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I am humbled and very proud to be awarded a Microsoft Azure MVP award today. A big “thank you” to all who helped me get here. 🙏🏻 A special thank you to my employer Betabit who supports me putting lots of effort into the community and helps organize or sponsor events. It’s strange but very cool to see social media ’explode’ (at least according to my standards) after my announcement. But I’m still just Rick, a guy who loves to do fun things with code, in the cloud.

We’re hosting a VS2019 Launch Event at the Betabit The Hague office. Join us for some Visual Studio 2019 goodness! And maybe even some swag… ? Join us on April 2 for the launch of Visual Studio 2019. Learn about how Visual Studio 2019 is more productive, modern, and innovative, participate in live Q&As, and be the first to take the latest version for a spin. https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs2019-launch/ The agenda is as follows:

The people over at Microsoft have been working hard and have delivered a lot of stuff. That makes for a nice start after the holidays! So there’s a lot of cool stuff available to play with. I created some simple and easy to remember links for all of these goodies. Feel free to use and distribute these 🙂 Links to the goodies! The spec for .NET Standard 2.0 is complete (https://bit.

As the title states: I was unable to attach the remote debugger (for instance to an Azure Web App) after installing Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. I got an error with something about invalid memory access or something like that. The solution is simple: install Remote Tools for Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. Go to the webite, pick your machine’s architecture (the x86 install won’t run on a x64 machine) and click download.

As I wrote earlier I presented at the 2014 Dutch Techdays. The session content is now available online. Find it here (Dutch): Session information + PDF of my presentation My presentation on SlideShare My session on Channel 9

The past couple of days I’ve been experiencing some issues with the context menu for my Solution Explorer in Visual Studio 2010. It contained scrollbars even when there was sufficient space on the screen to show the menu without scrolling. Searching for that issue I immediately found this blog post on The Visual Studio Blog. Taken from that post: We’re pleased to announce that there are patches available for Visual Studio and Windows Presentation Foundation that fix this problem.

I just read this great article by Mark Voermans: Expression Web SuperPreview: Look how your site renders in various Browsers. I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve been waiting for this for a long, LONG time. I’ll give it a go this afternoon and let you know what I think… Update: This first beta version only allows you to preview your site in different versions of Internet Explorer. We will have to wait for the full feature set until the final release of this tool…

Of course, twitter has been around for quite a while. The popularity of the service is booming, because it is becoming more and more mainstream now. I myself joined somewhere in the end of 2007, when it was still underground … 😜 Do you (actively) use twitter? And if so, what’s your account, do you use it on your desktop / laptop / mobile device … and which client(s) do you use?

The article about our company that was placed in two Dutch magazines can now be found on our website (and of course, this one is in Dutch).

I just read an interesting article on Bertrand Le Roy’s blog. The most important information: It so happens that the menu control is making a bad assumption on what the default value for z-index should be. We debated this at length with the IE team, but it became clear as we did so that they were right and that we were wrong. We had to fix that. So here it is, the patch for menu is out and you can apply it to build IE8-compatible ASP.

Our company has been mentioned in an article at the (pretty well-known) blog www.frankwatching.com. Read it over here (Dutch)

Scott Guthrie posted about a cool new ASP.NET server control: Chart. It can be used for free with ASP.NET 3.5 to enable rich browser-based charting scenarios. Read more over here: https://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/11/24/new-asp-net-charting-control-lt-asp-chart-runat-quot-server-quot-gt.aspx

Our company has (the first draft of) a new website online. We’re still working on the content, but the design is now online. Check it out @ www.mediagarde.nl (Dutch).

We all know the “Get a Mac” videos from Apple. And to be honest, they’re pretty funny sometimes. Most of the time… 😉 After a horrible start with the Seinfeld commercials (no offence Jerry), Microsoft might be on to something with their new campain “I’m a PC” (Seinfeld commercials to be found there, too). They got an actor that looks like the PC guy in the Get a Mac commercials and used him to introduce some new videos, telling us how many different kind of PC’s there are.

StyleCop version 4.3 was released last tuesday. A short summary of what version 4.3 brings us:  Various bugfixes, including fixes for VS integration issues Rules documentation is included and integrated into VS “Show Error Help” New rules, see blogpostfor the rules Branding change from Source Analysis to StyleCop **Links ** StyleCop blog: https://blogs.msdn.com/sourceanalysis/ Release announcement on the StyleCop blog: https://blogs.msdn.com/sourceanalysis/archive/2008/08/19/stylecop-4-3-is-released.aspx StyleCop 4.3 download: https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=sourceanalysis&ReleaseId=1425

Taken from the SysInternals website: The SysInternals web site was created in 1996 by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell to host their advanced system utilities and technical information. Microsoft acquired Sysinternals in July, 2006. Whether you’re an IT Pro or a developer, you’ll find Sysinternals utilities to help you manage, troubleshoot and diagnose your Windows systems and applications. One of the must-have SysInternals tools for a developer is DebugView.

Earlier this week the Microsoft Research Faculty Summitwas held. On 10was on the scene, and has a nice movie about the Sphere. For the entire article @ on 10, have a look over here: https://on10.net/blogs/laura/Sphere-multi-touch-computing/. This is just another sign that the best is yet to come… Good times 🙂

Rob Enderle, columnist at TechNewsWorld, gives a new/changed view on Microsoft, Google, Apple and Linux in his article The Fall of Google, the Rebirth of Microsoft and the Changing Face of Apple and Linux. A nice read… One of the cool quotes from the article: …but it becomes risky for anyone to depend on the other guy screwing up as they typically don’t forever.

