It’s been awhile. My last entry is almost two years old, written right after we launched Visual Studio 2008 in Germany, a product we will soon consider obsolete (on April 12th, to be precise). And while I did start to blog on our team’s blog, my personal site became a wasteland of comment spam sprinkled with a few actually real comments. So after laying flat for the last three days after catching a terrible cold at Bayern Munich’s 3-0 win over Mainz last Saturday, I sat down this morning and checked out the latest versions of BlogEngine.NET and AtomSite. While both did a wonderful job importing my SubText content via BlogML, I eventually decided to migrate to BlogEngine.NET: It’s mature, there are tons of themes available for it that look nice and don’t mangle my existing content, and its configuration is way less esoteric than AtomSite (and way better documented). Strangely, it was also only today that I discovered that my hosting provider supports direct access to my hosted SQL Server databases right from SQL Server Management Studio. Previously, I had to use Web Data Administrator, which only diehard .NET developers will likely loathe remember. Using SSMS I was able to deploy a local installation of BlogEngine.NET, create a new hosted database, and run the local installation with the hosted database to migrate content and test the system, while the live SubText web app remained untouched. Neat! One thing that didn’t survive the migration are permalinks (at least I made no effort to do so). Sorry about that, but I preferred to have the new platform up and running over maintaining perfect compatibility.

No kidding—get all the details here! Just one caveat: You'll be a tad late for Launch 2008 .

I've had a couple of inquiries over the last week, to which my response rate was rather sluggish. I was in Seattle attending TechReady 5, a Microsoft internal event similar to TechEd. Since all content is MS confidential, I cannot really say anything about it here. But I sure had a heck of a time listening and talking to .NET luminaries like Scott Guthrie, Pat Helland, Justin Smith, Anson Horton, or Greg Leake (who's just creating some major buzz with .NET StockTrader).

Today I ran into Daniel Walzenbach, one of our German Developer Evangelists and one of the nicest guys you can possibly ever meet. Daniel owns MSDN Solve, and has begged me for some basic architecture content since last X-mas. Unfortunately, I had to put him off until September once more, which he suffered bravely. Before he turned to leave, he held up a small GPS receiver and asked "Do you know WoIstDaniel? Check it out." I had no idea what he was referring to, so once I'd returned home I fired up a browser and had a look. I'm not sure how Daniel handles that kind of transparency in his private life, but his web application is way cool .

I've finally migrated this site from dasBlog to SubText, and added two more domains for this site—joergjooss.info and jörgjooss.de. Actually, this has happened more than one month ago, but only today I've finally settled for using Tim Heuer's awesome Origami skin after starting with Piyo. I added some CSS stuff from Piyo that I preferred over the original version (such as font families), and put a search text box into the sidebar (a feature that for whatever strange reason isn't being used in many SubText skins). What I like most about the skin: It renders code listings perfectly (unless you use the fixed layout), and it works fine in Firefox, Opera, and IE (fluid layout recommended here). The update also required me to have my site upgraded to ASP.NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005, which means I can now host some live demos on this site—once I've figured out how to make SubText's BlogRequestModule play along nicely with such content . Note that I didn't bother to preserve any PermaLinks from dasBlog so far.

Whoa, Nelly. Seven days of CeBIT are really tough. Each evening, my legs felt like wooden beams, and my feet seemed to grow out of my shoes. Regardless of that, it was fun. The Good The crew (way too many to name them all) Lots of interesting conversations on VSTS, software construction, version control with TFS, getting started with .NET, WPF, SOA, … The developer cinema concept Windows Home Server Mel's Diner… yummy The Bad Not getting an Evangelist shirt—C'mon, show some love for architects Not having actual demo PCs at our booth Not having any of the Express Editions available on CD The Ugly The VSTS Application Designer failing to show the Web Service details pane during my recorded VSTS talk, and me missing the fact that while demoing the synchronization between code and Application Designer, I forgot to add a [WebMethod] attribute to my method definition

IT March Madness, also known as CeBIT, begins on Thursday this week. I'll be giving a half-hour presentation on Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server, talking to customers, and be available to whatever customer question gets routed to me . You can find more details and the MSDN presentation schedule here. And don't miss our daily MSDN Q&A where you can ask the experts on pretty much any development topic that you're itching to deal with.

Hrast! Sorry about impersonating a Ed Greenwood novel character, but dasBlog's instructions regarding ASP.NET 2.0 should have included a note saying: We still require full trust. Unfortunately, I can only run medium trust ASP.NET 2.0 code on this site, which makes perfect sense from a security and requirements perspective. It's pretty sad not to be able to host live ASP.NET 2.0 samples on this site. Just today, I posted an answer on microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.aspnet that screams for a sample I have had sitting idle on my hard drive for more than half a year. Unfortunately, it requires ASP.NET 2.0… Seems like I will finally sit down a have a good hard look at ThinkJot and Nblogr.

Kudos to Mads Kristensen for creating a nice looking theme that works (almost) flawlessly on both IE and Firefox. It will also be part of the upcoming dasBlog 1.9 release. As usual, adding .categoryListNestedOutlineBodyTableStyle {     margin-left: 1em; } gives you nicely indented blog categories. But maybe I'm the only one who cares about that. Oh, and the neat page transition you get in IE is an old trick from Nikhil Kothari's blog.

Wow, considering my New Year's resolution was “way more blogging”, I failed miserably. Well, my excuse is the same as always—work. I've been super busy working with customers on various .NET Framework 3.0 projects, especially WCF and WPF. But now things are starting to settle down a bit, which should give me more time for blogging. Here's what I want to do: Blog more on HTTP specific .NET stuff. I've been answering questions on HttpWebRequest or WebClient in news groups and private mail for ages, so blogging about that topic is a no-brainer. Revive an old pet project of mine. Fomerly known as WebClient (dumb name, I know), #Agent will be a HTTP client written in C# and Windows Forms for testing and understanding low-level HTTP specifics. After an initial v1.0 release, a WPF version should follow soon. Cover more of my two favorite upcoming technologies—Atlas and WCF.