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Yesterday I attended the Microsoft DevDays 2005 in The Hague. The MSDN TechNet briefings in Veldhoven I attended last year (was that October or November?) were great. Because the DevDays would (or should) be even greater I could hardly wait for DevDays 2005 to begin! Here’s my short opinion on the DevDays 2005. Interested in a more elaborate version? Comment! Keynote Prashant Sridharan kicked off with a killer keynote. This guy alternated humour with fact, example with slides and gave an overall really good presentation.

Delegates can be seen as interfaces for methods. Let’s look at an example of a delegate and what it really represents. delegate double Calculation(double one, double two); All this line of code really does, is tell the class it is in that there might be one or more methods with the given signature: a method returning a double and taking two doubles as parameters. You cannot call a method Calculation now, because it does not have a body, so it doesn’t have any functionality.

When using XmlSerializer in .NET on a self-made class, you might receive the FileNotFound exception at runtime upon instantiating the serializer. You don’t get enough info to debug this problem, and the filename of the file it didn’t find can’t explain much either, because the dll-name is different ‘garbage’ every time. XmlSerializerPreCompiler to the rescue Chris Sells has developed the XmlSerializerPreCompiler tool, which gives you more info about why instantiating an XmlSerializer for your class won’t fly.

My provisional program for DevDays 2005: 09:30 Keynote: Microsoft Developer Tools Strategy Prashant Sridharan (Microsoft) 10.45 Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 Lex Oskam (Microsoft) 13.15 Indigo update Gijs de Jong (Microsoft) 14.45 BizTalk in action Sijmen Koffeman (Microsoft) 16.30 ASP.NET Web Services 2.0 Alex Thissen (Twice) I’ll probably be attending these sessions during my first DevDays ever: DevDays 2005.

To be honest, I’m glad I’m not on an ASP.NET project right now. I saw ASP.NET 2.0 in action last Friday, and I would go crazy if I would have to do an ASP.NET 1.1 project now. 2.0 and the new Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey) take a lot of ‘standard work’ out of the developers’ hands, making development much faster. It begins with something as simple as leaving the cursor where it is while switching between views.

Currently I’m reading the Microsoft Press book“Developing web applications with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and C# .NET” by Jeff Webb. (This book is part of the very interesting “MCAD/MCSD Self-Paced Training Kit“.) I borrowed this book from the Microsoft Library here at my new job. They’ve got a very wide variety in books! Another plus to add to the list. Although I’d like to think I’ve mastered quite a part of the .

This is the first in what I hope will be a lot of posts here on my newly created weblog. I started blogging at Google’s blogger, but then I wasn’t aware of the possibilities bloggingabout.net brings you! So now I moved my blog here, to be able to give my opinion about all kinds of (developer related) stuff, and off course just for the fun of it. I’ll try to keep you posted!