I received a great news in my mailbox this morning. My MVP recognition is renewed for another year!
Extracted from this e-mail:
Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2009 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Visual Basic technical communities during the past year.
When you navigate to the GAC folder (something like c:\Windows\Assembly) using the Windows Explorer, what you see is a special view showing assemblies' name, version, and culture (and some other info).
There are sometimes when you need to see the files hidden behind those assemblies.
You can still use the good old DOS prompt and navigate to that folder or better yet, you can add/modify a registry key that will force Windows Explorer to display that folder normally.
You need to create a new dword key under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fusion\ with the name DisableCacheViewer and set it’s [DWORD] value to 1.
You can also set the value of this key to 0 to display this folder using default assemblies' name, version ...
As I already wrote here, the TechDays Canada 2009 is coming back to Montréal December 2 and 3. As it was last year, this is a paid event but that really worths it.
Until July 1st (next Wednesday), you can pay only $249 CDN if you reference the code TDDIRVIP.
From July 2nd to October 21st, you will have to pay $299 CDN (early bird special).
After October 22nd, you will have to pay the full price ($599 CDN).
Visit http://www.microsoft.com/canada/techdays/ to register and for all the details on this event.
I just discovered that Philippe Lasserre has updated his free PDF book (1088 pages) to train VB.Net beginners.
I you can read in French (the only catch!), visit http://plasserre.developpez.com/cours/vb-net/ and download it.
The book covers Windows Forms, WPF as well as all the basics (OOP, database access, language syntax, IDE, ...).
If you read French, this is a must have!
Do you remember when I was talking of the VistaBridge, that component that let you use Vista features from your .Net application?
Microsoft did the same thing and continued to expanded the component into what they now call "http://blogs.msdn.com/windowssdk/archive/2009/06/12/windows-api-code-pack-for-microsoft-net-framework.aspx".
At the CodeCamp this weekend, my friend Christian Beauclair announced in his presentation the dates for the next TechDays Canada event. Montreal will be visited December 2nd and 3rd. This is a good news for Montréal.
The good news for me is that I was announced that I will be a presenter at the event. I don't know the session yet as the schedule is not completed.
I will continue to inform you as soon as more details will be available.
I just released a new article titled about the Validation Application Block (available from http://www.emoreau.com/Entries/Articles/2009/06/The-Validation-Application-Block.aspx).
The Validation Application Block is part of the Microsoft Enterprise Library which is a set of blocks emerging from the Patterns and Practices group. The latest version (version 4.1) was released in October 2008. I personally discovered it recently and cannot live without it anymore.
It was also the topic of my presentation at Montréal CodeCamp held May 30th.