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Pfew! A week of Microsoft TechDays here in Belgium with lots of talks on new Microsoft stuff, Azure included. You may know I already experimented with Windows Azure and ASP.NET MVC. Earlier this week, I thought of doing the same with Windows Azure and PHP…

A new screencast has just been uploaded to the MSDN Belgium Chopsticks page. Don’t forget to rate the video! Abstract: “In this video, the new tooling for Visual Studio included in ASP.NET MVC release candidate is demonstrated to create a create, read, update and delete user interface within 15 minutes.”

Offline web applications… This term really sounds like 2 different things: offline, no network, and web application, online. Maarten, you speak in riddles man! Let me explain the term…

It’s been quite a job, but there it is: Packt just announced my very first book on their site. It is titled “ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly”, covering all aspects ASP.NET MVC offers in a to-the-point manner with hands-on examples. The book walks through the main concepts of the MVC framework to help existing ASP.NET developers to move on to a higher level. It includes clear instructions and lots of code examples. It takes a simple approach, thereby allowing you to work with all facets of web application development. Some keywords: Model-view-controller, ASP.NET MVC architecture and components, unit testing, mocking, AJAX using MS Ajax and jQuery, reference application and resources.

This morning, I arrived at work after a great week of skiing in Pitztal, Austria. Unfortunately, I found my chair occupied by a new colleague looking a bit like Wilson. Good to see he enjoyed working early, like I do. But still, that was my seat and PC he was using… Thank you, dear colleagues, to see myself replaced by a plastic, smiling ball…

Another book review, this time for Packt’s “Software Testing with Visual Studio Team System 2008”. The book introduces you to the main types of testing available in Visual Studio Team System 2008 for both desktop and web applications, and then walks you through deploying, running, and interpreting the results of tests.

As you may know, PHPExcel is built using an extensible model, supporting different input and output formats. The PHPExcel core class library features a spreadsheet engine, which is supported by IReader and IWriter instances used for reading and writing a spreadsheet to/from a file. Currently, PHPExcel supports writers for Excel2007, Excel5 (Excel 97+), CSV, HTML and PDF. Wouldnt it be nice if we could use PHPExcel to store a spreadsheet on Google Documents? Let’s combine some technologies:

Last week, the new VISUG website has been released. VISUG stands for Visual Studio User Group Belgium and is one of the largest .NET related user groups in Belgium, providing technical sessions on different .NET related topics.

Last week, the ASP.NET MVC framework release candidate was released (check ScottGu’s post). Apart from some great new tooling support, form validation has never been easier. Here’s a quick introduction. Imagine we have a LINQ to SQL data model, containing an Employee from the Northwind database. As you may know, LINQ to SQL will generate this Employee class as a partial class, which we can use to extend this domain object’s behaviour. Let’s extend this class with an interface implementation for IDataErrorInfo.

I’m pleased to announce that PHPLinq 0.4.0 has been released on CodePlex. PHPLinq is currently one year old, and I decided to add a huge step in functionality for the 0.4.0 release. This blog post will focus on the current status of PHPLinq and what it is capable of doing for you in a PHP project.