In a full week of sessions at TechEd Developers 2007 in Barcelona, there is a lot of information to be assimilated, new contacts made and because of a professional change in the near future still very much a different TechEd.

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 features
With a RTM release by the end of this month Visual Studio 2008 is finally there. There are so many new exciting features to the C# and VB.Net languages and new functionalities in the IDE.
There is a great demo project called Dinnernow.net that uses several of the new technologies like LINQ, ASP.NET Ajax Extensions, WCF, WF, Powershell, etc. I went to two TechEd sessions (presented by David Aiken and Matt Winkler) that gave an overview of the whole project and what I can say is this: check it out, it will really help you understand ways to use these new technologies and features.

LINQ: I got the chance to learn more about LINQ in two sessions at TechEd. The good news for SharePoint developers: there is already a LINQ to SharePoint implementation on the way which is part of my Resources for WSS and MOSS for some time now :-)
Bart De Smet currently has an alpha version available at codeplex. There is a small video interview with Bart about this feature on the TechEd site:
http://www.mseventseurope.com/teched/07/developers/news/Pages/day5.aspx. Scroll down to “LINQ to SharePoint Implementation” for the video.

Microsoft Search Server 2008
Microsoft is working on a new search server that is based for on the search feature found in MOSS 2007. Checkout Joris’ great post on this for more details. 
There is also an “Express” version of this server, the release candidate is available here: http://blogs.msdn.com/enterprisesearch/archive/2007/11/06/announcing-microsoft-search-server-2008-express.aspx

Let’s make Popfly mashups!
With social networking sites like Facebook becoming more and more popular with all kinds of users, I love playing around with Popfly.
The Popfly explorer beta is out for download by the way.

I also had the opportunity to talk to a lot of people about all kinds of subjects. The Belgian party on Wednesday was such a great opportunity. See you at a next event!

Check out some photos of the event:

Microsoft TechEd Developers 2007 is almost there! Starting next Monday 5th November 2007 in Barcelona.

I'm looking forward to this big event, there are so many interesting sessions I don't know which one to choose for most of the time slots.

Check out the agenda at: http://www.mseventseurope.com/OnlinePub/Public/sessions.aspx?EventId=HbLEvtKcPE4%3d
There are a few sessions on SharePoint from Ted Patisson, Patrick Tisseghem and Spencer Harbar. Spencer is one of my SharePoint heroes :-) I'll certainly go to his session.
And of course there are tons of sessions on Visual Studio 2008, LINQ, .NET 3.5, Silverlight and so much more.
So many sessions... so little time...

This year I will certainly do a few posts on sessions I'll attend and some general information about the event.

See you in Barcelona!

Yesterday I went to the Belgian VISUG session on Silverlight: “Light up the web: Visug goes Silverlight”.

Gill Cleeren presented a very good overview of the main parts of Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1, did enough demo’s and a small introduction on XAML. Great stuff to get started on this new technology!
You can find the source code samples on his Gill’s blog post: http://www.codeflakes.net/blog/post/Silverlight-presentation-slide-deck-and-demo's.aspx

Also check out Gill’s company blog to which he also participates: N-Technologies.

Yesterday was the first day of the Belgian DevDays 2007.
There were lots of interesting sessions, unfortunately with 3 simultaneous developer sessions at the same time it was hard to choose.

The opening keynote by David Chappell:
David Chappell is a great speaker, it was nice starting off the conference with his session. He gave an overview of .NET 3.0 centered on the developer audience. The second part was for the system administrator’s audience, focusing on the new sysadmin products by Microsoft.

The other sessions:

MOSS Policies and Records Center: presented by Patrick Tisseghem. Policies and the Policies object model Some very nice things can be done by using the Policies framework. Hopefully more on that later.

The .NET Language Integrated Query (LINQ) Framework, by Raj Pai. We got a preview of the new LINQ syntax and its possibilities.

Extending ASP.NET Ajax by Jeff Prosise: this was my favorite session. Some tips he gave:

• Always define the UpdateMode=Conditional when using multiple UpdatPanels on a page. If you leave it to default all UpdatePanels in a page get updated without you noticing it. He proved this to us by using a tool called the “Web Development Helper”. This IE plugin developed by Nikhil Kotari offers tool to trace HTTP information, ASP.NET and Ajax. Download it at http://projects.nikhilk.net/Projects/WebDevHelper.aspx
• Use the ASP.NET client JavaScript libraries and extend the client object model.
• ASP.NET Ajax client libraries allow for implementation of kind of OOP in JavaScript. He showed us how we can use namespaces, inheritance of objects, defining “classes”. There is some information on this on the ASP.NET Ajax docs site: http://ajax.asp.net/docs/tutorials/CreatingClientComponentPrototype.aspx

Now, let’s get Orcas CTP and start coding :-)