This week I gave a presentation about Software Craftsmanship at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim. There were about 50 attendees, they were enthusiastic and asked a bunch of questions. Couldn’t have asked for a better audience!

Here are some pictures:

Here are my slides:

How do I become a good developer?

One of the students asked me this question. I’m not sure there is a short and correct answer to this question, but I’ll try to lead you in the right direction - so that you can find some answer. Pete McBreen suggests the Apprenticeship model for learning in his Software Craftsmanship book:

“We must reverse the decline in the quality of developer training. Learning software development is not the same as being taught how to program. Apprenticeship is more effective than training to learn a craft, since it is more about learning than it is about teaching. Apprenticeship deliberately avoids the "learned helplessness" of the schooling model by making the apprentices an integral part of the software development team (chapter 12).” – Pete McBreen, Software Craftsmanship: The New Imperative

Apprenticeship is simply explained: learning by doing with guidance from an experienced fellow. Read the Wikipedia article for more information.

What does it mean for me? Well, it means that you should find someone that can teach and help you to become a better developer. Don’t expect this person to tutor you, but expect this person to give you directions. This person will tell you what books to read, what problems are worth solving, what concepts that are worth looking into, what tools to use, what Open Source project you should look into etc.

Therefore I think you can start becoming a better developer by finding someone to pair up with.

What books should I read?

The first three books that pop up in my head are:

• The Pragmatic Programmer
• Test Driven Development: By Example
• Clean Code

You’ll find more suggestions here and here.

Good luck on your journey to becoming a master in the craft of Software Development!

Tomorrow I’m going to give a talk at Smidig utvikling Trondheim 2009, which is a seminar about agile. I’m really looking forward to this seminar because of good content and good speakers. There are some big names keynote speakers as well.

I’m not going to spoil too much of my talk, but I can say I’m going to talk about how teams developing software can be able to work in parallel if they apply loose coupling.

Here are my slides from my talk at NNUG Trondheim 26 February.

The development of the technology inside the IT business happens really, really fast, and many of these technologies have one thing in common; OO (Object Orientation).

Since OO seems to play an important role in our business, I think it’s important for us as developers to achieve a deeper understanding of the concept. It’s more to it than polymorphism, encapsulation and inheritance.

If you manage to master the OO concept, you’ll be able to “reuse” your knowledge across various new technologies like Silverlight, WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), .NET, Java, Ruby on Rails and the list goes on. It doesn’t matter if you are coding C++, Ruby, C#, VB, or Java, all of them apply the same concept; OO. Yes, they have their differences, but that’s another story.

Not only will a deeper insight to OO help you learn technologies faster, it will help you to write better code. In my presentation I also talk about 3 of the 5 SOLID principles; SRP (Single Responsibility Principle, DIP (Dependency Inversion Principle) and OCP (Open-Closed Principle). If you don’t know them, please learn them!!

You’ll find plenty of information about good design principles here.

This screencast was captured at MSDN Live in Trondheim 11. September 2008.

Download the source code from the presentation.

Download the slides from the presentation.

This screencast was captured at MSDN Live in Trondheim 11. September 2008.

Download the source code from the presentation.

Download the slides from the presentation.

This screencast was captured at MSDN Live in Trondheim 11. September 2008.

Download the source code from the presentation.

Download the slides from the presentation.

Here is the source code from my MSDN Live presentations.

Disclaimer: If you, dear reader is going to attend MSDN Live in one of the other cities (Bergen, Stavanger or Oslo), I recommend that you stay away from the source code to after I’m finished with the sessions in your city!

In order to run the demos you need Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and Silverlight Tools Beta 2 for Visual Studio 2008. If you have some issues regarding the source code, drop me a comment.

Silverlight 2

ASP.NET Dynamic Data

Forretningsapplikasjoner med WPF

In this post I will list all the questions I get during MSDN Live September 2008 regarding my presentations, and also answer them. If you attend one of my sessions, feel free to leave a comment and ask your question here.I will continuously update this post!

