Jan Tielens' Bloggings

Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 can be downloaded from the MSDN Subscriber Downloads. For those of you unfamiliar with VPC; Microsoft bought the technology from Connectix that allows you to host several virtual PC's on a single machine. Each virtual PC lives in its own isolated envirionment, and is physically only a single file of the host machine. To communicate with your Virtual PC's you can use either shared folders or (virtal) network connections. You can even access your Virtual PC's from anywhere in your network! This piece of software is great for software developers; you always have a clean machine to try something out. I keep a freshly installed Windows XP on my HD, and ever time I need to try something I copy that image. No more screwing up of your host machine.

MSDN Belux will organise another great MSDN Event on December 11th in Kinepolis Brussels in Belgium. There are two tracks

Ok, for all of us who didn't attend the PDC (and have a MSDN Subscription), the Longhorn PDC Preview can be downloaded from the MSDN Subscriber Downloads! This is nice, but I would be happier if Whidbey could be downloaded. Visual Studio “Whidbey” referenced in the instructions is not available from MSDN Subscriber Downloads, but is available by request from MSDN customer service.

In one of my previous posts I mentioned Microsoft Webcasts, where a lot of sessions can be watched. Recently they switched from Interwise software to Microsoft Livemeeting. But now it's not possible anymore to download the webcasts to view them offline. If you've read my previous post, you know that I love listening to technincal sessions while I'm driving to work. So I decided to make a suggestion for the Microsoft Product Feedback Team. The contents of my message are shown below and I'll keep you updated. I hope I've chosen the right channel to submit my opinion, if you know better places to do so, please let me know.

There is a new version of the open source Hippo.NET Build Tool available to download, which addresses some bugs and introduces multiple project support. I would like to welcome Dave Ehrlich as a Developer, due to his input the 1.3.0 Release was possible. Features that will be worked on for a next version:

The Belgian .NET User Group (BENUG) has an upcoming event about ASP.NET 2.0. So it seems my post on the 2nd of September was correct. Michiel van Otegem will speak about the following topics:

A new article that I wrote is published on the MSDN Belux site. It's about how to extend the DataGrid in the Windows.Forms namespace by adding a custom DataGridColumnStyle to it. Just creating the ColumnStyle is not that difficult, but when you want full design-time support for that column (e.g. listing it in the dropdown when adding ColumnStyles to a TableStyle), things get a little bit complicated. This article shows how to accomplish this and illustrates it with an example. The example is the ExtendedDataGrid that has a new ColumnStyle; the DataGridObjectColumn. This column can be used to evaluate expressions entered at design-time and displaying the results in the DataGrid. For example it's possible to have a column in your grid that evaluates price * (vat/100)without having to add another property to your collection or a calculated column to the your DataSet. The trick is to compile the expression that is stored as a string, using CodeDom. This technique is explained as well in the article.

As you may have noticed I am not in LA, so I have rely on other sources to get all the news from PDC. Scott Hanselman did a great job commenting nearly real-time. Thanks a lot Scott! A live stream of the keynote would wonderful, but this kind of posts is awesome too.