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The beginning of the year always seems the appropriate time to take a step back and see what happened in the last few months… So let’s take a deep breath…

The last year has been a busy for me… At the beginning of February I had the chance to give a talk about Rx (Reactive Extensions) in Paris for the Microsoft TechDays with my colleague Charlotte and ex-Microsoftee Mitsu Furuta. It was my first talk in such an event and it was a very valuable and interesting experience.

Few weeks after that, I went to the US for the very first time. I was in Redmond for a week for the annual MVP Summit. I had a dinner with the WPF Disciples where I finally met in person some of the guys of the group. I also discovered the Microsoft campus in Redmond, had a dinner with members of the WPF team…

In September I went to Anaheim (near Los Angeles) for //BUILD/. It was an amazing time. I’ve never seen so much enthusiast and it was truly amazing (maybe the Windows 8 slate distributed during the event is part of that!) It was also the occasion to meet new people.

In November, I went to Lyon for the MSDays as ATE (Ask The Expert) in order to discuss Windows 8 (and show the //BUILD/ slate):

Blog post activity has been also important and more varied (Windows Phone, Windows 8, WinRT…)

• A look at 2010 and perspectives for 2011
• Joining the WPF Disciples task force !
• MVVM Framework Explorer update and top MVVM Frameworks
• TechDays 2011: Rx talk in Paris
• TechDays 2011: Rx talk, slides and source code
• Flying to Seattle for the MVP Summit 2011
• Visual Studio 2010 and HW acceleration on Windows XP…
• WPF databinding trick (part 1)
• WPF databinding trick (part 2)
• Mix11: Windows Phone 7 news
• Mix11: Silverlight 5 beta
• When enough ViewModel is enough
• MVP Client App Dev: one more year!
• BUILD: Starting the BUILD series!
• MVVM Framework explorer updated
• BUILD: getting ready!
• BUILD: H-12
• BUILD: WinRT, Silverlight, WPF, XAML
• Running Windows 8 from a virtual environment
• Property change notifications when using SQL CE on Windows Phone 7.1
• Meet me during the Microsoft Days in Lyon next Wednesday!
• Track memory usage of your Windows Phone 7.1 app in real time

In 2012, I hope to do more work with Windows Phone. As an introduction to that, I’ll be speaking at the Microsoft TechDays in February on the subject “Performance analysis and optimization of Silverlight Windows Phone app”. I’ll write a blog post about this session very soon.

Happy new year to all my readers, and thank you for reading this blog and sharing your feeling in the comments!

Next Wednesday (November 9th), I’ll be at the Microsoft Days 11 as a member of the Ask The Expert team. I’ll be playing with the Samsung Slate I got at //BUILD/, discussing WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8.

Don’t hesitate to stop by and say hi if you’re coming to this event !

Saturday morning I’ll have the chance to catch an airplane for a direct flight from Paris to Seattle. For the very first time I’ll be part of the MVP Summit in Redmond.

I’ll be the perfect opportunity to meet other MVPs and discuss the future of WPF & Silverlight. Hopefully, I’ll also meet many of the WPF Disciples ! As you probably know, this event is under NDA so unfortunately I’ll not be able to discuss the news we’ll have there until they are public.

A great news for me for the beginning of this new year. I just joined the WPF Disciples group.

For those who doesn’t know what WPF Disciples is, it’s a group of people talking about WPF (and now also about Silverlight and Windows Phone 7). You can follow discussions of the disciples from the Google group home page or by using this RSS feed.

Very talented software engineers are part of this group; some of them are from Microsoft but most of them are from other companies all around the world. It’s a real honor to be part of it.

I’m hoping to meet some of the disciples in person during the MVP Summit at the end of February in Seattle. A particular thank you to Marlon and Sacha (and other administrators) for letting me join the gang

With the beginning of the new year, it’s the perfect time to take a step back and take a look at the past year. 2010 was a very rich year both on the technical plan (release of .Net 4, VS2010, WP7…) and personal (organization of the VS2010 launch event, MVP nomination…). Let’s see what happened in 2010 and some perspective for 2011.

