This week I unexpectedly found myself at Microsoft in Seattle. I was contracted by Microsoft Learning as a Subject Matter Expert to do some work on a couple of their upcoming certification exams for developers. It was my first time engaging with Microsoft in this area and I found it very interesting and challenging. There is actually a very well-defined standard process that the development of every exam must go through, before it is offered as a "live" exam. It was an interesting few days - and then I had also made some time to meet with other contacts at corp to see what is going on inthe differnet groups, especially as they are all gearing up for the new fiscal year (July 1).
SQL Server 2008 is almost here – the first release candidate was just released – do you know what it offers for application developers?Dubi Lebel, from Microsoft Israel, will fill us in on the more important benefits for developers, in this 2-session presentation. We will start with an overview of what is new in Manageability, Availability, Security and Performance and thendrill down into specific new Database Features Introduced in SQL Server 2008 such as:
- Spatial Data support
- Filestream storage
- New Data Types
- Direct Hierarchy support
- Sparse Column support
- Combined with filtered indexes, filtered statistics
- Change Tracking
- LINQ and Entity Framework
As always, we'll have our special "Hatzilu" session at our meeting. So please come prepared to discuss your most frustrating problems (or at least some of them!) and to share some of your own techniques and solutions that you have found useful in your applications.
Please confirm your attendance.
See you there !!
The July meeting of the Israel Visual Basic User Group
http://www.renaissance.co.il/ivbug:
July 2, 2008
Location: Microsoft Israel2 Hapnina St,
Ra'anana(09) 7625-100Floor 0 , Dekel Room It is the building across from Amdocs.Turn right at the first traffic circle and then there is an area for (free) parking on the left. 17:30 - 18:00 Assembly
18:00 - 19:15 “SQL 2008 - What in it for me as developer – Part 1”
Dubi Lebel, Microsoft Israel
19:15 - 19:30 Break
19:30 – 20:30 “SQL 2008 - What in it for me as developer – Part 2”
Dubi Lebel, Microsoft Israel
About the Speaker:
Dubi Lebel is a Technical Specialist and the Data platform Technologies Manager for Microsoft Israel.
Please be sure to email me to confirm your participation or for more information.
The May 2008 edition of the Renaissance Computer Systems Ltd. newsletter is now available at
http://www.renaissance.co.il/newsletters/NewsMay08.pdf
This newsletter discusses some of the new projects we've been working on, including a White Paper we did for Microsoft Corp. on SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio.
One of the most important new technologies for .NET, that we haven’t really covered in any of our IVBUG meetings, is WPF – Windows Presentation Foundation. WPF is the next-generation presentation sub-system for Windows applications. It provides both developers and designers with a unified programming model for building rich Windows smart client user experiences (and is the basis of Silverlight for Web applications) that incorporate UI, media, and documents. In the first part of his presentation, Eyal Vardi will present/review some of the fundamentals of WPF, and will move on to real-world development in part 2 of his presentation. Over the course of the evening, we will explore the main features of WPF, including XAML, Template & Style, new Controls, Resources, Animations, Routed Events, Commands, Dependency Properties and more. As always, we'll have our special "Hatzilu" session at our meeting. So please come prepared to discuss your most frustrating problems (or at least some of them!) and to share some of your own techniques and solutions that you have found useful in your applications.
Please confirm your attendance.See you there !!
The June meeting of the Israel Visual Basic User Group
http://www.renaissance.co.il/ivbug:
June 4, 2008
Location: Microsoft Israel2 Hapnina St,
Ra'anana(09) 7625-100Floor 0 , Dekel Room It is the building across from Amdocs.Turn right at the first traffic circle and then there is an area for (free) parking on the left.
17:30 - 18:00 Assembly
18:00 - 19:15 “Building Applications with WPF – Part 1”
Eyal Vardi, Experts 4D
19:15 - 19:30 Break
19:30 – 20:30 “Building Applications with WPF – Part 2”
Eyal Vardi, Experts 4D
About the Speaker:
Eyal Vardi is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional – MVP. Eyal lectures at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzelia, Israel and has participated in many Microsoft technical conferences and discussion groups. Eyal has participated in cutting-edge software industry projects: he co-founded R-U-Sure (managed by Yossi Vardi of ICQ), TreeWay and VCI, where he has held several senior positions. managing development,- and product and business development. Blog: Http://www.Experts4D.Co.il/Eyal
Please be sure to email me to confirm your participation or for more information.
