Maarten van Stam - Soft As In Software :-)

On my way to Redmond

2010-02-15T05:24:00Z

In a few hours I'll be on my way to Redmond. This week it's the MVP Summit 2010 where over 1300 MVP's from all over the world will get over there and meet each other and get some updates on technology. An opportunity to meet members of the Program Group and discuss some hot issues.

I didn't get any sleep tonight as I needed the time to prepare my machines in order to get some work done over the week and probably will use my time on the plane to catch up and sleep a bit. I guess I'll end up with a double Jet Lag this time.

Have something to share? Our magazine is looking for your content ...

2010-01-24T01:32:00Z

For 2010 we (the magazine team on the Software Development Network, Dutch developer user group) decided that it would be a good thing to bring the pedal to the floor and speed up with our magazine.

In previous years we provided four magazines distributed to our user group member delivered by mail (handed over by the mailman). Four magazines in a year will bring only one magazine in about 13 weeks. For the world we live in we thought this to be a tad too slow.

These days we are seeing a burst in eReader-deliveries all over the place, gadgets of all kinds and we decided this to be a good time to double our magazine count per year but to distribute fifty percent of the magazine count as digital magazine where possible optimized for eReader devices. That all sounds easier than it is as we are now experiencing. We need more input from our authors, advertisements but most of all we had to double our magazine tasks such as collecting and editing texts, working on the layout, verify the content etc.

One of the goals we have planned for our new setup is to change our layout a little bit and provide space for small editorial announcements to be supplied by whoever wants to announce something related to Software Development. Now that we deliver eight magazines a year these small announcements bring more up to date relevance to the magazine but for that to work we need your assistance.

If you have news on your software products, new releases, feature enhancements, hardware reviews related to software development, book releases (maybe you want -us- to review your books, soft- or hardware), maybe you want to share your research results from your software labs, announce your whitepapers, event, code projects, architect info ... send us your information and we'll try to fit it in our magazine!

Whenever you think you fit in this description (or you want to provide larger articles or want to discuss sponsored editorials-larger articles discussing products allowing to emphasizing on your product/business) just contact me on my contact page: http://blogs.officezealot.com/maarten/contact.aspx and one of our magazine members will contact you to work things out.

Oh, one more thing ... we accept content in two languages: Dutch and English. Being a Dutch magazine of course we prefer the text to be in Dutch but we understand not everybody is able to provide the text in Dutch leaving the other option to provide an English text.

Free SharePoint 2010 eMagazine

2010-01-18T22:04:00Z

The Dutch Information Workers Usergroup (DIWUG) powered by the Dutch Software Development Network (SDN) has published an SharePoint eMagazine free for download.

A free magazine for IT-Pro's, Developers and End (power) Users and available in two versions where one is optimized to read in eReaders.

http://www.sdn.nl/IW/FreeMagazine/tabid/139/Default.aspx

Have Fun and let me know what you like or don't like in the magazine.

Visual Studio 2010 Editions Compared

2009-11-06T10:47:00Z

For your convenience Microsoft posted an overview with all the Visual Studio 2010 options and features compared over the available editions (VS 2010 Professional, Premium and Ultimate).

http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010/default.mspx#compare

Check it out and decide what your favorite edition will be. Remember the launch is announced for March 22, 2010 so that’s only about 4 months from now!

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet …

2009-10-31T14:53:00Z

About two weeks ago I did some presentations at the Nationale Office Dag 2009 to show some tips and trips on Word, Excel and Outlook.

One of the tips in the Word presentation was how to create a stack of dummy text in order to check out your document layout by using the ‘Rand’ feature.

To test this, just open up a document and start typing ‘=rand(3,5)’ without the quotes and hit enter. Now you’ll notice that your document is provided with a bit of random text over 3 paragraphs containing 5 sentences.

Today I learned that when you have Word 2007 (or up) installed you can do the same thing with Lorem. Try it, do the same as with rand and start typing ‘=lorem(3,5)’ without the quotes and hit enter. Now you get the Lorem text you often see in Microsoft demos.

I promised to add some more Tips and Tricks information that I discussed at the presentations, but it has been extremely busy so this one is just a starter to begin with ;-)

Have fun!