Author: maartenvanstam

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Microsoft’s Satya Nadella’s book Hit Refresh

Hit Refresh

Satya Nadella wrote a book about the transformation of Microsoft and his journey coming from India as a child to the Executive role he now performs within Microsoft. I think it is a tradition CEOs write books, Bill Gates had a few (these days he is more into reading books and sharing his book picks every now and then in lists on his blog)

I just pre-ordered Satya’s book, to see how this is different from the books I read earlier published by Bill Gates. My guess is that it will be of a complete different order. We’ll see, it will arrive on my Kindle when it is released September 26th.

The book is now on preorder here:

* Be aware that the link is using my Amazon affiliate tag and I will get filthy rich Smile if you use that so I can buy more computer books and blog even more about interesting technologies! But don’t worry it won’t cost you anything extra …

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SDN Cast 66 – XlPublish with Mr. Moffat and Mr. Hoppe

SDNCast 66-800

Today we had our 66th SDN Cast, our 100th published video. Today with Mr. Moffat and Mr. Hoppe showing their new Excel tool XlPublish an Add-In for Microsoft Excel to better integrate Excel data and Microsoft’s Power BI’s Dashboarding product and make it available to every Excel user everywhere.

Usually the SDN Cast in Dutch but today the webcast is in English as Dick Moffat is from the other half of the globe from Canada. My connection was a bit crappy this time, probably my family was busy streaming Netflix eating all the bandwidth instead of watching daddy in his webcast Confused smile.

XlPublish is a very interesting product, making your work as Power BI person a lot easier if you have your data in Excel or even in external data that you can expose through Excel!

Where can you find our 66th episode of our SDN Cast?
https://youtu.be/KE6bhvdLLnI

Did you subscribe our Dutch SDN Cast channel already?

Subscribe your YouTube channel if you don’t want to miss a single broadcast. Usually we will broadcast on Thursday evenings at 8 PM but there can be a change of plans where we need to move to another time or day. So to be sure Subscribe to our channel on YouTube or go to http://www.sdncast.nl to see when the next episode is due.

Other news

Announcing TypeScript 2.5
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/typescript/2017/08/31/announcing-typescript-2-5/

Events

Events this Week

Google Developer Days Europe – September 5-6, Krakow, Poland
https://developers.google.com/events/gdd-europe/

Wazug – September 7 2017, Hilversum
https://www.wazug.nl/Event/Details/2059

Upcoming Events

Microsoft Edge Web Summit 2017 – September 13, Online
https://summit.microsoftedge.com/

MixUG – Development Event – 13 September, Gouda
https://www.eventbrite.nl/e/tickets-mixug-development-evenement-34890959800

Xamarin Dev Days – 16 September – Amsterdam
https://ti.to/xamarin/dev-days-amsterdam-2017

DevIntersection Europe, September 18-20 – Stockholm
https://www.devintersectioneurope.com/#!

.NET Conf – 19-21 September
http://www.dotnetconf.net/

Building high performance web applications with Preact – September 21th- .NET Zuid – Rotterdam
http://www.dotnetzuid.nl/Meeting/20/building-high-performance-web-applications-with-preact

Microsoft Envision – September 25-27 – Orlando
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/envision/default.aspx

Ignite 2017 – September 25-29 – Orlando
https://ignite.microsoft.com
https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions

Hybrid IT Event – September 26 – Maarssen, NL
http://www.fujitsu.com/nl/microsites/hybrid-it/event/index.html

4DotNet Events – Xamarin Event – 28 September, Nieuwegein
https://events.4dotnet.nl/xamarin-event

MixUG – Eindgebruikers Evenement
https://www.eventbrite.nl/e/tickets-mixug-eindgebruikers-evenement-34890983872

SDN Event 3 – October 6, Zeist, NL
https://www.sdn.nl/EVENTS/6-oktober-2017

TechDays October 12-13, 2017 RAI Amsterdam
http://www.techdays.nl/
https://techdays.msnlevents.net/content/eventselection.aspx?eventid=26152

SharePoint Saturday Belgium 2017, October 21, Brussels BE
http://www.spsevents.org/city/brussels/brussels2017

SharePoint Unite – October 24-26, 2017, Haarlem
https://sharepointunite.com/

Dev Intersection, October 30- November 2, Las Vegas
https://www.devintersection.com/#!/

Firebase Dev Summit – Amsterdam – October 31
https://firebase.google.com/dev-summit-17/

Web Summit – 6-9 November 2017, Lisbon, Portugal
https://websummit.com/

Visual Studio Live! November 12-17 2017 Orlando, FL
https://live360events.com/events/orlando-2017/vslive.aspx

As usual we are always looking for presenters for our own events and Meetup’s so if you want to share something about hot technologies or just about something you implemented at work or in an App that could be interesting to our audience let us know so we can schedule you for one or our next SDN events or Dutch .NET Group Meetups.

This off course also goes for if you want to write a great article for us to publish in our SDN Magazines or at our SDN Website. The downside of publishing a magazine article is that there can be sometime between writing the article and publishing the magazine. So, if it is time critical sometimes the best option is to publish it on the www.sdn.nl website to get more speedy attention to the article.

As you see, options enough to address your audience with top notch information. You can even, if you like, be our guest in our SDN Cast shows to discuss the projects you are working on or other topics you master. We will instruct you how to connect with us and what it is you need to join the show.

Hopefully we will see you at our weekly web cast, for the schedule go to www.sdncast.nl for next week’s announcement to find out the day and time of our next broadcast or go to www.sdncast.nl/youtube to watch old episodes and videos that we recorded at our events. Don’t forget to subscribe our YouTube channel www.sdncast.nl/subscribe or go directly to YouTube not to miss any of our shows!

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Office Development–How to reach the Office Extensibility Platform team

StackOverflow

A long time ago, I answered a lot of questions in the so called Microsoft Forums assisting the community with VSTO issues. The forums still exist (https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/home?forum=vsto), but are not the main access point anymore if you want to reach the Office Extensibility Platform team with your questions or issues.

These days https://www.stackoverflow.com is the center of the Universe (well… not really but if you have developer related questions it is … sort of …).

StackOverflow is a huge knowledge base of information formed out of an even bigger stack of questions from the community answered by not only the community but also from many of the ‘real’ product groups. If you are building your Add-ins using OfficeJS your can go to:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/office-js

This “office-js” tagged group of questions is actively monitored by the Office Extensibility Platform team and you might recognize many of the team members as being the ones answering your questions (or apologizing if you reached an issue). By asking your questions in there the information around it is automatically functioning as future reference item.

You’ll notice, if you Google for a specific issue or question, that you’ll hit StackOverflow simply because you often won’t be the only one with that question. Big chance that the answer is already available and that will save you the time to submit the question.

Remember, that by submitting your question, you are not only helping yourself but you’ll help many others arriving at a later time with the same question.

And … while you are at it, try to answer some of the open questions if you know the answer. It will provide you ‘reputation’ points that may help you even more. The more reputation points you get the more you are ‘credited’ with features. If your reputation is high enough you’ll be able to moderate questions with a group of peer moderators, and if it is really high you can moderate without confirmation of other moderators. You basically build trust by doing good.

BTW, the office-js tag is not the only tag where the team lives, other examples and my favorite tags:

image

Note that VSTO is also in there:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/vsto
so if you have questions on the good old VSTO tools this is your go to place Winking smile

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SDN Cast 65 – Alexa and Cortana Integration

clip_image002

Amazon and Microsoft announce to continue to work together and added integration between Alexa, Amazons smart IA interface, to communicate with Cortana, Microsoft’s smart girl – the other IA Interface in both directions.

It should be possible soon to open Cortana’s interface from Alexa and ask Cortana when your next meeting is scheduled, or to reschedule your appointment if you can’t make it and you want to move the appointment to another time or place.

The other way around you could open Alexa’s from Cortana to order some stuff on Amazon. Both domains are really extending each other and with that extending their scope of applications. It would allow you to create your own Cortana Skill using Cortana Skills Kit or develop Alexa skills with the Alexa Skills Kit to connect your own platform to both smart bots.

