Two weeks ago I was in Iceland, talking about SharePoint 2010 at TM Software (some photos here :-) ). During the course, some students showed me a pretty cool public SharePoint 2007 site that they have been working on: OneResponse (http://oneresponse.info

Next week on Wednesday and Thursday I’ll be in Milano, Italy during the SharePoint & Office Conference 2010. They have a nice lineup of both Italian and international speakers to deliver 60 sessions during three days. I’ll be presenting four of them:

The accordion is a musical instrument invented in Europe in the beginning of the 19th century. It produces music (or rather noise) by expanding and collapsing it while pressing buttons. This metaphor is applied to software: you may know the Accordion user interface control from Microsoft Outlook's navigation bar. In the last couple of years the control appeared in an ASP.NET AJAX implementation

Team System 2010 introduces the concept of team project collections (TPC). A team project collection is, as it says, a collection of team projects, which can be managed individually. You can backup, move, delete, etc… each collection individually. Each collection will also have its unique work item ids, check sets, etc… Team project collections also change the way team foundation stores its stuff. Before it would use a bunch of databases, now everything connected is stored in a single databas

If you’re an avid reader of this blog, you are probably aware of the fact that using Javascript plus SharePoint is a very powerful combination. In SharePoint 2007 there were a couple of techniques you could use to make sure your Javascript files would be referenced by SharePoint pages:

1. Add the Script reference to the Master Page
2. Use a Delegate Control (e.g. the AdditionalPageHead)

Team System 2010 introduces the concept of team project collections (TPC). A team project collection is, as it says, a collection of team projects, which can be managed individually. You can backup, move, delete, etc… each collection individually. Each collection will also have its unique work item ids, check sets, etc… Team project collections also change the way team foundation stores its stuff. Before it would use a bunch of databases, now everything connected is stored in a single database. One database per collection. You can easily find the database because it’s called Tfs_<CollectionName>. You ‘ll also find the Tfs_Configuration database containing all configured project collections (and depending on your installation a database for the analysis services).:

In this blog post I want to talk about .NET 4 new Lazy<T> class. First of all, why would you need something called Lazy?

You can use it for data access for example; when you load a row from a database parent table. Would you need to load the child rows automatically, or delay until they’re required. Some systems will delay load automatically, or load all they can (but what then when the child rows have other relations to grandchild rows, etc…). This kind of delayed loading of data is just what Lazy<T> (or Lazy(Of T) when using VB.NET) supports.

What developer today can live without intelli-sense? Of course I mean developers who have used intelli-sense before (if you don’t know something how can you miss something?). However finding a member in Visual Studio 2008 requires you to know the first letters of the class/method/… I’m quite sure you sometimes now a class contains a certain word, but can’t remember the beginning.

For those who forgot it, tonight Frederik and I invite for our Silverlight user group new years drink. Please check the besug site for more details.

There will be some silverlight, geek or normal talking with a glass of beer, wine or whatever you like, which is totally for free.

A long time ago, I wrote a blog post about the problems with String.Trim(). I’m happy to see that all three issues have been addressed in the .NET Framework 4.0.

To start with, Trim() will now be consistent with Char.IsWhiteSpace(). Theoretically, this is a breaking change, but I don’t expect many programs to have a problem with this change. Note that the change is very well documented in the online help.

The accordion is a musical instrument invented in Europe in the beginning of the 19th century. It produces music (or rather noise) by expanding and collapsing it while pressing buttons. This metaphor is applied to software: you may know the Accordion user interface control from Microsoft Outlook's navigation bar. In the last couple of years the control appeared in an ASP.NET AJAX implementation and a SilverLight implementation. Recently, the latter was ported to WPF and published as part of the February 2010 release of the WPF Toolkit. This article describes how to use this great WPF control.

This article provides hints and hacks on how to use the SQL Server spatial data types -Geography and Geometry- in Linq to SQL. The data provider has a problem with serializing and deserializing the SQL UDT's. If you ever tried to use these data types in a Linq to SQL (or Entity Framework) project then you certainly encountered the following error: “One or more selected items contain a data type that is not supported by the designer”.

