 3

Techdays 2010: Wrap-up (part 1)

2010-04-01T23:25:00.002+02:00

This week I’ve been attending two Microsoft events in Antwerp: the Students to Business day on Tuesday and the Techdays on Wednesday and Thursday. At the Students to Business day I was a speaker (if you are looking for my demos: over here).

Let’s start with the Students to Business day. I was very much involved in this event so please forgive me if I’m a bit biased, feel free to comment or mail me if you have any feedback on this event and/or on my talk.

This day for students started with a keynote by Phillip Vandervoort, Eva Van Laere, Yves Kerwyn, Kimberly Voltero and Luc Van de Velde. Phillip and Luc are experienced speakers and they did well, but of course most students were waiting for some technical content. Eva and Yves did a chaotic presentation of some new features in Office 2010. Unfortunately a lot went wrong during those demos. In my opinion the best part of the keynote was Kimberly’s part: The Power of Students.

After the keynote, the real fun started. First up: Bart Wullems about .Net 4 and VS2010. Good presenter, good content, I liked it and I learned some new things. After the lunch it was my turn. “Five things you’ll love about Silverlight” Right before my talk I was standing next to the stage, looking into the room full of students and, you know, freaking out… But once my slides appeared I just started and everything went well. The feedback I got so far was pretty positive so I’m really glad I accepted the invitation to do a talk. If you’ve got any feedback, please let me know! After my talk Bart De Smet, a young Belgian who currently works for Microsoft in Redmond talked about how Microsoft uses TFS to manage and test large software projects. I liked it, the audience liked it and I’m pretty sure Bart liked it too. Sumit Mehrotra closed the day with a talk about Azure.

After the students to Business day we were invited by Microsoft to go to the Sportpaleis to watch Starwars in concert. I’m not exactly a Starwars fan, but still an impressive show!

Wednesday and Thursday we attended the Techdays. ~~I’ll post about the Techdays later.~~ Go to part 2

Presentation on Students to Business day 2010

2010-03-30T17:50:00.000+02:00

Just a few hours ago I did a presentation "Five things you'll love about Silverlight" on the Microsoft Students to Business day 2010 in Antwerp. All went well and I promised to publish my demos on this blog, so here you go:

A zip with the demo source code

A running demo

The slides (without the video, Powerpoint 2010 only)

Plugg 2010

2010-03-11T23:28:00.001+01:00

Today I have attended Plugg 2010, a one-day conference in Brussels about web and mobile startups in Europe. I'm not going to write an in-depth report of this conference, but I would like to share some thoughts.

First and foremost, although I'm a computer science student who isn't currently involved in a startup, these sessions where very interesting and inspirational for me too. I really, really liked the short (20 minute) presentations this morning, most of them were very good. I especially liked Astrid Sandoval's talk about Issuu.

There was also a startup contest, the 20 finalists of this contest each did a 2 minute presentation. Both the audience and a professional jury where voting. To note: summarizing your whole idea in 2 minutes can be quite hard and some finalists did a very well, but others failed to make clear what their startups are doing. The 3 best startups then each did a 10 minute presentation. Raz*War won the audience award and Fits.me won the contest.

After the startup rally there where some more keynotes. I enjoyed the sessions about mobile applications and how to make money with them. The presentation of Opera Software Chairman Jon S. von Tetzchner was very insightful too (e.g. how does Opera make money with a free browser).

The venue for this event was the Begacom Sufhouse. Nice hall and conference room, but we suspect that Belgacom uses the big hall either as a storage space for weapons of mass destruction or to build aircrafts. The pictures should clarify why we think that. Either way, not the best location for people who are afraid of heights.

All pictures and videos of the conference are available online.

I attended Plugg 2010 as a guest of the organisation, special thanks to Zeus for making this possible!

Building a conference website and registration system

2010-03-01T20:25:00.000+01:00

Over the past few weeks, I've been working on the website and registration system for the Students to Business Day 2010.

On a related note: registrations have opened, you can now register for this free event on www.s2b2010.be. I'm doing a one-hour session called "Five things you'll love about Silverlight", on the developers track.

The registration system also includes a portal for schools to verify which of their students have already registered. Administrators get some basic statistics about the participants and a list of names, email-addresses and phone numbers. The styled list is nice, but not very handy in some situations. For that reason, there's an export to Excel function too.

Pictures:

You don't have Silverlight on your computer, that's why the images below might not load as fast and smooth as possible. Click here to get Silverlight.

The Gu in Belgium

2009-12-07T16:43:00.000+01:00

Last Friday afternoon, I went to Brussels to see Scott Guthrie (a.k.a. “The Gu”) in action.

Let’s quote Wikipedia:

Scott Guthrie (born 1975) is a vice president in the Microsoft Developer Division. He runs the development teams that build ASP.NET, Common Language Runtime (CLR), Silverlight, Windows Forms, WPF, IIS 7.5, Commerce Server, .NET Compact Framework, Visual Web Developer and Visual Studio Tools for WPF. He is best known for his work on ASP.NET, which he and colleague Mark Anders developed while at Microsoft.

Scott talked about 3 major topics: ASP.NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010, Silverlight 4 and ASP.NET MVC 2.0. I found it rather remarkable that even after four hours he didn’t bore me at all. Great speaker! (and of course: interesting topics).

Scott Guthrie is known to wear a red shirt when doing a presentation, so every attendee got a red shirt. That of course resulted in some nice pictures.

Luckily, Scott did a lot of demos. During his Silverlight talk he showed a few of the applications that were first shown at the PDC, including the photo booth application and a Silverlight 4, out-of-browser, Facebook client.

I’m happy I have finally seen how to use ASP.NET MVC too. For some reason I had never before seen a real demo of how to get started with it. I’m a fan!

Scott also said that there will be some kind of big announcement about windows mobile and Silverlight for mobile early next year.