One of my projects from last year was nominated for and won the IWS, Search Partner of the Year award. We received the award for a project we did for the Dutch consultancy company Twynstra Gudde.

We created a system which allows the user to search through many different subsystems using the simplest interface we could design:

Under the surface the system combines the results from all of their back-end systems to give the user a complete view of all the information available relevant to their search query.

The search results are presented in way that allows a user to filter the results and find detailed pages (all red text is a link):

I am very proud that I was part of the team to build this solution, which the client is very enthusiastic about and the Microsoft chose to honor with the Search Partner of the Year award!

Microsoft press release

Tam Tam press release

My company is organizing a one day conference about Employee 2.0 (in Dutch only) together with Agile, Wortell and Microsoft. The main part of the program consists of case-studies of actual application, which help employees to find the information they need, communicate more efficiently etc. And it's free!

From Rands:

Here is an audacious goal for your resume: to get you to a point in your career where you no longer need a resume. It’s the point that in your chosen industry people know who you are and what you are capable of. And they want you doing it at their companies.

Jeff Atwood posted an entry today about how it's important to have fun at work. I can only agree with him, since the reason I still am at my current job is the fun I'm having and the great people I work with.

If you love software as much as I do, you deserve to work at a company where people come to work not to punch a clock, but because they love software, too. You deserve to work at a company where software engineering is respected. You deserve to work at a company where peers meet to enjoy building software together.

And just like Jeff's company, we're hiring too.

Who am I?

As you probably guessed, I am Paul van Brenk and I live in Rotterdam in The Netherlands. I've been writing this blog since October 2003, when I started it to write about the PDC in that year. I've been developing software since the Commodore 64, using Basic. I rediscovered how much fun it was when in college writing small asp applications, in vb-script. The move to ASP.NET was obvious when the beta of .NET 1.0 arrived and now I'm comfortable in C# and VB.Net, but prefer the first. I recently developed an interest in LISP and try to get more comfortable with C and C++, but I don't use that often enough.

I currently work for Tam Tam, where I specialize in Custom Solutions for the Information Worker business Unit as a sr. software engineer. My time is spent designing and writing applications and training the junior developers. In my spare time I contribute to the opensource blogging platform dasBlog.

Why a blog?

A blog is a good way to keep track of the things I find interesting or discover and a great way to share them. Hopefully you'll find them intersting, helpful or atleast point you in the right direction. Since blogs are best when there is 2 way communication, please post comments or send emails. Just try to keep them more or less ontopic.

Can I email you?

paul.van.brenk@gmail.com

What platform do you use?

I try to run the latest daily build of the dasBlog, as far as my host supports it. So you may encounter the occasional issue, but that's life at the bleeding edge of software development.

Again for 2007-2008 Tam Tam had received the Microsoft Gold Partner status.

Via: Freakonomics Blog

 Microsoft released a beta of Live writer [0] this weekend and says it works with dasBlog, so this is a test to see if it actually does.

[0] Writer zone

Available on SourceForge.net, haven’t found anything yet, excellent work Omar, Scott and everybody else.

[full list of new features]

In Seattle for the Compiler Workshop and offcourse it's raining, so I felt right at home.

I did touch up this picture to make it less depressing.

Mart has a much cooler pic of the Space Needle and a great post about his top 6 things at Office DevCon 2005.

Could be a little sharper, but still a nice perspective.

Omar announces das Blog 1.7

Upgrade is not x-copy….

via: [Boing Boing]

Very cool picture.

via: flickrblog

“.NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference Volume 2” with the long awaited xml classes is available for pre-order at amazon, too bad it’s estimated shipping date is April 29, 2005.

Channel9 guy checks out Jenna Jameson.

Hanging out with mr brown.

Since I finally picked up a mobile phone with a camera I might as well bore you with the pictures I take.

Flicker stream

Also available as rss and atom feeds.

Posting pictures from my mobilephone.

The cover says it all.

Or does it...

I'll be back at SellsCon from tomorrow till Friday, minus some flying time, after I arrived a little early (but in time for some mall food). I'm not sure if I will make it to the Nerd Dinner on Tuesday or opt for the free drinks.

Highlight should be hunting down bears with Rory Blyth Keiths security talk.

Updates have been made to improve the performance of Windows XP Service Pack 2 as a guest in Virtual PC, to improve the manage ability of virtual machines when used with SMS 2003 Service Pack 1, and to provide support for running Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition as the host operating system.

[download virtual pc 2004 sp1]

note: The readme is not yet available.

Comments are enabled again. Let's see if I can keep up with removing the spam.

Raymond Chen recently wrote a number of posts about the /3gb switch and virtual memory.

Great tip from Chris Sells for working on projects from mapped drives. You'll have to run caspol for every version of the framework you're using.

Lately, I've been running Virtual PC a lot to test various versions of WinFX on various platforms. To save me for locking any valuable code into a VPC HD, I use VPC shares, mapping Z to the D HD on my VPC host PC. That's all well and good 'til I try to load a project from Z which, according to the OS, is a mapped network drive (in spite of the fact that it's just the other partition on the very same PC), and Visual Studio complains that since I don't have FullTrust on that drive, things may not work out the way I'd hoped (and for whoever decided to write the code and put up that message box, thank you!):

The project location is not trusted.

Running the application may result in security exceptions when it
attempts to perform actions which require full trust.

What's happening is that VS is detecting that the project on the network drive is getting Intranet permissions according to the good and true workings of .NET Code Access Security (CAS). However, since I'm just trying to pretend that Z is on my PC (and, in fact, it is), I want it to have FullTrust permissions. To accomplish this, you need to add a new Code Group with an URL membership permission specifying the folder (in URL form) to which you'd like to grant full trust. You can do with the .NET Framework Configuration tool or you can do it from the command line like so:

c:\>caspol -q -machine -addgroup 1 -url file://z:/* FullTrust -name "Z Drive"

Once this new code group is in place, any new .NET processes you start will give any assemblies on the Z drive full trust (make sure to cycle the devenv.exe process if you want these new permissions and that message box to go away).

Since awarding new permissions, full trust or not, to any chunk of code is something that can cause a security hole, be careful. In this case, I'm awarding full trust so that Z acts just like a normal HD which has full trust by default, so I'm OK. Please make sure that you're OK before adding permission via code groups willy nilly.