Avanade Netherlands released a new website[1]. Unlike the previous one, this one is here to stay 😉 The website holds information about events, career possibilities, publications, videos, links to blogs of Avanade Netherlands employees and more… Have a look! It is in Dutch, by the way. [1] https://www.werkenbijavanade.nl (Dutch)

I only had time for a quickie: The page containing all my online profiles has been updated… When interested, have a look at them{.null}.

The EntLib Extensions to WSSFhave gotten more and more attention lately. There now is a (very positive) announcement about the extensions on the WSSF site, and there is a complete article on MSDNexplaining how to use the extensions. Check it out! Links: EntLib Extensions to WSSF: https://www.codeplex.com/EntLibExtensionsWSSF MSDN article: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc164250.aspx WSSF site: https://www.codeplex.com/servicefactory

It’s here: the Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit. This first release contains two tools, both supported on WSS 3.0 and SharePoint Server 2007. Batch Site Manager From the “Move, Lock, and Delete Site Collections” page on Applications Management you can schedule bulk operations against site collections in the farm—including moving site collections between content databases (!!). stsadm extension: UpdateAlert This command will refresh all alert URLs in a specific site collection, which is extremely important should you change the URL of a web application or after an upgrade.

This morning I found a mail in my inbox telling me I was invited to Live Mesh. That’s a nice start of the weekend, so thanks Jan! The Live Desktop user interface looks pretty cool, and it almost feels like a real desktop. But that part of Live Mesh is pretty much like Live SkyDrive: a big online disk for you to put stuff on. Lots of stuff. 5 Gigabytes worth of stuf… 😉

It’s been a while because I’ve been so busy lately, but the next (technical) step for my personal website is now online. When browsing to https://rickvandenbosch.net/blog/, the content of my blog here is displayed sort of mirrored over there. I used an OpenSource RSS component to read my private rss feed from blogging about, and display it from there. There’s still a lot of work to be done (like styling!), but I’ll get there.

Some of my (Dutch!) Avanade colleagues recently released ‘Entlib Extensions To WSSF’ to CodePlex. Quite a cool addition to the already rich Enterprise Library. Entlib Extensions to WSSF (Web Service Software Factory) is an extension that enables WSSF to easily integrate with Enterprise Library. This extension allows you to very easily handle cross cutting concerns in WCF services like Validation, Exception Handling and Logging without much programming. The extension accomplishes this by using the policy injection application block of enterprise library.

I’m not entirely sure about the article on Digitimes. One of the reasons is because it was posted on April first. Another reason is the way it is written. But if it turns out to be true, I’m going to have to get a Blu-Ray player for my Xbox 360… 😉 A quote from the article: Lite-On IT is developing built-in Blu-ray Disc-(BD) ROM drives for the Microsoft Xbox 360 game console, according to industry sources.

Getting the ModalPopupExtender from the Ajax Control Toolkit to work (decently) in SharePoint was not exactly a walk in the park. With a default SharePoint installation, the modal popup is partly positioned ‘outside’ of the page (you only see the bottom right part of the popup in the top left corner of the browser). Postbacks are not executed or executed poorly and the page gets garbled up. A possible solution for the positioning of the popup is to set the X and Y property of the ModalPopupExtender.

It is now possible to get updates from this blog through e-mail (nice feature, feedburner{.}). Updates will be sent once a day, but only when new items are available. Curious? Subscribe here!

One of my colleagues pointed out the new Fine-grained password policy feature in Windows Server 2008. As you can see in this postat The Sean Blog, some values have to be entered in the I8 format, which isn’t very user friendly. Because of that, he asked me if I could whip up a tool that converts days, hours, minutes and seconds to the I8 format. I quickly put together this small tool for him.

As a reaction to this articleat Peter Ritchie’s MVP Blog, I thought I’d give my two cents on having a single exit point for methods. Here we go… When writing code, I always create only one exit point except for the occasional throwing of an exception. Most important for me is to always know where your code (really) stops. In case of long and complex methods there’s a chance you’re going to miss a return statement when scanning through a method.

One of the most annoying things in Visual Studio (to me) was the fact that complete solutions (solution folders, projects, regulare folder) would be expanded upon opening. And with big solutions, that isn’t too much fun. There are macros available online, but the ones i found were pretty slow. This is only one of the things that the PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 solves for you. But there is more. Much more!

Just a quick post: Windows Live SkyDrive is now available. It left the beta stage yesterday. You can now store 5Gb of data online, choose who has access to each folder you create and more. There is a maximum filesize of 50Mb. Interested? Have a look at https://skydrive.live.com/

There are several steps to creating a custom web service to be hosted in SharePoint. The MSDN library{.} has a walkthrough on creating a custom web service{.}. After having followed this walkthrough thoroughly, I though my web service was good to go. Unfortunately all I saw was an error: “Could not load type ‘ThisAndThat’ from assembly ‘SoAndSo’”. Just as I was about to search for an answer somewhere online, I remembered that the MSDN library features the Community content for little over a year now{.

So that’s part 1: www.rickvandenbosch.net is now online. There’s nothing to be found over there yet, but the domain has been delivered. Oh, and there’s an easy redirect to my blog, so that goes back here ;). From now on, you can also use rickvandenbosch.net/blog as the url to find my blog. I’m currently talking to the bloggingabout.net admin to mirror my content over there, for now it’s just a redirect.

As stated on ScottGu’s blog{.} in his latest post{.}, the .NET Framework Library Source Code is now available. A detailed blog post about the steps to follow to enable .NET Framework source access in Visual Studio 2008 can be found at Shawn Burke’s blog in this post{.}. Taken from Scott’s post: Once you follow the configuration steps in Shawn’s post above, you’ll be able to dynamically load the debug symbols for .

Have a look at this articleat Worse Than Failure. That’s pretty funny. Or actually, pretty scary… 😐 Oh and, by the way, the Rick in the article is not me ;).