Major 2010 events:

• February: ATE (Ask the Expert) during the Microsoft TechDays in Paris
• April: Visual Studio 2010 launch event organized with Microsoft and my current employer. We had about 80 participants, and 4 technical sessions + extra demos
• July: nominated as a Microsoft MVP in the Client App Development

Major 2011 events:

• February: I’ll animate a session during Microsoft TechDays in Paris about Rx with Mitsu Furuta and my colleague Charlotte. The detail about this session can be found here (in French)
• March: I’ll be part of the MVP Summit in Seattle

My 2010 blog posts:

MVVM

• MVVM Frameworks Explorer updated
• Leveraging expression trees to unit test ViewModel classes
• Minor update to the Silverlight MVVM frameworks explorer

WPF

• Set up the main window of your WPF project
• A WPF behavior to improve grouping in your ListBox
• PDC10: WPF vNext
• WPF internals part 3 : how Z-Index works ?
• Attributes-based validation in a WPF MVVM application
• Where does the default TwoWay binding comes from ?
• Changing the layout of a WPF TreeView to look like multiple ListBox
• WPF internals part 2 : how the WPF controls are organized ?

Windows Phone 7

• Tap N Match a cool WP7 game !
• Sound effect in a Silverlight Windows Phone 7 application
• Beta build of the Windows Phone 7 tools is available
• Windows Phone 7 challenge for french readers !
• Using the camera in the Windows Phone 7 emulator
• Bug when using NavigationService in Windows Phone 7
• Mix10 : first Windows Phone application using Blend4
• Mix10: Windows Phone 7 series development tools available
• Mix10: starting today !
• Mix10 is coming : Windows Phone 7 series sessions announced !

Other

• MSDN Ultimate Subscription Giveaway
• MVP in Client Application Development !
• R# can create resources for you in XAML
• Using Reflector to debug a .Net app in Visual Studio without the original source code

2011 blog posts:

No major revolution here. I’ll continue to blog about WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone 7. I’ll continue to give feedback right after major MS conferences (Mix, PDC…)

Happy new year to all of you, thank you for taking time to read this blog and to share your opinions using comments

Day 1 of PDC 2010 is now over and I had the chance to watch the “WPF vNext” session by Rob Relyea. You can follow this link if you want to watch the video on-demand.

History

Rob starts with an history of Microsoft products from Windows 95 and IE 1.0…

The Blend team was created to build tools that would meet developers and designers needs. They worked closely with the Avalon team (codename for WPF) to make sure the platform was adequate and toolable.

Then the Cider team started their work in order to have a good integration in Visual Studio.

At this point, .Net 3.0 hasn’t shipped yet (it was in 2006), but Microsoft already has the vision of having XAML-based technology in the browser (with what would become Silverlight) and on the phone.

Silverlight & WPF

Silverlight

• focuses on premium media experiences and business applications
• suitable for most other types of application

WPF

• complex ISV (Independent Software Vendors) applications
• key scenarios includes DX and Hwnd interop

Convergence

• bringing key features of WPF into Silverlight
• WPF will support Silverlight hosting in the next version

ISV needs

• great Windows applications
• modern UI
• seamless integration
• rich content

Microsoft adoption of WPF

• Visual Studio 2010
• Expression Studio
• Web Matrix
• Powershell ISE
• more to announce from Microsoft, but not during this PDC…

WPF vNext

• integration of the Ribbon in WPF
• improved collections handling in background thread (simplify the problem related to the UI thread)
• improved UI virtualizing and grouping (right now virtualization is disabled as soon as you group data in an ItemsControl)
• seamless integration: new SilverlightHost control (so we’ll be able to have DeepZoom in WPF !)
• hwnd-based will no longer have airspace problem (for example, a Winforms control is always rendered on top of all other WPF controls).

As a conclusion, it’s good to see Microsoft finally giving some information about the future of WPF. The most important part I guess is to understand that Microsoft is still doing improvements on WPF and positioning WPF as the key technology for building apps with modern UI on Windows. We might have more and more applications switching to Silverlight but I’m sure they are still a lot of need for a technology like WPF which can use the whole power of the Windows OS (wheter it’s interop with native code, DirectX or other technologies).