Silverlight 2

ASP.NET Dynamic Data

WPF Line of Business Applications

Q1: Is there a DataGrid for WPF?
A: According to Rob Relyea, Microsoft announced back at Mix08 and TechEd08 that the WPF team is working on a DataGrid and a Ribbon control for WPF. They have added their project to CodePlex and following the more transparent Microsoft trend.

If time to marked is important, it’s possible to check out controls from 3^rd party vendor like XCeed, ComponentOne, Telerik and Infragistics. As last resort, you can host a Windows Forms control inside your WPF application. Then you have plenty vendors to choose from when deciding a Grid control. Check out this post.

The MSDN Live tour fall 2008 has started and the first event was in Stavanger 4.September. This was the third time I’m a speaker at MSDN Live in Stavanger, and as always a pleasure! You guys and gals always give good feedback! Thank you very much! I also had the chance to speak to the audience between my sessions, and I was great. Lots of enthusiastic developers in this city! But enough about that, and back to the reason I’m posting this post; the slides from my presentations.

Disclaimer: If you, dear reader is going to attend MSDN Live in one of the other cities (Bergen, Stavanger or Oslo), I recommend that you stay away from those slides and source code to after I’m finished with the sessions in your city!

If you have any question or feedback, please go ahead and leave a comment or send me an e-mail. You find my address in the slides or in the bottom of this page.

Silverlight 2

ASP.NET Dynamic Data

Forretningsapplikasjoner med WPF

I just want to inform that the dates for the next MSDN and TechNet Live have been announced. As usual the tour visits Stavanger, Bergen, Trondheim and Oslo.

I’ve had a sneak peek at the program for both MSDN and TechNet. TechNet focuses heavily on the release of Microsoft’s new virtualization platform, Hyper-V. Actually every session is about this product or virtualization in general. Exciting!

I’ve been invited to speak on the developer track (MSDN) along with Anders Norås and Rune Zakariassen. I’m covering Silverlight 2, ASP.NET Dynamic Data and Line of Business applications in WPF. Anders is covering Service Oriented Architecture and Internet Explorer 8 for developers, and Rune is going to talk about debugging. There is also going to be a second track on MSDN with focus on ASP.NET and how to build web applications on the .NET platform.

I’m really looking forward to this event. Anders in one of the most famous Norwegian developers I know of. His is a known blogger, and a prominent speaker. What’s special about him is that he has in depth knowledge of and experience from using several platforms like .NET, Java and Open Source projects. Last year he gave a speech at the JavaOne conference in Oslo, and now he is going to talk to the .NET community through MSDN live. He has entitled his session: “Want SOA? Throw out your web services!”. It’s bold statement seen from the .NET community perspective! This should be interesting. Yeah, I know SOA isn’t about Web Services, it’s just a tool. I’m looking forward to this Anders!

Rune is also good speaker and I’m sure he going to deliver a great session about debugging. It’s an important topic, because we developers spend lots of our time debugging. I think the audience (me included) can learn plenty of tricks here to put in their developer tool belt here.

I’m going to do some writing later on the topics I’m covering. Hope to see you at MSDN Live in September!

Yesterday we had a NNUG (Norwegian .NET Developer Group) meeting in Trondheim. Mads Nissen and Olle Paulsson from Objectware started the meeting and they presented their thoughts on and experience from SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). This is a quite bold topic, but I thought they delivered very well! They had a firm and clear vision what SOA is all about. Great session guys!

After the break Pål Fossmo and I talked about what’s new in VS2008 (Visual Studio 2008). Pål started to talk about Code Metrics. There were some neat tricks to detect if your source code is unmanageable. The code metric tool in VS2008 can measure class coupling (dependencies between classes), depth of inheritance and cyclomatic complexity. Alt this is indicators of how manageable your source code is. I never used this tool in VS, but I will start right away. Thank you Pål!

