Kristian Kristensen’s Blog

I thought I would give some pointers as to how it went at Microsoft TechDays in Denmark from the 21st to the 23rd of May 2003. Part of the reason is so I can remember when some time has passed

A colleague and I hit the train on 5 AM on Wednesday, and was at Odense Congress Center (where the TechDays where going to be held) at 08.30. As usual when Microsoft throws events/conferences like this nothing is missing! In the morning there are bread and coffee and during the afternoon coffee and cake is coming in at a steady pace.
The first two days was focused on Visual Studio .NET and Windows Server 2003, the last one on Office System 2003.

On Wednesday I attended the following sessions:

Keynote by Morten Strung Nielsen on The .NET Vision

.NET Developer WorkBench by Richard Lloyd Money

Automated builds using Visual Studio .NET and Visual Source Safe

IIS 6 Security

Getting started with WS-Security and WS-Routing

On Thursday I attended the following sessions:

Keynote by Tony Goodhew Product Manager on improvements to The .NET Framework, C# and VB

Build your own Weblog with RSS Feed using ASP.NET by Tony Goodhew

Interse: Intelligent integration of Information by Mogens Nielsen

Code Access Security in ASP.NET by Michel Baladi

Proces and Security model in IIS 6 by Michel Baladi

On Friday I attended the following sessions:

Keynote by Lone Lyth, Erik Dibbern Roser and Torben Marcussen on The new Office System 2003

Visual Studio .NET Tools for Office by Erik Dibbern Roser

Advanced XML in Word 2003 by Erik Svensen

Smart Tags and Smart Documents in Office 2003 by Erik Svensen

Development of solutions using InfoPath by Ole Kjeldsen

In the evening on Wednesday there was some entertainmnet in a Cafe area in the Congress Center where one could compete using RC jeeps and XBox’s.
On Thursday evening Microsoft had arranged for the participants to go to the movies. One picked between three movies: Matrix Reloaded, The Recruit or X Men 2; I saw The Recruit.

My colleague and I took the train home to Aalborg at 17.30 and I was home at nine O’clock. And after the three intense days I really needed to relax.

All in all I was very happy with TechDays, we had a great trip
If only I could convince someone to pay for a trip to TechEd 2003 in Barcelona….

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I just fumbled a bit around with Remote Desktop in Windows XP, and man is that cool!!! The fact that you can log on to remote computer and control is nice, but not that innovative, I mean that’s what *NIX people do all the time – including me, which is exactly how I update these pages – the really amazing part is the added features. You can tell the Remote Desktop Connection program to automatically transport all played sounds on the remote computer to your local machine, or you can leave it on the remote computer. Plus, you can choose to map you local drive on the remote machine so you have access to all your files, and ability to copy back and forth.

This little program is great, and I just wish I had taken the small amount of time to try it out long before now…

And by the way, you can download and install the Remote Desktop Client for Windows 2000 so that you can control your computers from Win 2000 also.

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Yesterday I attendend the launch of Microsoft’s new products Windows Server 2003 and Visual Studio .NET 2003 in Århus. It was mighty cool! Before lunch there was a 2 hour long presentation of the new products in which there were embedded some funny shows. 3 people from a danish tv series (Langt fra Las Vegas – Frank Hvam, Katja Kean and Nils Buckingham) made periodic shows. After lunch there were 3 sessions for developers and the day ended with Carpark North playing and attendees geting free beer. Mighty great!!!

Just read this article on java.sun.com about the new language features in Java 1.5 codename Tiger. It is quite amazing how after .NET/C# came the Java guys have been busy to implement stuff that was cool in C# in Java. Finally though Sun has understood that boxing is actually pretty darn nice!

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Tomorrow my sister is having her communion (konfirmation in danish), so we’ll go to church at 10, and afterwards have a “party” with the whole family.
It’s gonna be nice, and hopefully she’ll get some good presents

I’m considering installing Windows Server 2003 on my spare machine. It would be nice to use the new server software for real; plus I could have a closer look on Web Services and their support in Windows Server 2003.