Check out this short scene from last week’s CSI New York !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ni_rAamVP2s
And they say that VB gets no respect...
Last week was the (now) semi-annual TechEd Israel conference. This was my sixth time participating in this event - I have given presentations at all six TechEds here. The conference is an amazing experience and has come a long way from 2000/2001 when we had to lobby Microsoft Israel to put on such an event. There were about 3,500 participants - about half the amount of TechEd EMEA for all of Europe!
The attendees enjoyed most of the sessions/speakers and the speakers enjoyed the interactions and challenges of the attendees.
A particularly interesting observation for me was when I asked the attendees at my session (Sync Services for ADO.NET) how many of them were VB developers. At VSLive last month I got about 80% VB developers. Here I got only one (1) !! and even he was only after I promised SWAG to anyone who admitted to it. Wow...
An extra treat for me personally was getting/seeing some of my Redmond friends to come over for the conference, including Pablo Castro, Matt Winkler, Lisa Feigenbaum, and Shy Cohen. The attendees really enjoyed their great sessions as well. An extra thanks to Matt, for staying in Israel an extra day to be the guest speaker at a special joint VB/C#/Architects User Group meeting.
I recently (OK, 10 days ago) returned from my annual pilgrimage to San Francisco, to speak at the main VSLive conference. My presentations this year are described here.
I'd like to share with you two observations / surprises from this conference:
(1) It is well known that I am a pretty big fan of DataSets - but I realize that it is not necessarily the most popular position to take. At VSLive, I gave 2 sessions on DataSets (Intermediate and Advanced). Image my surprise (if not shock and horror) when I realized that there were at least 2 or 3 other sessions covering much of the same content on DataSets. Could DataSets be making a comeback...?
(2) In one of my DataSet sessions, I asked the audience how many of them were developing with VB vs. C#. While one would expect a high percentage of VB developers in a data-centric session, I was still surprised that the audience was easily at least 80% VB developers. Could VB be making a comeback...?
Note the special date of April’s meeting and the special registration requirements.
This month’s meeting will be a joint meeting for IVBUG, IVCUG, and .NET Architects User Groups, so that we can all take advantage of a special guest speaker – Matthew Winkler from Microosft Corp (Remond). Matt is a Workflow Foundation expert and will be sharing his expertise with these 2 sessions: WF+WCF IntegrationWCF and WF are like two siblings separated at birth. They are two powerful technologies, but until .NET 3.5, did not know about one another. We’ll talk about how and why these two technologies have come together, how to take advantage of both from your code, and walk through some basic patterns that highlight how these two technologies fit together. Creating Custom Composite ActivitiesOne of the benefits of WF is that it allows for the creation of new patterns of control flow, you don’t just have to use state machine and sequence. Working with customers, I’ve seen a lot of people do some pretty weird things to fit their process into a sequence. We’ll walk through the mechanisms required to build new types of control flows, and then implement a few. Do to the expected great demand and limited seating, you MUST register in advance for this event at http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032374675&Culture=he-IL
See you there !!
The April meeting of the Israel Visual Basic User Group
http://www.renaissance.co.il/ivbug:
April 9, 2008
Location: Microsoft Israel2 Hapnina St,
Ra'anana(09) 7625-100Floor 0 , Dekel Room It is the new building across from Amdocs.Turn right at the first traffic circle, there is a new area for Microsoft parking on the left. 17:30 - 18:00 Assembly
18:00 - 19:00 “WF+WCF Integration” Matthew Winkler, Microsoft Corp.19:00 - 19:15 Break19:15 - 20:15 “Creating Custom Composite ActivitiesMatthew Winkler, Microsoft Corp.
Well, spring is in the air, which for me means, among other things the renewal time for my Microsoft MVP award. I am proud to say that once again this year I have proven to be worthy of the award - thanks Microsoft !
Unfortunately, I won't be able to attend the MVP Summit in Redmond later this month :-( But at least I had the chance to talk with some of the VB PMs at the VSLive Conference this week.
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