I talked about SL 2 (Silverlight 2). This was a follow up the talk Øyvind Viken had last year about Silverlight 1. It was a short speech where I focused on what’s new in version 2. The most important thing about SL 2 is that it contains a CLR (Common Language Runtime). Yeah, it’s right you can now developer SL 2 applications in your favorite .NET development language. You can at least choose between C#, VB.NET, IronPython and IronRuby.

Content from my presentation:

• Slides (Power Point 97/2003)

• Slides (Power Point 2007)

• Source code

Da har jeg omsider fått lagt ut kildekoden fra vinterens runde av MSDN Live. Jeg beklager at det har tatt noe tid. Jeg har delvis kommentert koden samt fjernet det som var overflødig. Hvis du har noen spørsmål så er det bare å legge igjen en kommentar eller sende meg en e-post på mail at goeran.no.

Windows Presentation Foundation

Den første presentasjonen jeg hadde på MSDN Live denne vinteren var om WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation).

Jeg implementerte presentasjonen i WPF slik at jeg kunne kode XAML inline i slidesene og så rendre output (WPF) direkte til skjerm. Denne applikasjonen kan dere også bruke for å se hvordan man strukturerer opp WPF applikasjoner og som en huskeliste for XAML/WPF syntaks. I applikasjonen så viser jeg også eksempler på basic XAML, Styles, Triggers, Databinding og templates. Du kan laste ned kildekoden på linkene listet opp i avsnittet under.

• WPF Introduction ”Power Point Killer”
  Applikasjon som ble brukt som slides under presentasjonen
• Web Viewer
  Demoen som ble kodet opp på slutten av presentasjonen. Her viser jeg hvordan man konsumerer data fra en webapplikasjon og visualisere denne dataen i WPF.
• CoverFlow
  Implementering av iTunes Cover Flow i WPF

ASP.NET MVC Framework

Den siste presentasjonen jeg hadde under MSDN Live var om ASP.NET MVC. Du kan laste ned slides og kildekode i avsnittet under.

• Power Point Slides
• BlogOnRails
  Demoen som jeg viste under presentasjonen

Last week I held a presentation about WPF for Microsoft Student Community at NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology).

As I’ve mention before in my blog; Microsoft Student Community is an organization for students with interest in Microsoft related technologies and especially .NET. The organization is driven students on voluntarily basis. 44 people had registered for the event and I think and 30 of them came. The content of the event was WPF and LINQ which my friend Jonas Follesø held. If you continue to read you will find Q&As from the session. And If you fingers are itching to touch XAML and WPF you can download the source code I posted in the "NNUG WPF presentation" post.

In my presentation I focused on XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language) and some basic WPF; standard controls, triggers, data binding style and templates. During my speech I got a lot of questions. The students particularly seemed to care about XAML. No doubt they saw the trade off by developing the user interface in a markup language.

Someone also asked about the deployments scenarios. Here is the full overview of the scenarios. Scenario 1; compile a WPF application as a standard EXE. Then the application will be run as a process on the OS with security context from the user that started the application.

Scenario 2; compile a WPF application as XBAP (eXtensible Binary Application Protocol). These applications can run inside a web browser but they will run in sandbox mode. This means that you will get limited access to different APIs. For instance you will not get access to the hard drive. Both of these scenarios require .NET 3.0/3.5 installed.

Scenario 3; use Silverlight. Silverlight is a browser plugin and it’s almost cross platform. It works on IE, Safari (yes on Mac OS X) and Firefox. The Open Source community (Mono project) is also working with porting this technology to the Linux platform. You can read more about it on the Mono-Project site. What I almost forgot to mention is that Silverlight contains a subset of the WPF API. It's like .NET microframework for .NET.

If you attended the session and have any question please post me a comment or send me an e-mail.

Microsoft Norway has finally announced the dates for the next MSDN Live event. The tour starts in Stavanger 31.Januar. Then it’s Bergen, Trondheim and last but not least Oslo.