In my previous article I expressed some disappointment in the usefulness of the Map Projections in SQL Spatial Tools on CodePlex. There's not much you can do with these in a real-life application. Fortunately there's also Proj.NET on CodePlex, a flexible advanced point-to-point coordinate conversion engine that is used internally by a lot of open source GIS projects.

Two weeks ago I was in Iceland, talking about SharePoint 2010 at TM Software (some photos here :-) ). During the course, some students showed me a pretty cool public SharePoint 2007 site that they have been working on: OneResponse (http://oneresponse.info

Next week on Wednesday and Thursday I’ll be in Milano, Italy during the SharePoint & Office Conference 2010. They have a nice lineup of both Italian and international speakers to deliver 60 sessions during three days. I’ll be presenting four of them:

If you’re an avid reader of this blog, you are probably aware of the fact that using Javascript plus SharePoint is a very powerful combination. In SharePoint 2007 there were a couple of techniques you could use to make sure your Javascript files would be referenced by SharePoint pages:

1. Add the Script reference to the Master Page
2. Use a Delegate Control (e.g. the AdditionalPageHead)

For those who forgot it, tonight Frederik and I invite for our Silverlight user group new years drink. Please check the besug site for more details.

There will be some silverlight, geek or normal talking with a glass of beer, wine or whatever you like, which is totally for free.

A long time ago, I wrote a blog post about the problems with String.Trim(). I’m happy to see that all three issues have been addressed in the .NET Framework 4.0.

To start with, Trim() will now be consistent with Char.IsWhiteSpace(). Theoretically, this is a breaking change, but I don’t expect many programs to have a problem with this change. Note that the change is very well documented in the online help.

LINQ expressions have proven to be extremely versatile, popping up in all sorts of areas. “Static Reflection” seem to be the latest hype. But what is static reflection anyway, and why is it good or why is it bad?

Reflection is used to obtain information about the code you are executing, and to use that information to interact with the code dynamically. Sometimes reflection is used to interact dynamically with code that is statically known by a program already. For example, data binding heavily relies on reflection to dynamically read and write properties. The calling program knows about those properties statically, but the data binding libraries do not. In data binding, object properties are often identified by their name, expressed as a string. That string is then used by the libraries to construct a PropertyInfo object.

Last week, I did a presentation on Windows Azure at HOWEST, University College West Flanders. As promised, my hands-on-labs of this session.

1. A file archive application to upload/download files into a database in the cloud.  This application consists out of a webpage (UploadFile.aspx) to upload files into a SQL Azure database, and a REST service to dowload your files as a stream. You can dowload the sources at : CodeArchiveService.zip

1. Configuring and Tracing

WCF can send messages in buffered mode and in streaming mode. The default is buffered mode, which means that the whole message needs to be transfered and received before the client can start processing it. When messages get too large to be send as one big blob and when those messages can’t be split in different message parts, streaming is your option. To use streaming (both on input and/or output parameters), define the parameters as type of stream (you should use the base class here, not a derived one like eg. FileStream), Message or IXmlSerializable. This should be the one and only parameter, no extra parameters are allowed !

Checking attributes on classes can be done by getting the type of the class and executing GetCustomAttributes() on it. You just need to iterate over the resulting object[] to find what you are interested in.

To simplify this a bit more, I wrote a couple of extension methods :

    static public class AttributeExtensions
    {
        static public T FindAttribute<T>(this object obj)
            where T : Attribute
        {
            return obj.GetType().GetCustomAttributes(true)
                .Where(attr => attr.GetType() == typeof(T))
                .Select(attr => attr as T).FirstOrDefault();
        }

        static public List<Attribute> GetAttributes(this object obj)
        {
            return obj.GetType().GetCustomAttributes(true).ConvertAllItems(c => c as Attribute).ToList();
        }

        static private IEnumerable<TOutput> ConvertAllItems<TInput, TOutput>(this IEnumerable<TInput> e, 
            Converter<TInput, TOutput> op)
        {
            foreach (TInput item in e)
            {
                yield return op(item);
            }
        }
    }

So, on a Person class like this