Afanaat.nl | Sander Schutten

For about 5 months now I’m running with a couple of friends. We started out with a small route in the woods, but that got a little too dark in the winter. One time I was running right behind one of my fellow runners and I couln’t see anything but his white shoes. Suddenly I noticed the path was way to our right and we were standing somewhere in the middle of some schrubs. We then decided it was time for a new route. We found that route near the woods we used to run. Since then we expanded it to be around 7 kilometers in length. Our last record is about 41 minutes and today we’ll try to beat that. Below an image of the route.

DevDays 2007…I was there, but were you? For those of you living in the Netherlands, Microsoft held the 2007 edition of DevDays and off course Avanade was well represented. On the main plaza you could find our stand where we were running an XNA demo on two giant plasma screens. One was running on a laptop and the other live on a Xbox360. Okay, Avanade doesn’t actually do projects using XNA, but we didn’t mind. In a part of our spare time Eric van Feggelen (http://www.fegelein.com) and I developed sort of a tech demo to show off the power of XNA. Both with little experience in 3D game development (Eric some more than I) we put together a scene rendering with water, clouds, an island and off course our logo.

I’ve put the demo online for you to download. You need at least a videocard that support shader language 2.0 and DirectX9 to run this.

Downloaded a total of 442 times

Most of the time I spend on our stand showing off our XNA demo, but I also was able to attend some sessions. Most of the DevDays were about Silverlight and Visual Studio Orca’s, and oh boy, some great stuff is ahead of us. I’m definitely going to play a little with Silverlight and LINQ to SQL, but also with XNA.

Here you can see me in action on the stand

Jolly, they got me! Dennis just tagged me. At first I had no clue what it meant, but it seems a game of tag, and now I’m it. This means I have to write five things not much people know about me. So here it goes

1. My girlfriend is Tamara Bos and we’re together for over 7.5 years now. She’s my first and only true love and we are very happy with each other, especially now we are living together in Almere since last october.
2. I wanted to be a comic writer. You could always find me draw, wherever I was. I got a book on how to draw comics and tried every technique in it. Since I got a real computer I don’t practice drawing anymore. These days I express myself when I design websites on the computer instead.
3. I was very active in the mod tracking scene under various nick names, including DJ Schnibble and Snith. It started out as a joke when I wanted to cover the horrific song ‘Ik zing dit lied voor jou alleen’ by Jantje Smit. After that I covered ‘7PM’ by ATB and finally created about twenty tracks of various styles.
4. I’ve made two short movies in a school contest and won the awards for best movie and best male and best music. The first movie was about a hippie who killed people because he needed meatloaf for in his soup. I created the complete sound effects track in mod tracker. Because I only had a video recorder I needed to dub the whole track to the tape at once. The second movie was called Split Second and it was about a detective who’s girlfriend got kidnapped. This was the first movie at the school contest to be edited completely on the computer. We added a lot of special effects like explosions, gun fire and sound effects.
5. I played soccer for almost my whole life. At the age of five I wanted to play soccer, but was too young. Because they had one kid short I was added to the team at Unicum. My position on the field was left-back, but sometimes I played left-center. This means I didn’t score too often, but I didn’t care. For years I played in the highest team, but before I reached the age I could play for the first team I quit soccer. Mainly because I disliked the morale of a couple of players, but also because I needed time for my education. After my time on the field I played indoor soccer for a couple of years with some friends. When most of them quit I wanted to return to field soccer, but during the second training I made a wrong move and tore the meniscus of my right knee. I don’t play since then and won’t play it anymore. I’ve moved to other sports instead, like tennis and spinning.

Phiew, that’s it. Now I pass it along to Mark, Ronald, Olav, Tamara and Jeroen
Good luck, you’ve just been tagged!

Are you tired of dealing with the drama regarding adding an existing project from web in Visual Studio? If so read on, because if you follow these steps tightly you’re ready to go in a minute, or … well, faster then figuring this one out yourself

1. Open your solution in Visual Studio and choose Add > Existing Project From Web
2. Type the url to your site, e.g. http://localhost/YourSite
3. This is the important part: in the open file dialog, instead of browsing to the project file, type the full url to your project file, e.g. http://localhost/YourSite/YourSite.csproj
4. Visual Studio will tell you it was unable to match the url to the path. Now browse to the directory that contains the project file and select it.

As if magic, Visual Studio suddenly adds your project to the soltion. I hope this helps you not to waste hours to figure it out or even let you create a new project file (I dit that most of the time, go figure!).

The last couple of weeks I’ve succesfully migrated my Media Center including this blog to Vista Beta 2. While I was busy anyway, I decided to migrate my blog to Community Server, so here you are. I hope you like the new design as well.

Vista is running pretty well, although I have a driver conflict which makes my computer reboot about once a day, but I can live with that. Vista Media Center is really cool. I really like the way they present video’s and music in this version. It is somewhat slower unfortunately, but that may be fixed in future released (let’s hope it does :)).

When I turned on the feature to output an XML documentation file when building my project I’m confronted with a load of warnings that the XML documentation is missing for some method. While it’s nice to see these warnings I didn’t want to see them anymore without lowering the warning level. So I searched the net and found a way to suppress these warnings:

• Go to the properties of your project.
• Go to Configuration Properties | Build
• Enter the number 1591 in the field labelled ‘Suppress Specific Warnings‘

I’m still looking for a complete table featuring all the warnings and their code so I can turn off other warnings when I get them.

From this place I would like to wish both readers of this blog a happy new year. My target for 2006 is to grow this blog and hopefully more people will read it.

As per monday October 7th Microsoft released BizTalk Server 2006 CTM. This release is only available for users with a MSDN or TechNet account. The CTM release of BizTalk Server 2006 is fully compatible with Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. I just can smell the RTM version coming very soon.

I don’t believe any of you guys missed this, but about two months ago Microsoft released the first Beta of BizTalk Server 2006. Boy what a lot improvements are in the package. Here a short list of new or altered features:

• Much easier installation (next, next, finish)
• Single mmc for all your administration needs
• Easy creation of deployment packages (MSI generation)
• Single-touch developer deployment
• In order message processing
• Subscribe to and handle suspended messages
• Browse button for file locations (yeah, it still wasn’t there!)
• MOM improvements
• BizTalk API, so no more WMI hell
• Application concept which keeps all your artifacts together
• Some new and improved adapters
• And a lot more

During my attendance at the BPI & Workflow conference early october I had the change to play with this baby for a while and I must say that the improvements really tilt the product to another level.

In future posts I will dive into these new and improved features and explore them a little.

Today I joined the web-log community and will, as many others, post my personal opinions and findings on various subjects, but specificly BizTalk Server. I’m an Avanade consultant working in the Netherlands and specialized in business process integration using BizTalk Server. This means a lot of information on this blog will be about BizTalk. Aside from that I’ll also keep you updated on some of my hobby’s like Windows Media Center, XBOX360 and whatever else comes to mind.

Because I wanted to start blogging sooner I already have some stuff lying around which I want to put up here. So, in the coming couple of days I will submit there posts which will get me up to speed!