Historic news! To coincide with the re-launch of the 4 Chaps From Blighty website the 4 Chaps have started podcasting! You can download the very first ever 4 Chaps podcast here. This first podcast is part of a collection that discusses how to give great presentations and is aimed at first time or relatively new speakers who want to improve their presentation skills. Future podcasts subjects will vary across a wide range of information technology related subjects.

This one is clearly a first attempt but it marks the moment when the chaps entered a new world. Let us know what you think over on the 4 Chaps site.

It’s official: 4 Chaps From Blighty are going to DDD4. Not since Swindon 2006 have all 4 chaps been seen in public in the same place. Steve Tudor will be there to unveil his new presentation "Microsoft Robotics Studio" and I will be giving perhaps the last ever run of the much loved and occasionally dangerous "Automating Builds Using MSBuild" session (small children not allowed). Fellow chaps, Brian Long and Steve Scott, will be on hand to escort the 4 Chaps speakers to safety should things turn really nasty. On hearing the news Clare Parr (Microsoft UK’s Breadth and Community Marketing Manager) said "Who ? I’m sorry, I’ve never heard of you. Look, I’m a bit busy at the moment, could you come back next year ?" Wise words, Clare. The Mayor Of Reading (Bet Tickner) was unavailable for comment.

The System.Windows.Forms.MaskedTextBox class has a property called Mask that represents the input mask for the text box. This mask is clearly specific to a culture. This entry discusses this property, its associated property editor and the localized masks provider by this property editor.

Click on the MaskedTextBox.Mask property in the Properties Window in Visual Studio and then click on the ellipses in the property and you will most likely see the following Input Mask dialog:-

The dialog represents a collection of example masks for the CurrentCulture ("English (United States)" in this example). The dialog itself is dependant upon the current culture and therefore it is determined by the setting in the Regional and Language Options dialog. You can, for example, see the Spanish examples by closing Visual Studio, setting the culture to Spanish (Spain), restarting Visual Studio and opening the dialog again:-

The number of examples is specific to the culture so if you open the dialog for German (Germany) you will see just 4 entries:-

Unfortunately this list is hard coded and there is no way to extend or customize the list. The examples are hard coded in the internal MaskDescriptorTemplate class. The possible values are shown here:-

en-US Descriptions	English / Invariant	Arabic	German	French	Italian	Spanish	Japanese	Chinese Simplified	Chinese Traditional	Korean
Numeric (5-digits)	00000	n/a	n/a	99999	99999	99999	99999	99999	n/a	99999
Phone Number	(999)000-0000	(999)000-0000	n/a	00 00 00 00 00 00	0000 00000	(999)000-0000	99900-9990-0000	(900)9000-0000	(00)9000-0000	(999)9000-0000
Phone Number no Area Code	000-0000	000-0000	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	9000-0000	n/a	9000-0000
Short Date	00 /00 /0000	00 /00 /0000	00/00/0000	00/00/0000	00/00/0000	00/00/0000	0000/00/00	0000-00-00	0000/00/00	0000-00-00
Short date and time (US)	00 /00 /0000 00:00	00 /00 /0000 00:00	00/00/0000 00:00	00/00/0000 00:00	00/00/0000 00:00	00/00/0000 00:00	0000/00/00 00:00:00	0000-00-00 90:00:00	0000/00/00 00:00:00	0000-00-00 90:00
Social Security Number	000-00-0000	000-00-0000	n/a	0 00 00 00 000 000 00	n/a	000-00-0000	n/a	n/a	n/a	000000-0000000
Time (US)	90:00	90:00	90:00	00:00	00:00	00:00	90:00	90:00	90:00	90:00
Time (European/Military)	00:00	00:00	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
Zip Code	00000-9999	n/a	00000	00000	00000	00000	000-0000	000000	99000	000-000

Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) and Korean have additional formats for cell phone numbers. Japanese has additional date/time formats for the Japanese calendar. Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) has additional date/time formats and identity card formats. Korean has additional date/time formats.

The English formats are used for Engl

Want to speak Spanish or German but can’t be bothered to spend the time learning the language ? Look no further. Researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University in the United States have developed a device that detects movements in the neck and face when words are mouthed. The device detects the sounds that would be made if the words were actually spoken instead of mouthed, translates them into the target language and uses a voice synthesizer to say the translated words. The effect is that it can look like you are speaking another language (although in reality it looks like a dubbed movie).

One of the best kept secrets at TechEd Europe 2006 has been that the .NET Framework 3.0 has been released! The news was apparently released in Eric Rudder’s keynote. It was made so clear that very few people at TechEd actually knew that it had been released. Speakers became exhasperated when they mentioned it to attendees and people didn’t believe them. Well, it’s true. Go download it.