Some other news items we discussed this week was about the sneak preview of the upcoming release of XLPublish and the next version of UWP Community Toolkit. We want to try to get Dick Moffat on the show again so he can give us a demo of their new product.

Where can you find our 65th episode of our Dutch SDN Cast?
https://youtu.be/nuoigZhnRKI

Did you subscribe our Dutch SDN Cast channel already?

Subscribe your YouTube channel if you don’t want to miss a single broadcast. Usually we will broadcast on Thursday evenings at 8 PM but there can be a change of plans where we need to move to another time or day. So to be sure Subscribe to our channel on YouTube or go to http://www.sdncast.nl to see when the next episode is due.

Other news:

The UWP Community Toolkit v2.0
https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2017/08/30/uwp-community-toolkit-v2-0
https://github.com/Microsoft/UWPCommunityToolkit/

XLPublish
https://dmoffat.wordpress.com/2017/06/15/xlpublish-is-almost-here/

TFS 2018 RC1 is available
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/08/30/tfs-2018-rc1-is-available/

VSTS Update – Aug 28
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/08/29/vsts-update-aug-28/

Hey Cortana, open Alexa: Microsoft and Amazon’s first-of-its-kind collaboration
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2017/08/30/hey-cortana-open-alexa-microsoft-amazons-first-kind-collaboration/

Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.4 Preview
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2017/08/25/visual-studio-2017-version-15-4-preview/
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/08/25/uwp-net-standard-2-0-preview/

Events

Events this Week

MvvmCross .NET Summer Hackfest, August 21st to September 2nd, 2017
https://www.mvvmcross.com/hackfest/

IFA 2017, Berlin, Germany
http://b2b.ifa-berlin.com/en/IFA/IFAKeynotesConventions/IFAKeynotes/Microsoft/index-2.html

Upcoming events

Google Developer Days Europe – September 5-6, Krakow, Poland
https://developers.google.com/events/gdd-europe/

Wazug – September 7 2017, Hilversum
https://www.wazug.nl/Event/Details/2059

Microsoft Edge Web Summit 2017 – September 13, Online
https://summit.microsoftedge.com/

MixUG – Development Event – 13 September, Gouda
https://www.eventbrite.nl/e/tickets-mixug-development-evenement-34890959800

Xamarin Dev Days – 16 September – Amsterdam
https://ti.to/xamarin/dev-days-amsterdam-2017

DevIntersection Europe, September 18-20 – Stockholm
https://www.devintersectioneurope.com/#!

.NET Conf – 19-21 September
http://www.dotnetconf.net/

Microsoft Envision – September 25-27 – Orlando
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/envision/default.aspx

Ignite 2017 – September 25-29 – Orlando
https://ignite.microsoft.com
https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions

Hybrid IT Event – September 26 – Maarssen, NL
http://www.fujitsu.com/nl/microsites/hybrid-it/event/index.html

4DotNet Events – Xamarin Event – 28 September, Nieuwegein
https://events.4dotnet.nl/xamarin-event

MixUG – Eindgebruikers Evenement
https://www.eventbrite.nl/e/tickets-mixug-eindgebruikers-evenement-34890983872

SDN Event 3 – 6 October 6, Zeist, NL
https://www.sdn.nl/EVENTS/6-oktober-2017

TechDays October 12-13, 2017 RAI Amsterdam
http://www.techdays.nl/
https://techdays.msnlevents.net/content/eventselection.aspx?eventid=26152

SharePoint Saturday Belgium 2017, October 21, Brussels BE
http://www.spsevents.org/city/brussels/brussels2017

SharePoint Unite – October 24-26, 2017, Haarlem
https://sharepointunite.com/

Dev Intersection, October 30- November 2, Las Vegas
https://www.devintersection.com/#!/

Web Summit – 6-9 November 2017, Lissabon, Portugal
https://websummit.com/

Visual Studio Live! November 12-17 2017 Orlando, FL
https://live360events.com/events/orlando-2017/vslive.aspx

As usual we are always looking for presenters for our own events and Meetup’s so if you want to share something about hot technologies or just about something you implemented at work or in an App that could be interesting to our audience let us know so we can schedule you for one or our next SDN events or Dutch .NET Group Meetups.

