Over the last weekend, I was travelled together with Patrick (Sharepoint MVP) and Jabez (File System MVP) to Kuching to meet with Ming Man (C# MVP) to host a event known as “devInTown”. My session of the day is “Ultimate Data Visualization with WPF” – which basically WPF/UX related talk.

The poster above was designed by Windy Teo (APAC MVP Team).

Other’s MVP Poster.

Ming Man in action – Topic “CRUD using LINQ in C#”

I think Ming Man trying to teach LINQ to his 10 years old kids.

Patrick Yong (Sharepoint MVP) sharing the Sharepoint Vision with the crowd.

Not sure the “07” printed on his t-shirt means – Office 2007 :)

That’s me in action – obviously I’m so excited to share the WPF demo with my crowd

Am I look serious? hahahah

The youngest MVP in Malaysia in action – Jabez Gan (still look like a kid right) :P hahahah

he is running Windows 7 RC in his HP machine.

Really appreciate the crowd to spend their Saturday morning with us. Thanks Kuching!

Photo of speaker and helpers

Able to take some time to shoot some photos in Kuching. I love Kuching as it is so much green. So natural

This coming Saturday 27th June 2009, couples of other Malaysian MVP will be having a developer event in Kuching. For those of you who stay in East Malaysia feel free to attend. Or if you want to recommend it to your friend, you can direct them to the following website.

I’ll be delivering a session as well - Ultimate Data Visualization Experience with WPF
Catch me in Kuching if you want to learn and understand how to built some stunning data visualization application.

Many of you might know that Microsoft launched it second wave of downsizing practice early of this week. Many of my friends who work in Microsoft world-wide do worry about their future. However one of the every unexpected news is MSFT eliminate Steve Riley. THe last time I attended his session is few months ago when I was in US for MVP Summit.

His session is one of the few security session that I attended. In general, he is a professional security speaker who know is domain quite well, knowledgeable and good in telling jokes ;) (if you realize the jokes is actually telling you the fact).

The Microsoft Teched or other conference in future might not be the same again as MS lost one of their top speaker.

Unbelievable!

Nowadays, many developer might forgot about what is Win32 API and don’t appreciate the API. Well, it is because a lot of things has been take care by .Net Framework.

Had you ever wondering, when you run the code below, what has been trigger to ask the OS to show you a window?

Dim Form1 as New Form()

Form1.show

At the bottom line is all about Win32 API. The problem is coding with Win32API is quite difficult. Fortunately, my peer aka Bugslayer is the expert in this field. Win32API is his forte!

He started to blog few days ago, stay tune for some interesting contents from his blog.

His blog is known as NTStatus (wondering why? refer Win32API)

When I was in US for MVP Summit a month ago, I got invited by Lilian to have a video shooting session.

Basically in the video,  I just share a little about what is my MVP competency about, where I from and of course what is my contribution to the community.

 
Video: MVP Walter Wong

If you are passion about technology as I am, you can become MVP one day!

Also, please visit some of our very own Malaysian Developer MVP team member

• Patrick Yong – ask him everything about Sharepoint Development
• Poh Sze, Lim – make sure you use Windows Mobile before ask her question! She is the Windows Mobile MVP.
• Wei Min, Chan – very hardcore developer. Both Wei Min and I are developing using Visual Basic!
• Ming Man, Chan – Look for him if you are staying in East Malaysia
• Gerald Hoong – SQL Server MVP – very professional trainer!
• Chiu Kiang, Phua - “PCK” in short, SQL Server expert!
• You name here!

One of the challenge of developing WPF and Silverlight is manage your UI. Especially when developing LOB application, there are numbers of possibility which the application need to be extend to others modules in the future. In order to address this challenge, Microsoft introduce a practice known as Composite Application Guidance.

The first version of the Composite Application Guidance shows the code in C#. If you are VB developer like me, you are going to convert the code line by line. But the hassle is over, there is a VB version available for you.

You can download it here.

Microsoft officially announced the launching of its Internet Explorer 8

You can read more about IE8 in the following news or blog

Microsoft launches IE 8 with a smile

IE8 Team’s blog 

If you are not the IE8 fans, why not give a try.

Are you developing Silverlight (SL) application? If Yes, you need to look at the following article at code.msdn.microsoft.com

Article wrote by one of the SDE/T in Microsoft – Silverlight MD5 Implementation

Since Silverlight application is hosted in the web, there are numerous possibility that it will get attack. A small MD5 algorithm will be helpful

For the past few months, I’m busy with one of the pet project from Microsoft Malaysia – WPF Reactor.

During the product testing, the team found out that Video failed to play in certain Windows XP machine. After the sleepless night, we found out that Windows Media Player 10 is one of the requirements for <Mediaelement>. The challenge arise when we need to detect what is the version of Windows Media Player that installed in the client’s machine.