I’m invited by Microsoft as a speaker on this tour. This time I’m going to give two sessions. The first is on WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and seconds is on ASP.NET MVC. I’m really looking forward to this! I’ve worked with WPF for the last couple of months and it has been lots of fun. It’s a rock solid technology and it’s a must have utility for your “utility belt” – Especially if you are a user interface developer. I describe it as a utility because it can really gain your productivity as a developer and satisfy your customers because you can visualize their business data in such was they have never imagined.

ASP.NET MVC is really promising, as everything Scott Guthrie is involved with at Microsoft. It really changes the way we implement Web Applications today. Go and read more about it on Scott Guthrie’s and Scott Hanselman’s blog.

Anders Knudsen from BEKK that delivered a smashing session on AJAX back in February 2007 is also invited. This time he is going to talk about ADO.NET Entity Framework and ASP.NET Futures.

Last but not least the famous Jon Jahren going to give a session on SQL Server. I’m not sure but I think it’s SQL Server 2008 “Katmai” and developer tools for SQL Server he is going to focus on.

Hope to see you there. This is going to be lots and lots of fun!

You can get more information about this on Rune Grothaug's blog.

 

I held a presentation at NNUG 25th October in Trondheim. The content of the presentation was XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language) and WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). The goal was to give the audience a basic knowledge about the fundamentals of these two technologies. I thought that this might give them a head start on learning more about these technologies. I must admit that the learning curve has been quite steep for me. Maybe I’m just a slow learner.

As I have gotten more hands-on experience with these technologies, my knowledge about them has grown. But there were a few fundamental principles I had overseen during the last couple of months and which are crucial to gain XAML/WPF eureka. So I’ve created a reading list for you XAML/WPF newcomers. I hope you find it useful.  I've also posted a link to the source code from the presentation in the end of this post.

XAML

XAML is based on XML and stands for (eXtensible Markup Languageee). It’s a declarative programming language designed for instantiate and initialize .NET objects. Yes, that’s right – a programming language designed for creating instances of .NET objects and set initial values by using XML syntax.

• Learn what XAML is
• Learn the syntax of XAML
• Understand how it works by instantiate and initialize your custom classes
• Use Markup Extension to extend the XAML language
• Others
  • Terminology
• My XAML bookmarks at del.icio.us

WPF

• Introduction to WPF
• Learn and understand the architecture and the important structures of it
  • WPF Architecture
  • Element Tree
• Properties
  • Dependency Properties
    • Dependency Properties explained
    • The Ins and Outs of Dependency Properties
  • Attached Properties
• Events
  • Routed Events Explained
  • Triggers
  • Triggers 2
• Data Binding
  • Beatrice Costa on Data Binding
  • Code Project Article
  • Data Binding with objects
• Resources
• Styling and Templating
  • Styles and Triggers
• My WPF bookmarks at del.icio.us

 

Yesterday we kicked of Microsoft Student Community at NTNU in Trondheim for this school year. We got 100 registered participants, 80 of these came to the event. It could have been more, but we had to close the registration today because of the size limitation of the room and the size of the pizza order.

The meaning of the event was to enlighten and motivate new students to be a part of Microsoft Student Community. Microsoft Student Community NTNU is an organization for students with interest in Microsoft related technologies, especially .NET. It’s driven by students, and has no commercial influence by Microsoft. It’s a place where students can come together to learn new cool stuff. So if you want to stand out from the crowd and be little different form all the other students, this is the place to be. My experience is that students with experience in Microsoft and .NET related technologies, will certainly get positive responses from potentially employers.

The theme for the kick-off was a bit vivid, but it certainly caught the eye of the students since 80 students did care to participate. We branded the event with lots of posters saying “Do you want a job?”. I think we hit bullseye, because it’s not a secret that students/employees with background in .NET related technologies are very hot in the job market today.

