From now on you can follow @Visug on Twitter.  All updates, news and more will also be announced here.

And for those who are interrested: As promotion of their twitter account, they give away a free ticket to the TechDays 2010 (Belgium) away to one of the followers.

At least one time a year, Visug announces an international speaker.  This time they got Brad Abrams, program Manager @ Microsoft and author of Framework Design Guidelines.

Brad will talk about these guidelines.  Just a must-attend session.

More info and register for this FREE event : http://visug.be/Eventdetails/tabid/95/EventId/16/Default.aspx

Already for the third time, the new community day in Belgium. Organized by all the usergroups for developers and IT Pro’s or anyone who is interested.

When? Thursday 25th June 2009

Where? Utopolis Mechelen

All info can be found here http://www.communityday.be.

Food, drink and knowledge are available. And yes, it’s still free .

So go the website and register fast as the seats are limited.

Since this year I'm the house photographer for Visug.  There were already 2 events this year were I took some pictures.  You can find a part of the photo's on the Visug site.  If you want to see the full set, follow the links below.

Event 1 : 15 januari 2009 - Visug meets Juval Löwy Part 2

Event 2 : 19 februari 2009 - Visug Live Mesh

Last tuesday, Visug held a new event about VS Extensibility.  The location was in one of the offices of my company.  It was a hugh success.  Around 70 people attended this session.  Before the session, I had the change to have a personal meeting with James Lau and Jean-Marc.  You can read also a short post about this event on James Lau's blog.

I have taken several pictures.  You can view them at my flickr account.

Maybe you haven't heared about, maybe you have.  Visug has another international speaker : it's the community manager for the Visual Studio ecosystem focusing on VSX (Visual Studio Extensibility);  His name.......Ken Levy.

He will talk about 2 hours over VSX.

So be one of the hunderd people (at this moment still around 80 places left) that can attend and go over to the Visug site and register for this event.

It starts at 18 hour and the location is at Ordina Schelle.

Just like last year, the Visug user group is organizing a bowling on the evening of March 12th.

I can say it was fun, till the power went down.  But we had even more fun afterwards.  Just go to their website and register for the event.  Be quick as only 30 people can join it.

Place to be : Overpoort Bowling Ghent.

Starting hour 19:30

Ending time : .... Depends on how much fun you want to have.  Last year it was somewhere after 3 o'clock in the morning .

BTW : First we eat a whole bunch of pizza's with the whole group

Hereby I announce the 1st Silverlight Challenge organised by Ineta Europe.  In Belgium, Visug is organises the event.

All info can be found on following website :

• http://belgium.silverlightchallenge.eu
• Snowball.be

The overall website can be found here : www.silverlightchallenge.eu.

For the Belgium competitors, please upload your contribution to http://belgium.silverlightchallenge.eu and not to the general website.

If you have any questions or problems, you can contact Gill Cleeren through the contact form on the challenge website or leave comments on his blog article.

Hope to see a lot of Belgium contributions in this contest.

Yesterday evening, the Belgium Visug group organized a “Best of TechEd” session.  In this session several speakers (I was one of them ) has given a 5 – 10 minute presentation about the best session they attended at TechEd 2007.

Following topics were given:

• Astoria (Yves Goeleven)
• BizTalk Services (Lieven Iliano)
• ASP.Net Futures (Gill Cleeren)
• Building Services with the Service Factory: Modeling Edition (Kurt Claeys)
• .Net Code Protection (Sven Cipido)

The evening started with a 25 minute part of the openings keynote video. And at the end Peter Himschoot also gives a little example of the combination between Ajax and Silverlight.

Afterwards there was a bit of time to talk with everyone.  The comments that I heard where very positive.  So I hope Visug will organise it next year again. For me it was also a great experience, as this was my first external presentation I gave (I already had given presentation within my company).

All presentations and demos will be available at the Visug site later this week.

You can download my presentation here Best Of TechEd - SLPS.ppt (560 KB).