For more information, you can also check-out a blog post from Pete Brown entitled “The Present and Future of WPF“.

Today I need help from all my readers across the globe ! Please vote for our TapNMatch WP7 game here

Microsoft France is organizing since a couple of months a Windows Phone 7 contest in order to create cool applications. Applications are demonstrated using a short video which is posted on Facebook. The goal is to have the maximum number of “Like” in order to be selected for the final.10 applications are going to be selected, and on October 7th, each selected developers will have to present very quickly (2min) its application in front of an amazing jury made of Steve Ballmer and CEOs of french companies.

A coworker and I have been working on a Windows Phone 7 game called Tap N Match created using Silverlight. The goal of the game is to associate “targets” which have a number either by creating pairs (5;5) or sequences (1;2). Here is quick description of the game:

• best scores are recorded in the cloud using Windows Azure
• use of the Bing APIs in order to determine the country of the player when posting a new score
• use of the Pivot control

Here is the presentation of our application on YouTube:

In order to vote for our application:

1. Go to : http://www.facebook.com/Developpeurs.net
2. “Like” this page
3. Go to the video of my game : http://www.facebook.com/Developpeurs.net#!/video/video.php?v=434150728926
4. “Like” my video

Thank you very much for your help !

As a Microsoft MVP for this year, I got 3 MSDN Ultimate Subscriptions to share with friends and co-workers. I already gave 2 of them to co-workers and I’d like to offer the last one to one of my reader !

The “official” pricing for the MSDN Ultimate Subscription is $11,899. The subscription is valid one year and is not restricted to US only. The MSDN Ultimate has the following items (among many others – you can see the detailed list here):

• Windows Azure Platform
• Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate
• Visual Studio TFS 2010
• Expression Studio Ultimate
• Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008
• Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010, Project Professional 2010, Visio Premium 2010

In order to take your chance to get this subscription:

• let a comment on this blog post
• explain what you would like to do with the subscription
• share you blog address, community website or whatever to show how you’re involved in the .Net community

Contest is now over. The winner of the MSDN Ultimate License is Mike Strobel. Thank you all for letting a comment, I which I had more subscriptions to giveaway…

A couple of days ago I received an email telling me I got the MVP Award for 2010 ! I’ve been waiting a little bit before I wrote this post because I invited my coworkers at home in order to celebrate this yesterday and I wanted to keep the surprise

This is the very first year I got the MVP award. I’m very proud to have this recognition from Microsoft and it is giving me new ideas for the future. I started this blog almost 2 years ago now and I’d never imagine I’d get so much feedback about it. My MVP award is also recognizing my work in the French community (on the developpez.com website) or for conferences I’m giving in my daily job.

The MVP award will be also for me the occasion to have pre-release of Microsoft software (but I’ll not be able to publicly give information about them since I’ve just signed an NDA) and also to enjoy a free MSDN-Premium subscription !

For more information about the MVP Award Program you can check-out:

• the home page of the program
• the blog the program

Thanks to all my readers also who are giving me feedback and support.  I’d also like to thank my co-workers who are helpful in my daily job. I’m very lucky to be part of this very nice team. By reading posts before they go public (Charlotte, Fred !) or discussion about software programming in general (the whole Pythagore group!) I get cool ideas about things I want to share. So thank you every one for supporting me

A couple of months ago, the french programming website www.developpez.com organized an event to discover Windows Azure programming (I wrote a blog post about it here).

A similar event has just been launched for Windows Phone 7 development at challenge-windowsphone7.developpez.com

(tr: “Let’s go !” “World cup ?” “No… Windows Phone 7 challenge by developpez.com !”)

The challenge is made of 6 steps:

1. Tools : download and install the required tools
2. Quizz : first basic quizz
3. Silverlight development
4. Silverlight and push notifications
5. XNA
6. Quizz : advanced quizz

Each winner will have the following gifts:

This kind of challenge is really helpful to discover a new technology the funny way ! I hope I’ll get my “I Love Windows Phone” tee-shirt to wear it this summer