Jan Tielens' Bloggings

Jon Flanders released a beta of a very promissing tool: BTSnapshot. I haven't tried it out but it seems to solve one of my primary issues when doing BizTalk development: the deployment process during the development cycle. Nice work Jon, I'll check it out as soon as I can find some time!

Next week I'll be in Porto (Portugal) to deliver a BizTalk Server 2004 training. If you're intrested check out following site for more information and registration:

Pfeww, 2004 went by like a blast! A lot of cool things happened during this year, it's hard to pick out the most important one, but changing jobs was certainly  had the biggest impact! Let's hope the new year may be as exciting as 2004; but I'm pretty sure of that: 2005 will rock!

Some time ago I was involved in a proof-of-concept project that had grid computing capabilities as a "nice-to-have feature". At that time we were playing around with web services that were called by the distributor of the grid. Today Microsoft Watch has a nice article about Microsoft Research project around grid computing, code named "BigTop":

[Via Patrick] Woehoe, another colleague at U2U has started to blog, welcome Gert! I love working at a company where there's so much community involvement. Subscribed

During these holidays I've got a few days off, which I'm spending (partially :-) on playing with the new Visual Studio.NET 2005 CTP (December edition). The Server Side has a great article by Patrick Smacchia about one of the new language features in .NET 2.0: anonymous methods.

Last week I was wondering (together with Peter) how Microsoft distributes their VPC images. For example for a course which uses two VPC images, you get one "base" image, and two "delta" images which rely on the same "base" image. Suppose you could pull of the same trick for your own VPC images using your magic-super-tuned base image! This would give you at least two advantages:

Probably like every developer I want to have as much information as possible on my screen, especially when writing code. The chosen font is of course quite important; more text on your screen is better (as long as it’s readable). If you want to replace the default font, I recommend following website: http://www.proggyfonts.com/. Over there you can download a lot of programming fonts, for free! My favorite programming font is currently Opti Small: