I just reinstalled my desktop, since it was running slow. I had to many small apps on it, I got new RAM and VS.NET 2008 was just released! So great to have it all working just fine again :) What I noticed when installing programs from the Windows Live family was the installer. What you get is a very slow start to check if any existing application are installed: Then the fun starts! What happens is that the installer starts downloading each application you checked from the boxes below. When... [More]

I just ordered 2 more GB's off RAM for my desktop, and it finally arrived today. I plugged it in, and I could see in the BIOS boot screen, that all was well with 4096MB's of RAM. This should be just great for VS.NET 2008 RTM!! So I boot up Vista and what I see in the system overview, is that my system only shows 3327 MB's of RAM: So I thought that maybe one of the modules was bad or something, but then again - the BIOS boot showed no errors. I rebooted just to check, but all was the same. ... [More]

What a day, but unfortunately it started off a bit slow, and as usual very cold! I started in the auditorium where David Gristwood and Ted Pattison held a talk about workflows in SharePoint. The talk was supposed to be a 400 session and was titled: "Workflow in Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies 2007: Deep Dive for Developers". Though it was about workflow, it was not a 400 session. It was rather an introduction to workflow, and showing how the designer works and so forth. ... [More]

So I've finally tried using the panoramic feature in Live Photo Gallery beta. I took some pictures of the bay from the cafeteria on top of the conference center. Have a look: There are some errors, but the biggest must be me not holding the camera steady :)

The rest of Wednesday, went rather slow. We heard some tips and trick with the Visual Studio 2008, which was really all about the keybindings (2005 version online) of the IDE. Afterwards we heard LINQ to Entities by Mike Taulty, which was about the larger framework that Microsoft is shipping in the first half of 2008. What it enables is LINQ to a conceptual data model. Mike presented us with the three declarations, that describes your model: SSDL - Store Schema Definition Language (i.e. wha... [More]

Wednesday started with a session from Stefan Schackow, who showed how to do asynchronous programming on the web. This was a really interesting session, and I learned a lot to take home! The above image shows the order of the methods invoked in the timeline of a normal page lifecycle, as well as the asynchronous life cycle. What you do is add: <%@ Page Async="true" ... %> .. to your page directive, and it uses the "new" life cycle. The image above, is supp... [More]

Here at TechEd Student Partners from all of EMEA are gathered to collect new info on technology, as well as network, network, network as Caroline Phillips puts it :) Tuesday afternoon, all the Student Partners met to network, and meet each other. There was a session where we got a talk from Rob Miles as info on the MVP program, ass well as talks from MSPs who had been at Microsoft as an intern. Later the fun started, since we went bowling:   I won a t-shirt for the best player on m... [More]

On Monday Luca Bolognese held an introduction to C# 3.0, where he takes a C# 2.0 program and convert it to C# 3.0. As he goes along, the code becomes much shorter, and it becomes much clearer! Starting with memory object he iterates over a collection of objects using the standard foreach loop. Lets say you've got a list of Customer objects in a variable customers: List<Customer> londonCustomers = new List<Customer>();foreach (Customer c in customers) { if (c.City == "London")... [More]

Omar Khan held a two part session about building web applications with the new Visual Studio 2008, and this morning I attended the second part. The first part, was really about LINQ, and what you can use it for, but together with today's session it became a little bit more clear what's great about the new product. First off you have greatly enhanced intellisense, for both HTML, JavaScript, CSS and of course LINQ: This is really some cool stuff, because out of the box VS 2008 supports ASP.N... [More]