Yes – that’s me and it’s awesome! I'm the September 2007 MSDN-guru!

Microsoft Norway and Rune Grothaug started in April 2007 with the MSDN-guru of the month award. The meaning with the award is to honoring talented Norwegian developers as a mark of respect to their work and abilities. The awardees get a self portrait article published on the Norwegian MSDN website. The articles usually contain background information about the MSDN-guru, achievements, and thoughts on the future.

This month I was picked out by Rune and Microsoft. I’m following in the footsteps of two of the Norwegian Microsoft Regional Directors Sondre Bjellås and Jonas Follesø that have won the award in April and Mai. Personally I’m very satisfied with this achievement. To quote Sondre, it feels much like “Look mom, I’m on TV”.

The idea behind the award is that the developer community nominates MSDN-gurus and Microsoft and Rune pick them. If you know any developers that are candidates for the MSDN-guru title or if you think of yourself as a hot candidate, you can send an e-mail to Rune.

Click here to read my MSDN-guru article (Norwegian version).

“The Wow” starts 12. October 09.30 am in Oslo. The Expression European Designer Tour is in town with high quality speakers and an exciting agenda. If you are excited about graphic design and want to learn more about the tools in the Microsoft Expression family - this is it!

The content is self explained by the title of the tour and it’s all about the Expression tools and graphic design. You will learn about the tools and what Microsoft thinks about graphic design and the position of the craft in the future.

Florent Pajani kicks of the tour with a talk on Microsofts vision on Software and Services and how they are connected.

Register here to attend.

Read more about this on Rune Grothaug’s blog MSDN Up North.

For the last couple of months I’ve been looking for cheap (free) screen capturing tools and services in “the cloud” (internet) to deploy and publish screencasts.

And I have finally found one, and it’s damn god. I have always known that Camtasia is an eminent piece of software for screen capturing, but it’s expensive. TechSmith have started a project called the JingProject and it seems to me that its Camtasia stripped down to its birthday suite. You can do basic screen capturing with it and record voice, but there aren’t yet any features to edit the screencast after the capture – at least you have a cheap tool.

It isn’t the screen capturing feature or that it’s free that make the JingProject a killer app, but it’s the feature to deploy and share screencast on the internet that make this application a real killer app. You create a screencast and then within the application upload it to the Screencast.com service. When it’s uploaded you can share it by give away the URL or embed a flash player in your webpage with the screencast as the content.

Visual Studio 2008 Hello World screencast

Here you see a  screencast I've created with Jing. I've uploaded the screencast to Screencast.com and used an embedded flash player to embed the screencast into my blog post.

You should all check it out! It’s awesome!

You can find Screencast.com training videos here.

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.

Last evening I scratched my hard drive and installed a fresh installation of Windows Vista. In order to spare some time, I decided to install Vista from USB memory stick.

Kurt Shintaku has written a great blog post on how to install Windows Vista from a USB memory stick. I follow his post step by step and I had a fresh installation of Vista in 20 minutes.

Right now I’m looking into how I can create an image of my hard drive with Vista and my default apps installed. By default apps I mean Visual Studio, Photoshop etc. The applications I always install after the OS is installed.

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.