Day 3, and my sessions are all done so I get to swan around going to other people’s sessions and generally having a good time. Here’s a few pics of the day’s events:-

Ant and Dec speak at TechEd!	Carl Franklin picks up a guitar and starts to play
Community Dinner (Tim Leung, Andrew Westgarth, Clare Parr, Ian Cooper, Paul from Ireland, David from Madrid, Brian Long)

If you read this blog regularly you might recall a previous post entitled The Problem With DDD where I presented various ideas on solving the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper problem. To recap, the problem is that DDD is more popular than DDD can cope with. Demand dramatically exceeds supply and DDD typically sells out within a week (as DDD4 did recently). My previous thoughts on solving this problem won’t work in practice because they involve a larger investment from Microsoft or changing the event to a paid event and this would change the dynamics too much.

So here’s the latest attempt to solve this problem: DDD Online. The idea would be that for those people who either didn’t manage to get in to the live event or who live too far away from Reading to make the trip impractical the whole event would be available online as live webcasts. The online experience wouldn’t be as great as the live experience because you wouldn’t be able to network or mingle but it would be practical for many people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to attend and it would not represent a significant increase in costs for Microsoft.

What do you think ?

On Wednesday I did my second session which was entitled "10 Things To Know Before Internationalizing An
Application". It was the first session of the day and I was happy with the result. About 150 people attended and
there were lots of good questions after the session.

TechEd Europe is running a competition called Speaker Idol where would-be speakers get to present a 5 minute slot to an audience and a panel of experts. The winner gets a speaking slot at TechEd Europe 2007. I’ve seen a number of these presentations and the speakers have been quite impressive. The eventual winner was Bart de Smit and if you get a chance to see him he should be well worth your time. Another notable contestant was Bogdan Prodan, a 25 year old from Romania. Bogdan gave a great presentation and even though he didn’t win I think we will be seeing more of him at future conferences.

In the evening each country had a "drinks and food" event at a local venue. The UK evening was at Shoko with some excellent food and some excitable dancers and musicians. Naturally they sang in Spanish but my spanish wasn’t up to understanding the lyrics. They could have been singing anything...

Shoko - Ian Cooper, Clare Parr, Dave McMahon

Shoko - Dancers and Musicians

Here I am at TechEd Europe 2006 in Barcelona. I’ve got a couple of internationalization sessions (one today and one tomorrow). This morning was the opening keynote with Simon Brown (Vice President of Developer And Platform Evangelism), Eric Rudder (Senior Vice President Of Strategy), Eric Lee (Senior Product Manager in the Developer Division) and Anders Hejlsberg (Technical Fellow). I’ll mention a few of the details that I found interesting but don’t take this as a complete coverage of the keynote because it isn’t.

The session opened with a somewhat patronizing and humourless cartoon of a French developer and an English developer teaching security 101 to an audience of developers in what I suspect was hoped to be a funny and amusing way. Still, there’s always TechEd Europe 2007. Simon Brown provided a few TechEd stats: registrations from over 50 countries, 4000 developers at TechEd for developers this week and a further 4500 for IT Forum next week (personally I think the split between the two conferences is a really smart idea and I hope that the US takes Europe’s lead). He also announced Imagine Cup 2007 (http://www.imaginecup.com), a competition for students all over the world to demonstrate technology, with the final being in Korea in 2007.

Simon Brown also introduced Arfa, an 11 year old girl from Pakistan. Arfa has made the news a lot over the last 2 years primarily because she passed her Microsoft Certified Professional exam in C# at the age of 9 (or 10 depending on your source). Think about it. Have you passed your MCP exam ? She has and she did it in a country that suffers from wide-spread illiteracy. Even better, she passed her ASP.NET exam at the age of 11. Really quite something. Well done.

Eric Rudder provided a few details about releases. The 2007 Office system was released to manufacture yesterday at 6:00am Pacific time. MSDN subscribers should receive it before the end of the month. Vista RTM will also be available to MSDN Subscribers "quite shortly". ASP.NET AJAX Beta 2 was also released last night (it includes localization and globalization support amongst other new features). You can reach downloads for all of these products at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio. You also might like to be aware that Microsoft Learning are making their clinics and e-books free until 15th January 2006 (see http://www.microsoft.com/learning).

Opening Keynote
Developer Cartoon	Anders Hejlsberg

Eric Lee demonstrated a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application for a fictitious company called Fabrikam. In particular the demo showed an animated manikin that did a catwalk-style series of movements to show off clothing from Fabrikam. It went a lot further than most WPF animation demos as it showed a fully animated human with joints that bent correctly as the figure rotated in a relatively sophisticated way.

Finally Anders Heljsberg (ex-Delphi hero) demoed LINQ and as usual thoroughly wowed the audience with just how fabulously clever and useful this technology is.