Hans Olav started the event by telling who we are (Microsoft Student Community) and what can we do for you. He also said something about Imagine Cup, and he talked about our experience within this contest. We also had some technology sneak peak previews on WPF, LINQ and XNA for the students and what they have coming if they continue to participating in Microsoft Student Community events this year.

I gave the presentation on WPF where most of it really was a demo. In the demo I did create and photo viewer application that read photos from disk. The demo contained of 3 lines of C# and the rest was XAML. I used the HTML/CSS analogy for the XAML and XAML template feature, since many of the students as I expected had has some experience with web/HTML development.

Resources

I promised some of the students that I would post links to WPF resources on my blog. Here you go:

• http://wpf.netfx3.com/
  Microsoft’s Community website for WPF
• WPF Forum @ MSDN
• http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/
  Tim Sneath is a notorious blogger and a Client Platform Technical Evangelist
• http://www.beacosta.com/blog/
  Beatrice Costa has many good posts on WPF Data Binding
• http://blogs.msdn.com/llobo/default.aspx
• http://www.ericsink.com/wpf3d/index.html
  Eric Sink has written some good articles about 3D in WPF
• http://www.thewpfblog.com/
• http://www.windowsclient.net
  Another WPF Community Site from Microsoft
• http://wpf-resources.com/
  Lots of WPF resources
• http://del.icio.us/goeran.hansen/wpf
  My WPF bookmarks at delicious

Here are the tools you need to get started with WPF development:

• Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2
• Microsoft Expression Blend

Here is my source code from the presentation. Feel free to drop me a comment or send me an e-mail if you have any question concerning the source code or Microsoft Student Community.

Happy hacking and coding!

After my presentation about Sync Services for ADO.NET at MSDN Live in Bergen I got some questions. Since the questions are relevant for everyone that participated at MSDN live I will address them here in my blog. The questions concerned both SQL Server Compact and Sync Services for ADO.NET.

What is the max size of a Sql Server Compact database?

4 GB is the max size of a SQL Server Compact database and it supports multiple connections up to 256.

Read more here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa983341(vs.80).aspx.

 

How do to redistribute SQL Server Compact with my application?

There are two deployment options; traditional Microsoft Windows Installer and “xcopy” deployment.

If you choose to use the Windows Installer option you choose SQL Server Compact as a prerequisite and the installer will automatically download the bits for SQL Server Compact from somewhere in the internet cloud.

If you go for the xcopy option, you have to add the SQL Server Compact dlls as a part of your project. You find these dlls under C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition\.

Read more here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa983326(VS.80).aspx.

 

Is Sync Services for ADO.NET shipped with the next version of .NET Compact Framework?

Sync Services for ADO.NET is not supported for .NET Compact Framework in VS2008 Beta 2. I think Microsoft will ship this feature for .NET CF in a later stage.

There are several threads on the Sync Services forum about this topic.

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1475649&SiteID=1

Yesterday at MSDN Live in Bergen I got a really good question after my presentation. The question was asked by a Master class student that working on a master thesis about occasionally connected clients. He asked me how he could learn to use Sync Services for ADO.NET and Sql Server Compact. My presentation gives an overview of the technologies, but if you want to dive deeper you have to dig the web for more information. Since I’ve already dug the web for information about this technologies I will post the links If found useful here. This will give you a good starting point to learn more about these technologies. I recommend you to start with Rafik Robeals “Take data offline” article on CodeProject and then start to watch the webcast if linked to.

