I’ve just rebooted from a Windows update only to find at my startup screen the following window.

And I am wondering do other OSes have something similar …

Last week I had the chance to talk about strating up with SQL Azure on a Microsoft’s Developers Day event. The things I’ve talked about included: How to create your database on the cloud, querying data, migrating Databases to SQL Azure. Tips and Tricks: SQL Azure firewall through API, Managing connections, Logging sessionId's, Throttling and latency, Transactions, Supportability.

Overall the event (I think) went great, people seemed excited about this new technology and had a lot of questions (which is always nice as it shows interest).

For all of you that didn’t have the opportunity to come listen about windows Azure live, the content has been uploaded on the TechDays site. You can find about SQL Azure and download my Slide deck and sample code from here

Last week I was asked by http://microsoftfeed.com to give an interview about the MVP program.

Microsoftfeed.com is a Microsoft community blog focused mainly in the middle east region. It contains lots of valuable information and they’re currently running a section called “Interview with Microsoft Most Valuable professionals” which features a lot of interesting people. So when asked to participate I jumped to the opportunity, even though things have been pretty hectic lately (starting your own business can be really time consuming, believe me).

The interview was published the day before yesterday and you can find it here, I think you’ll find it interesting, especially if you’re interested in joining the program ;-).

The data connection builder dialog is a database tool component that’s included in Visual Studio and helps you build a connection string to a database.

Last week though the standalone source code was published at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Connection/, so that anyone can use it to build a data connections independently of Visual Studio. According to the license, you can integrate and redistribute the source code with your application.

With the data connection dialog, you can perform following tasks:

• Build/Modify connection strings.
• Customize the data connection dialog.
• Write your own custom data providers.

Nice!

Those of you that are interested in EF probably know by now by now that if you wanted to start playing around the new features of EF like POCO entities, Self tracking Entities and Code Only EF, you had to download and install EF4FeatureCTP2.exe.

Unfortunately the second CTP which was released last November, the update for Visual Studio 2010, was released without the POCO Template (the new code generation mechanism for EF relies on T4 mechanism) and raised a lot of debate and comments from developers.  Last week though the EF Team announced the Entity Framework POCO Template update for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, you can download the C# version here and the Visual Basic version here.

Besides being compatible with Beta 2, the new template includes a number of bug fixes, generated code improvements, handling of relationship fixup that includes support for Foreign Keys in the Model (see more details here about this new feature of Entity Framework) and compatibility with change tracking POCO Proxies and ObservableCollection<T>.

The POCO Template is not going to be part of Visual Studio 2010 in RTM. Instead the team’s plan is to continue to deliver updates for it through the Extension Manager and the Visual Studio Gallery.

Watching Vittorio Bertocci's Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) introductory talk at PDC as well as the recording of the excellent talk Microsoft Architect Hervey Wilson gave on this subject at PDC09 brought back wonderful memories of long discussions (and arguments ;-)) I had with Stelios, Manolis, Dimos and Stavros back when I was working at DOL, on Federated identity and Microsoft’s offerings on that area.

To be honest I skimmed through Hervey's session rather too quickly, got a little confused, jumped over to Vittorio Bertocci’s session and then … gave up. I decided that I needed to look at the whole WIF thing another time – and ideally in a more structured way than just watching a PDC session :-)

So today I found out that there is a much more structured way to learn about Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) and Azure. The new identity developer training kit and channel9 training course, announced today, contain a new hands-on lab, Federated Authentication in a Windows Azure Web Role Application, which provides step-by-step guides for hosting in Windows Azure (WAZ) a Web application accepting identities from an external identity provider, leaving you free to focus on the business function of your application. You can also go here for a standalone version of the lab.

So if you’re really interested on this subject I suggest you take a look at them, I know I will.

It’s been a while since my last post, but things have been pretty hectic trying to set up and start my new business. Thankfully things are going great so you’re going to be hearing more about Techaholics in the near future ;-).

Yes Techaholics is the name I think best represents what my Friend Panos talked about a few years back (now that I look at it we’ve come up with a name almost at the same time just two years ago, what a coincidence ;-)). Let me know what you think about it.

I’ve already started working on the website and hope that will not be long till I’ve got it up and running. Till then you can have a look at the Christmas Card I’ve created (you probably got an email with it before Christmas) using Silverlight for Christmas.

So Happy new year everyone, hope this year brings you everything you ever wished for.

Well as mentioned in my previous post last Tuesday I had the chance to speak about Prism and Unity at a DotNetZone event.

I believe the talk went really well, at least the attendees seemed very interested in those two frameworks. Unfortunately time was rather short for covering both topics so I feel I need to apologize for going a bit too fast.

Anyway I’m putting up my slide deck and demo code as promised in case you want to dive into it and have a go your self with Prism.

Don't hesitate to contact me if you need more help in these.

I’m going to be speaking at the next DotNetZone event on a very interesting topic namely IoC (Inversion of Control) and on how using "Prism" and it's friend Unity (an implementation of IoC) from the Patterns and Practices team that can help in building Silverlight applications in a way that lends itself to testability and modularity.