This off course also goes for if you want to write a great article for us to publish in our SDN Magazines or at our SDN Website. The downside of publishing a magazine article is that there can be sometime between writing the article and publishing the magazine. So, if it is time critical sometimes the best option is to publish it on the www.sdn.nl website to get more speedy attention to the article.

As you see, options enough to address your audience with top notch information. You can even, if you like, be our guest in our SDN Cast shows to discuss the projects you are working on or other topics you master. We will instruct you how to connect with us and what it is you need to join the show.

Hopefully we will see you at our weekly web cast, for the schedule go to www.sdncast.nl for next week’s announcement to find out the day and time of our next broadcast or go to www.sdncast.nl/youtube to watch old episodes and videos that we recorded at our events. Don’t forget to subscribe our YouTube channel www.sdncast.nl/subscribe or go directly to YouTube not to miss any of our shows!

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Redstone 4 – Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 16353 for PC (Skip Ahead)

RS4 Windows 10 Insider Preview 16353

Almost at the same time as the Insider Preview Build 16281 for PC for Redstone 3 (Fall Creators Update) Microsoft released the Skip Ahead Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 16353 for PC to the Windows Insiders who opted in for the Skip Ahead flight:

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/08/31/announcing-windows-10-insider-preview-build-16353-pc-skip-ahead

The flight is currently closed, if you haven’t joined the Skip Ahead flight you need to wait until after the release of the Fall Creators Update that was announced for October 17th in about six weeks from now:

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/09/01/create-and-play-this-holiday-with-the-windows-10-fall-creators-update-coming-oct-17

Microsoft created a nice infographic to show you the differences between the RS3 and RS4 flights:

Skip Ahead

I just installed the build, no issues so far so all good for now …

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Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 16281 for PC

RS4 Windows 10 Insider Preview 16281

Builds are following up quickly these days, at least for Redstone 3 (Fall Creators Update). Today we moved to 16281 for PC builds:

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/09/01/announcing-windows-10-insider-preview-build-16281-pc

On a side note, today Microsoft also announced the release date for the Fall Creators Update to be October 17th Worldwide:

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/09/01/create-and-play-this-holiday-with-the-windows-10-fall-creators-update-coming-oct-17

With the release also the Mixed Reality devices will become available for you to buy, so start saving for your super cool own Mixed Reality set!

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Cortana and Alexa collaboration

Alexa-Cortana

While Cortana still isn’t available for the Dutch, development is not standing … Microsoft and Amazon just announced their collaboration effort to integrate Cortana with Alexa and vice versa

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2017/08/30/hey-cortana-open-alexa-microsoft-amazons-first-kind-collaboration/

The idea is that you can now order your stuff through Amazon using Cortana by asking Cortana to buy your stuff on Alexa, Amazon. The other way around you can ask Alexa to open Cortana and tell you what is on your schedule for today or to reschedule your meeting if you won’t be able to make it.

To enhance this, you should be able to create your own Cortana skills and Alexa interactions so start thinking about what you could do with this before this is opened later this year!

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Office Development – SharePoint Framework Extensions now RC0

Office Development - SharePoint Extensions RC0

In June I blogged about the SharePoint Framework Extensions Developer Preview and last night the SharePoint Framework Extensions moved a step forward, they are now available as Release Candidate 0:

https://dev.office.com/blogs/sharepoint-framework-extensions-rc0-now-available

Not completely ready so to say, my guess there will be at least two more RCs but at least they moved out of Preview.

If you don’t know what the SharePoint Framework Extensions are, just jump back to my June post to read all about it.

Have Fun!

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Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 16278

RS3 Windows 10 Insider Preview 16278

Quick Update:

Another Windows 10 Insider Preview Build for the Redstone 3 release flight. Again, “Skip Ahead”  aka Redstone 4 is skipped, so this will be another stabilizing build to prepare Redstone 3 for going RTM as the Fall Creators Update in a couple of weeks or maybe even faster.

Here are the details on the official Microsoft Insiders Blog:
Announcing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 16278 for PC

Have Fun, probably won’t last that long as with this pace the next build can be expected quickly!