Registry! Yup, that is the simple answer which we all know that majority of the application settings and attributes store inside registry. The answer is the WMP version registry store at

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\PlayerUpgrade

Name: PlayerVersion

Type:REG_SZ

Value: 11,0,6001,7000 (for my Vista machine)

For VB programmer (just like me), you can use the My.Computer.Registry object to quickly access the value you want.

It is a busy weekend and I almost miss out what I promise my audience in last week Technet MSDN Technology Summit.

If you were there in the event, I hope you like my session which present together with Hoong Fai and Chris Leong from Microsoft Malaysia.

You can get my presentation slide here.

I presented one of the cool application which known as WPF Reactor. Then I shared with them the tips and tricks which I learnt during the development of this application.

As promised, you can find more resource information by download ToTster file and import into your WPF Reactor.

Before I wish you all for Happy New Year and Happy Holiday, I would like to remind you to scan your source code for SQL Injection and Cross-site scripting (XSS). Well, Microsoft release Code Analysis Tool.Net (CAT.Net) middle of December 2008. Previously, FXCop can only scan for SQL Injection but not XSS. Due to the rising AJAX application deployment over the cloud, XSS become one of the highly rated attack on the cloud.

You can download the tools here.

I'll presenting in January Devtalk. It will be a developer security topics. In case you miss out my session in TechEd SEA 2008, here is the chance for you to attend. It is one of the top session in the event. Click here to find out the details.

Synopsis of the session

Lap Around Web Application vulnerabilities
A live hacking session demonstrating the different types of tools and techniques used by hackers. Come and understand in-depth the problems of insecure application and the solutions to solve the vulnerability. If you are not aware of these problems, you must attend this session!

TechNet MSDN is back to KL again. Tones of interesting contents for you to absorb and digest. You can register yourself here.

If you wondering where had I been, just to inform you that I'm working on a community project which going to release soon (real soon). Here is the sneak preview.............

It is a client application built using WPF, Windows Live ID SDK, IE8 components and others. Curious? just wait........ hahahaha

Over the years, there are many reports, comments, study been done on the search engine. Today, I plan to do a small research on the search engine usability studies. So I build a small application that having 3 web browser control to host 3 top 3 search engine just like the picture below

The thing that really surprise me is GOOGLE actually leading in term of usability. I'm not talking about the simplicity BUT they actually care about user's interaction with browser. The Google actually move the search textbox to the center of the browser. It straight away catch the user attention on where they should enter their keyword.

Another reason why Google still lead in the market. The lesson is beside accuracy of the results but USABILITY is very important.

In many scenarios, when user navigate to textbox, they want to directly enter a text rather than remove the current text only start typing the new text. In short this is what I want to achieve

Initially I thought can use SelectAll() method to do that

However, it doesn't achieve what I want. The textbox look like below.

In order to achieve the solution, need to add another line of code which is Focus().

Now the cursor will point to the textbox and the text has been selected. User can directly enter any text they want without erase the existing text.

Hope it helps.

Patrick Yong, pretty much known as the "OBA Guy" received Microsoft MVP Award last week.

He is guy who you can speak to from office client development to office server (sharepoint). He is awarded as MVP for Sharepoint Server. You can visit his blog here.

Congratulation Patrick!

Well need to hijack my blog to post the following jobs ad. My company Gain Secure,  is looking for .Net Developer.

You can apply this post IF

• interest to work with Cool Technology to solve people's problem
• interest to work with the expert
• working experience - 0-2 years (this is NOT a senior post)
• solve the following question - write a function/pseudocode to swap values of 2 variables

then send your resume walter@gainsecure.net

It was a surprise when I receive email from Microsoft to ask about my bio and photo to feature in TechEd Online. FYI,c TechEd Online is a place where you can view alot of contents about TechEd such as video, links and RSS. The best part about it is if you not able to attend the conference in other region, you can also view some of the contents there. Not only for Developer but IT Pro as well.

TechEd Online - Link

To be honest, I'm very glad that I be chosen and totally surprise me. At least I know that TechEd SEA do catch other's country attention.

Some of you might heard of twitter, for you who don't, basically it just a service to tell your "follower" what you are doing. And of course you can follow someone you like.

Just like today, I follow one of the App Security Guru - Michael Howard.
If you are twitter user you can "follow" him here.

And if you interest to "follow" me, you can do so at here.

If you are a fans for VB.Net and would like to mix around with other VB.Net expert including the product team from Redmond, then you should join this group in facebook.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=47315261872

As the MVP for 5 months, 1 of the things I enjoy most is speaking to developers/developers/security consultant about all these cool technologies. A month ago, MVP South East Asia team organize a fun game in TechEd SEA 2008. It actually asking the delegates to wrote a short sentence about MVP and I came across the following game card which describe me.

"To become an Independent Experts, listen to the real answer and protect your application from Hackers like Walter Wong"

Hey, I am not Hacker........ well even most of the time I talk and demo security, it is a way to educate the developers why they should write secure code. I'm trying all my best to educate and service my customer on this. :D

Anyway Hacker sounds cool? hahahahha