Articles

• http://www.codeproject.com/smartclient/takedataoffline.asp
  Rafik Robeal is a member of the Sync Services for ADO.NET team in Redmond and he has published an article on CodeProject to give developers an introduction to Sync Services for ADO.NET. This article is a very good start if you want to learn about Sync Services for ADO.NET
• Visual Studio Magazine
  Update Local Data Caches with Sync Services for ADO.NET
• Visual Studio Magazine
  Lighten Up Your Local Databases
• http://www.syncguru.com/Projects.aspx
  A Sync Services for ADO.NET demo series written by Rafik Robeal
  

Blogs

• http://blogs.msdn.com/stevelasker/
  Steve Lasker is the program manager of the UI Frameworks Client team
• http://blogs.msdn.com/synchronizer/default.aspx / http://www.syncguru.com
  Rafik Robeals developer in the SQL Server Replication & Synchronization team. He is currently working on Sql Server merge functionality and Sync Services for ADO.NET
• http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlservercompact/
  SQL Server Compact team blog

Webcasts

• http://shrinkster.com/sel
  Offline Data Synchronization and Caching for Smart Clients part 1
• http://shrinkster.com/sem
  Offline Data Synchronization and Caching for Smart Clients part 2
• http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=293600
  Steve Lasker demonstrates the Sync Designer in VS2008. He show you how to cache data locally on the client using SQL Server Compact and Sync Services for ADO.NET
• http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=294031
  Steve Lasker demonstrates how to use Sync Services for ADO.NET with Windows Communication Foundation
  

Others

• http://del.icio.us/goeran.hansen/sync-services
  My delicious bookmarks on “Sync Services for ADO.NET and Sql Server Compact” resources
• http://shrinkster.com/seq
  Sync Services for ADO.NET forum
• http://shrinkster.com/sep
  SQL Server Compact forum
• http://shrinkster.com/seo
  Smart Client Architecture and Design Guide
• Q&A on OCS and Sync Services for ADO.NET
  QA for Ocasionally Connected Clients and Sync Services for ADO.NET

 

Happy coding! If you have some additional resources, feel free to drop me a comment.

We kicked of MSDN Live in Oslo last Monday and there were lots of people - about 600 I think. Oslo is not only the capital of Norway, but it’s also the “capital” of .NET developers. Many of the best and brightest Norwegian .NET developers are stationed in this city.

In the morning the atmosphere among the crowd was electric and the expectations were high. Jonas Follesø started off with two presentations on Visual Studio 2008 and C# and LINQ. As always, his performance was very good. Then Rune Zakariassen followed up with a presentation on Visual Studio Team System codename Rosario. I haven’t had a chance to attend his sessions yet, but I certainly will in Bergen next Tuesday. Morten Abrahamsen kicked off with two presentations after the break. The first had the topic “the modern SOA landscape” and the second was about Windows Communication Foundation. Morten is a well know speaker at MSDN Live in Norway, and as expected he performed well and the topics were fun.

Since I’m the newbie I got the last slot of the day. I think my presentation went well. I started 5 minutes behind schedule, but I managed to finish in time. I had some minor performance problems with my computer and I had to skip the last part of the demo.

Wednesday we visited Stavanger. There were over 100 registered people for this event. I don’t have the number of the actual visitors, but I think it was close to 70 something.

According to Rune Grothaug there was 1000+ people registered for MSDN Live fall 2007 event. That is a lot of exposures for Visual Studio 2008. It has been lots of fun. I’m looking forward to Bergen and Trondheim.

I’ve uploaded the slides from my presentation. If you have any questions, feel free to drop me a comment or send me an e-mail.

I’m invited by Microsoft Norway to be a speaker at the MSDN Live event this fall. We are going to visit Oslo, Stavanger, Bergen and Trondheim. The theme this time is Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas) and .NET 3.5.

I’m going to give a speech on a new technology in .NET 3.5 called Microsoft Synchronization Services for ADO.NET. It’s a framework for developing Occasionally Connected Clients. An Occasionally Connected Client is a term used when we talk about applications (clients) that relay on server side infrastructure (servers), and the client cannot interact with the servers over a network in a timely manner.

A Occasionally Connected Client scenario

I couldn’t really find a more suitable scenario than this one. In the first project I worked on as a consultant for Abeo, I was hired out to a large project for a regional energy production company in Trondheim. They needed a computer system to manage their field working engineers. So they equipped their engineers with a tablet PC. This tablet had a 3G card installed for mobile network communication. On this tablet we deployed a Smart Client application for integration with their legacy systems using Web Services.