In talking with various colleagues and customers building business applications with Silverlight I find that Prism (and it's friend Unity) is frequently mentioned but not everyone has seen it or use it. So coming next Tuesday 15th of December 19.00 at MIC (Microsoft Innovation Center) we’re going to deep dive into it. I’m planning on starting off with some fairly basic code and gradually build on that making use of dependency injection and modularity.

In Particular we’re going to talk about:

• Inversion of Control with Unity
• Dependency Injection with Unity
• Modularity with Prism
• The Unity Bootstrapper
• Building a modular Silverlight Project
• Shells, Regions, Views
• Commands
• Loosely Coupled Events with Event Aggregation
• Sharing Data via Region Contexts

This is a level400 event so I strongly urge you to come listen but I’m also going to try my best to stream the event on UStream http://www.ustream.tv/channel/35-dotnetzone-event-prism (the code not my face don’t worry ;-)) as well for all of you that won’t be able to make it there.

UPDATE! For those of you that still aren't convinced whether or not to attend, I'm throwing in a little bonus. A lucky winner will get the chance to take home a brand new copy of Windows 7 Ultimate, Microsoft's new operating System, as well as a 120 day trial of Exchange Server 2010. Here they are sitting on my desk waiting for their next owner ;-).

Are you intrigued with Cloud computing, are you considering Microsoft’s Windows Azure but don’t know whether this is going to actually save you money? Then visit Windows Azure ROI / TCO calculator and find out.

After you agree to the terms, you’ll then have to fill in a one page questionnaire. The most important question is about the expected ‘growth profile’ of your application, i.e. steady, predictable or spiked growth, etc.

When you’re done with that you’ll be presented with a detailed cost estimate, which includes estimated costs for Windows Azure, SQL Azure, .NET Services and bandwidth costs.

But that’s not all, by clicking the next tab you’ll be able to get a cost break down of all Windows Azure costs.  This includes platform application migration and setup cost estimates (shown on the left) and more

The tool also includes estimates for Platform IT Administration and Support and then a Windows Azure Platform TCO rollup for your application.

Finally in the last tab you’ll find a detailed ROI comparison including the important ‘cost-savings’ estimated value.

Last week at Microsoft DevDays “Make Web not War” we had a rather passionate conversation on the features Microsoft’s cloud relational database engine (SQL Azure) offers today and how these are going to change the way we program today.

In that direction I’m linking the page that Microsoft has put up in order to listen everyone's wishes on what features are the most important ones.

So if you want to shape the future of SQL Azure, if you are passionate about Windows Azure and the SQL Azure relational database, then visit SQL Azure Feature Votting to vote for features that you believe should be included in it. This is your chance to shape the future of SQL Azure.

Yesterday I received my Google Wave Invitation which includes 8 more invitations to give away. So I have 8 Google Wave invitations and I’m going to give them up to 8 readers that will leave a comment to this blog post. So if you’re interested in testing Google’s new Social Platform leave a comment and try your luck ;-)

The draw will take place next Tuesday.

P.S. You’ll have to include an email to your comment in which I’m going to send the invite in case you win.

I had the chance to speak at Microsoft TechDays today about IE8 and the new features that it brings.

I grabbed the opportunity to also demo the new fbSlice Web Slice I’ve talked about at TechEd. Expect to see more about this soon ;-)

You can find my slide deck and accelerator twitter client demo source code on skydrive if you need to download it, or just see the presentation here:

Photos from Berlin

It is Monday 16th Nov 2009 - which means that TechEd Europe in Berlin is over. Overall I have had a good week – lots of time with product team members and colleagues.

The week didn’t start as indented though. I traveled feeling a bit sick and arrived at Berlin having a small fever. Spent the entire Sunday in bed trying to avoid getting worse but didn’t avoid going to the doctor on Monday only to find that I had tonsillitis and needed to start antibiotics. Good thing though is that after having taken it for a day all symptoms went away. Unfortunately I couldn’t drink any beer :-(.

Then Tuesday was my interview by Giorgio Sardo where I shared my experience in building a web slice with the Facebook API; we will also discussed some handy tips and tricks for building compelling accelerators and visual search providers for Internet Explorer 8. If you missed it you can see it here

Highlights

• Most of the developer sessions I did attend were good to very good. Presenters were well prepared and fun to listen, unfortunately the level was rather low for my standards but that’s something I expected since sessions are planned to fit the general audience level and not mine in particular.
• The conference was smooth and the facility worked well
• The expo area, hands on lab area and TLC area all were great – you could fill the week by taking advantage of those 3 and not attend a single session
• The 6 interactive theatres that delivered sessions even during lunch were a great addition
• It was fun to be in Berlin on the 20th anniversary of the wall coming down. Nice one Microsoft.

Lowlights

• The keynotes on Monday. Awful. Sorry – but they were.
• Lack of “general” development session on .NET Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. I was told that around 45% of the sessions were dev but it never felt that way. The 45% included “edge sessions” like embedded and windows mobile that I think many of the developers attending would ignore (myself included) which sometimes meant you only had 2 or 3 sessions to choose from in any slot. Shame.
• Lack of developer announcements. Unfortunately they were kept for PDC.