Everyone knows Snag-it, the great capturing tool of Camtasia.  I think that a lot of developers use this tool to make screen captures.

Well these guys gives us a nice plugin for VSTS.  After you have installed this plugin, you can easily add a screenshot to your work items in VSTS.  It's just great .

You can download it here. If you want to see it working before installing just watch this video.

I'm going to start with C# 3.0 and LINQ.

Microsoft has released samples and hands on labs , so this will be good palce to start with.

You can download the files here :

• LINQ and language samples for Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2
• LINQ Hands On Labs
• C# 3.0 Language Enhancements Hands On Lab

Found on my colleague's blog "Snowball.be".  Take a look at it and have a good laugh

This is just an hilarious video on MS Paint. Just watch it, you'll see!

A few new events by the Visug group are comming up :

1. Light up the web : Visug goes Silverlight.  A presentation by my colleague Gill Cleeren
2. Speakers Dev Match : The technical blood will flow over the attendees of this session, while two speakers try to convince them about a type of technology
3. Best of TechEd : Not able to go to TechEd Barcelona this year.  Visug organize their mini TechEd with an overview of the big Brothers TechEd.
4. Christmas Geek dinner : After the spare rib fun of last year, this year a new dinner is coming up.  No more info for the moment.  I hope they choose a place with Bancontact this year as some people has troubles with paying the meal last year.

For more info and to register for one of the events just go to the Visug site.

Yesterday evening and today, I received a few mails with some sad news. David Boschmans passed away the night from Tuesday to Wednesday.

We all know David as an enthusiast man for the Belgium Development community as a developer evangelist.  He enjoyed live and after a few events we had a good pint and laugh.

David, We will miss you.  You will not be forgotten.  Rest in peace my friend...

My thoughts go out to his family.

Update :

Tom Mertens created a small place, where you can leave your message, so we will always remember David.  Go to http://david.vsdotnet.be.

You can also see pictures of David at Flickr : http://www.flickr.com/groups/davidboschmans/pool/

It seems that Microsoft is going to experiment with free office software.  The first software will be Works 9.  Works is a lightweight package of the big brother Office and is mostly used by home users.  One the items that is not provided in Works is the presentation package (e.g. powerpoint).  Works also cost around 40 dollar, a lot lesser than Office,where people sometimes has to pay 10 times more.

The people who wants to install the free version of Works will see some little advertisments on the screen.

Microsoft hopes to be in competition with tools as Google online Docs & Spreadsheets or the free OpenOffice.

For this architecture Microsoft has requested a few weeks ago a patent for showing advertisments within Windows and other software.  This software will show advertisments to the uer based on information of the users hardware, content of documents.

Just got the mail from my manager that I can go to TechEd 2007 in Barcelona this year.  I will attend it together with my colleague Kurt Claeys.

This is where I will be the whole week (click on the picture to go to Googlemaps).

Yep, finally it's there.  Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008.  And it's not only VS2008, but also the .Net framework 3.5.  Full support for WPF and Silverlight is included, so UI guys, you can play around now .  Beta 2 also contains a Go-Live license.

You can find the downloads here :

1. The installation files :
   • Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition Beta 2
   • Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition Beta 2
   • Visual Studio Team System 2008 - Team Suite Beta 2
   • Visual Studio Team System 2008 - Team Foundation Server Beta 2
   • Visual Studio Team System 2008 - Test Load Agent Beta 2
   • MSDN Library for Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2
2. The VPC files :
   • Visual Studio Team System 2008 - Team Suite Beta 2 VPC
   • Visual Studio Team System 2008 - Team Suite & Team Foundation Server Beta 2 VPC
3. Installation instructions (You can find the download links also here).  As always read them carefully
4. Visual Studio 2008 Express Beta 2

Update : Scott Guthrie has written an nice article about this beta.  You can read it here.

Update 2 : When you want to create Silverlight projects in VS 2008, you need the Silverlight Extensions.  Go get them here. (Txs Gill).