The new battery I got for my laptop is great! It has a very high capacity, so now I’m not so dependent on being near a power source when I’m working on my laptop, at least not as much as I were before.

I’m going to attend TechDays which Microsoft Danmark is hosting in Odense in the end of March. I’m going there with a collegue of mine from work, and I think it’ll be very exciting! The web site says that there are over 60 different sessions to chose from, so there’ll definitely be a chance to learn something.

After some small glitches the new Intel P4 3.0 GHz with 800 MHz FSB has been released. Damn, I would like to get my sweaty hands on one of those!

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Windows Server 2003 was launched on thursday, and I watched the live broadcast from San Francisco. That was kinda cool, to watch it over the internet while it was occuring in SF, US.

I read on Neowin that Longhorn was leaked in another alpha build (build no. 4015). Screenshots from it looks very interesting.

My trip to Aarhus for a .NET student seminar went well, the seminar was kinda boring, since I had heard most of the talks before. Luckily I meet Martin “Gimpster” Geisler and we walked around in Aarhus and afterwards I saw his dormitory. So all in all the day ended great afterall

I’ve now run with the Office System 2003 for a while, and so far I’ve had nothing to complain about. It works smoothly and looks great. Starting to take a closer look on the InfoPath app, on which I might develop a solution for work. So far the idea is mostly vague, hopefully not for long.

On a hardware note I’ve got a new battery for my laptop; the old one was getting very crappy!

Tada…

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Just upgraded my Office XP installation to Office System 2003 Beta 2. The upgrade went smothly; amazingly enough when you think you’re upgrading from a production release to a beta release. Way to go MS

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After having my serverrack standing alone not used, I’ve finally put my servers in it. Kinda looks good, the only problem is that the servers aren’t rackmountable, and tower servers looks a bit stupid in a rack cabinet…

On another note speaking of servers my UPS came to work once again today around noon. The power company had some problems, and I was out of power for 45 min. That sucks! Thank god there are UPS’s around otherwise my life would be a stinking hell…

Tuesday I’m attending a .NET seminar in Aarhus; from what I know at the moment it looks promising… at least the sessions before noon.

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Well I’ve just got my hands on the Beta 2 Kit and I must say “I’m impressed!”. The kit contains a whopping 18 cd’s, with 15 of them being acutal apps and the last 3 demo, evaluation and developer cd’s.

So far I haven’t installed anything yet – since I’m not home, but I plan to do it as soon as I get home

I’ve been watching some of the demo videos and presentations included on the cd’s, and so far InfoPath strikes me as the cooler app. I’m very must looking forward to checking it out!

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My Office 2003 Beta 2 Kit has just arrived!! I just gotta pick it up this afternoon.

Pure greatness!

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After reading this entry in Don Box’ Spoutlet, I just had to read up on the P4 HyperThreaded (HT) CPU. And after doing that I must admit that that is definitely the CPU that’ll be the base for my next system!

The CPU roughly explained is designed so that it appears as if there are two logical processors in the machine, and therefore the system can simultaneously execute two threads thereby performing better.

I looked at a P4 HT running at 3.06 GHz with an Asus motherboard and 512 MB DDR SDRAM, and from what I can estimate the price tag for that will be 8100 Danish Kroner, which is quite a large amount given that there is no GFX card or anything in.
But hey new shit is expensive

As I side note I’ve handed in the .NET service I’ve been codin’ for Work. It’s a Windows Service that when activated via a timer checks if new Word or Excel documents have arrived in a software system that we sell, and if there are it automatically converts them to various formats. From what I know it works as it’s supposed to, but I guess I’ll find out after Work has tested it extensively
Now I beginning to expand the service to handle sending of e-mail in a batch job from the same system.

By the way Windows Server 2003 was marked as RTM (Release To Manufacturing) today!
I’m still waiting for my Office 2003 Beta 2 Kit, but it should arrive in a couple of days. I’m especially looking forward to trying out InfoPath the new XML app.

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