Laurent Kempé

.NET Managed User Group of Switzerland

During my trip to Barcelona, last week, I met Atif Aziz, President and Program Director, and Roman Mathis, Vice President and Membership Director, of the .NET Managed User Group of Switzerland. We had several interesting discussions and I finally decided to join them in there user group as I am working in Zürich, Switzerland and there are located in the same city.

The 3 upcomings Events organized by the user group are:

Implementing MVC with ASP.NET
02.11.2004 at 19:00, 1020 Renens     
Presented by Sébastien Bouchet
Most of the development time in a project is dedicated to the user interface, making the presentation layer architecture the backbone of any ambitious development project. An appropriate architecture should enforce maintainability, versatility and reusability. This requires fine isolation of layers with different business lifecycles, such as the look & feel, navigation and business logic. Beyond the physical code-behind model, ASP.NET does not mandate any architectural paradigm for the presentation layer so nearly every project is required to create one from scratch. The Model-View-Controller (MVC) approach is a de facto industry standard and available in most development frameworks, but what about in .NET? This sample code-driven session will discuss application of MVC in .NET, available frameworks, and in particular the Microsoft User Interface Process (UIP) Application Block.

Using HTTP Modules and Handlers to Create Pluggable ASP.NET Components
04.11.2004 at 19:00, 8700 Kusnacht 
Presented by Atif Aziz
HTTP modules and handlers can be used in ASP.NET to provide a high degree of componentization for code that is orthogonal to a web application, enabling entire sets of functionalities to be developed, packaged and deployed as a single unit and independent of an application. Atif illustrates this approach by demonstration of an application-wide error logging and display facility, called ELMAH, that is completely pluggable. It can be dynamically added to a running ASP.NET web application, or even all ASP.NET web applications on a machine, without any need for re-compilation or re-deployment. Along the way, you will learn about how ASP.NET handlers and modules work, when to use them and how to implement them effectively.

Sharp Vector Graphics (SVG#) 
Presented by Christian Wenz
23.11.2004 at 19:00, 8005 Zurich
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is the official W3C standard for vector graphics on the web. Since the format is XML-based, .NET is a natural choice to dynamically generate SVG graphics. The talk introduces the SVG format, identifies advantages and disadvantages, covers the Open Source project SVG# and discusses similarities and differences between SVG and XAML.

Skype API

TOOLS: new version of skype released

Skype released a new Windows version (v1.0.0.94) of its great freeware VoIP tool. As you know, versions for MacOS X, Linux and PocketPC platforms are also available.

Trip to Barcelona - Microsoft Connect Event

Today I am flying to Barcelona - Spain and leaving the horrible weather here in Zürich - Switzerland (same at home in Mulhouse - France). I am attending Microsoft Connect Event, and really hope to see a bit of blue sky there because it has been to much time without sun here.

1. Zürich, horrible weather, 8 degrees, raining, but a Ferrari	2. Nice flight, at least here the sky is blue
3. WHOAUH !! Waking up in such conditions is a pleasure

Yesterday evening we had a party at CARPE DIEM LAUNCH CLUB, a real nice place, cool music, great food and just in front of the sea.
Today the event started with a general presentation of the agenda, then a presentation/discussion about Channel 9 and right now talk about Mobility.

IIS Admin

In an older post, I talked about the method described by Steven M. Cohn to have Multiple IIS Virtual Servers on XP Pro. Discussing with Renaud yesterday he shown me a tool to do it, I don't like to type under the shell ;-).

"IIS Admin is a small tool for use on Windows XP Pro. It allows you to create multiple websites on WinXP Pro and to switch between those websites. On Windows XP Pro, only one website can run at a time."

Thanks Davy Belmans, for your great tool.

Speaker at 'Rencontre ASP.NET'

On the 29 of September I was invited by Microsoft France in Strasbourg - France to be a speaker at there conference 'Rencontres ASP.NET' to talk about ASP.NET and the Starter Kits.
It was such an interesting experience to face around 80 peoples and to talk about ASP.NET. It started with 3-4 minutes of stress then the rest of the presentation went ok.
I hope to do again such experience.

1. Last Reading of the slides, stress starts

2. Presentation of the agenda, in face of me around 80 peoples...

3. Ending of the presentation, it's kind of hot here ;-)

Thanks to Mitsu and Pierre for there support. Also thanks (for sure) to Lucas for the diner, Mathieu and Lionel for the restaurant's excellent choice.

Not such a sad day :-)

I knew I read it somewhere !!! Latest release of Whidbey permits to hide the components on the designer. Use the View menu Non Visual Controls, shortcut Ctrl+Shift+N.

A sad day for component developers

A couple months ago I posted about a major regression happening in ASP.NET v2. It's amazing that even after an overwhelming difference of 10 to 1 people voting to keep the Components tray in the designer, which allowed wizards, designer verbs, and extender providers to provide an incredible powerful enhanced visual experience in the IDE, Microsoft decided not to fix it.

So, you can kiss bye-bye to your UI-technology agnostic components and IDE integration. You'll have to keep two codebases and use the ugly gray-rendered "controls" (can't understand why you have to inherit from Control or WebControl if you're not doing any UI stuff, and why it has to live in the HTML design surface). A huge step backwards in what seemed to me like an important evolutionary step towards software factories based on highly reusable components.

They definitely ruined my day. But I plan to publish an extensive article of what you'll lose, and all the features you can exploit from this powerful model. Hopefully, if I get enough developers to use it, they will put more effort in bringing it back.