Jan Tielens' Bloggings

Recently I discovered (thx Faan) a great way to fill up some useless time, like driving to my work: listening to technical sessions on my Pocket PC. Today a lot of great resources are available that can be downloaded and saved on a Pocket PC to watch while you're on the road. Even sessions with video can be saved since large memory cards (+128 MB) are not that expensive. Here is a list of resources that I know, please let me know if you know others:

Since yesterday the Microsoft Enterprise Instrumentation Framework (EIF) can be downloaded from the MSDN Downloads section downloaded from the MSDN Downloads section. Before yesterday EIF could be downloaded only from MSDN Subscription Downloads. So now it's for everyone!

From MS Belux Forums by Gerd:

Today my new article on MSDN Belux went online.

From Tom's Corner:
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Is anyone interested in Belgian blogger drink (or dinner for that matter) after the MSDN Chapter/TechNet Briefing in Kinepolis, Brussels on October 7th, 2003? Well, I would not want to limit the attendance to bloggers, so everyone who is interested can join us.

Tom talks about the MSDN Chat about "Visual Basic .NET Language Design". Thx for sharing the info Tom, because I couldn't attend the chat!

Skype
What is Skype? “Skype is the next phenomenon from the people who brought you KaZaA. Just like KaZaA, Skype uses P2P (peer-to-peer) technology to connect you to other users – not to share files this time, but to talk for free with your friends.” Ok, big deal you could say, we already have Messenger. But I recently had some problems making voice connections to family with Messenger. Even when they were using one of the most recent ADSL Routers, with UPnP enabled, I couldn't connect. So I gave Skype a try and I must say I was amazed; not only the sound quality is in my opinion even better than Messenger, but Skype could make connections to pc's behind firewalls and/or routers. Installation and account creation is very easy, connections are made within a second. Ofcourse they have not (yet?) the huge user base like Messenger, and their focus is on voice communications, but I keep this little program so I can voice chat with people to Messenger can not connect.

Component developers have to make decisions all the time about how to flexible their components need to be. They need to find the balance between flexibility and development duration: if they want to increase the flexibility, they probably need to spend more development time. How to implement the needed flexibility depends on the situation. In some cases it is needed that the components must execute code that will be written by developers that actually use these components, so that code is not yet available while designing the component. In other cases it may be required something changes depending on a setting, for example how Customers are displayed (first name + last name, last name + initial, …). Providing this kind of flexibility in your components can require a rather complex model to be able to determine what the ToString method of the Customer object needs to return. But this kind of flexibility could quite easy be accomplished if you only could put some code in a String, and let this code be evaluated by your component. Of course you’d want to avoid writing your own parser for such a String at all times, so what could be of any help? CodeDom and Reflection can be used for solving this kind of problems.