The weekend-after has passed and I've slept through most of it. Man did we use up some hours (some nights we went on with the training until 23:00 hours) and especially the last night when we drank past the bar its closing hours and went on in a local pub in Domburg!
But of course it wasn't about partying, but about .NET 3.5. And I really think we discussed everything there is in .NET 3.5 and even more. On the last day, we discussed Silverlight and the Entity Framework even.
The evaluations were great, with most of them replying that it was so much. But as expected, still one step ahead. Both students and us still need to think about how we are going to write our software in the future, especially when you start to realize that LINQ and the other new features is so much more then just querying a database.
Thing is, we at Class-A had a great time organizing it, preparing for it and finally presenting it. I know the students had a great time and I really hope they get the opportunity to use .NET 3.5 in their daily lives.
This week it's up to Mike, Anko and Astrid and their Business Intelligence Summer Class, going through everything that's SQL Server and accompanying products.
Unit testing using Visual Studio just got better! When preparing some stuff for the Summer Class (yeah, I know, a bit late as it's already going on ;-) I was doing some unit testing for my mobile application, inside my Virtual PC image for Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2.
It was going through my head that I missed TestDriven.NET its integration in the IDA and that it would very unlikely be able to support the deployment of my tests to my mobile device. Without thinking, I pressed the right button and to me suprise, what option was presented to me?
So now you know I write all my training exercises without using tests, because this was the first time I noticed it. You can run a single text with the click of a mouse button! Unfortunately you can't right-click a file in the solution explorer and do the same, but you can select the class in the editor itself and run all tests in that class...
I've almost missed this, but Live Writer Beta 3 was released on september the 5th. As Google, Microsoft has created an installation program where users can select the tools they want to install, which are then downloaded and installed automatically.
Not much has changed in WLW Beta 3. You can now add videos to your posts, although probably most weblog hosting parties won't support the HTML tags to support this. A good thing is that it now supports English spelling checker for people with regional settings set to a different location than the USA. They've also seemed to fixed some blurring issues on images, but I haven't tested that yet.
Anyone still not using Windows Live Writer sure is missing something, though. And while at it, I also installed Messenger 8.5 Beta 2, using the same installer.
Awesome! Just a few days before the .NET 3.5 Summer Class, Silverlight 1.0 is released.
With the announcement, the news is out that Silverlight will be officially supported by Microsoft and Novell on Linux via the Mono initiative. Microsoft will deliver Silverlight Media Codecs for Linux and Novell will be building a 100% compatible Silverlight runtime implementation called "Moonlight".
You can read much more about Moonlight on Miguel de Icaza's weblog and view some screenshots here.
I'm pretty excited about Silverlight. Before Silverlight I was never really interested in WPF's XAML, but I'm learning fast now and I'm loving it more and more.