With this tablet and the Smart Client the engineers could receive daily work orders (instructions) with addresses to the locations, detailed description of the work items and much more. I’m not going to detail it more than that, but you get the picture. They wanted to manage their field workers by equipping them with a pc enabled for mobile communication.

One of the biggest challenges was to design the client application so it would adapt into its environment. An environment there the client was integrating into the legacy systems over a mobile network (3G). The engineers are often working in basements of buildings or they are at the move while driving a car to their next work location. We could not trust that the network connection had 100% uptime, even not 50% uptime.

We developed lots of nice mechanisms to synchronize the client with the server while the network was available. So the client had all the data needed to work without a network connection. If the users stored new data or made some changes to existing data, these were propagated to the server when the network connection was available again. It works a lot like Outlook. You don’t need a network connection to write an e-mail. You just write it and hit the send button. When a network is available, Outlook detects it and sends the e-mail for you.

In my speech I’m going to draw parallels with our challenges and how the Microsoft ADO.NET Synchronization services could have solved many of them for us. And of course, I will have lots of demos and not so many slides. If you are curious about this technology you should check out Rafik Robeals article on CodeProject.

By the way, this project was implemented back in spring 2005 using .NET 1.1.

Looking forward to talk at MSDN Live!

Resources

• CodeProject article
• Rafik Robeal's blog
• Microsoft Synchronization Services for ADO.NET Orcas Beta1 release

Last Thursday I held a presentation at NNUG (Norwegian .NET User Group) in Trondheim. I talked about application development on the Windows Vista Platform.

Seen from a developer perspective, the platform is huge! There are lots of new API’s in this release of Windows. I picked out three features that I think will lift desktop applications running on Windows Vista to a new level; Sidebar, Desktop Search and RSS Platform.

Content from the presentation

Me and some guys from the Microsoft Student Community NTNU arranged an event at Gløshaugen campus today. 60 students from NTNU registered for the event, and almost every one showed up.

We invited Lars Bjørnar Listhaug from Abeo to come and talk about their experience in use of Microsoft and .NET technologies implementing solutions for their customers. Abeo is an It-consultant company with about 90 employees. With on office in Oslo and one in Trondheim. Abeo is an Microsoft Gold Partner and focus a lot on Microsoft Technologies. 

Lars Bjørnar also gave us a demo of the Point Of Sale solution he have been working on as an Architect for the last two years. The solution is developed for Lindbak Retail and the team have spent over 15 000 hours on this project!! It was really cool.

Abeo sponsed the event and bought pizza and beverage for the students! High five Abeo!

I talked about developing solution on the Windows Vista Platform. I focused on the Windows Desktop Search Engine and the Windows RSS Platform. 

By the way, I'm also going to give this presentation on NNUG 10.05.2007 18:15. Hope to see you there!

Here is the slides from the presentation:

• Power Point 2007 format (pptx)
• Power Point 2003 format (ppt)

I've uploaded some pictures on Flickr from this event!

 

 
Me talking about Windows Vista (Picture taken by Jonas Follesø)

 

Lars Bjørnar Listhaug shows off the fantastic UI of the Lindbak Retail Point Of Sale Solution

Picture: Jonas/Flickr

I held a presentation about WF (Windows Workflow Foundation) at NNUG (Norwegian Net User Group) in Trondheim today. I think the presentation went well, except there could been more attendees at the session.

The product looks quite promising. I’m looking forward to play more with it.

You can download the slides her.

Last week I’m finally finished the semester at school. I have about one month vacation in total this summer. The rest of the time I’m going work for Abeo, ride my bike (Ducati 748) and personal hobby projects. I and Jonas are currently working on some software for the St. Olav Hospital in Trondheim.

Have a nice summer! Cheers!