This has to go down as another great success: registrations were capped at 400 (capacity was 300), 50 people were on the wait list, 300 people attended on the day, lots of enthusiasm and excitement, more sessions than is humanly possible, well done to everyone concerned. I didn’t have time to attend too many sessions but I made a point of seeing Ian Griffiths’ session on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) which is one of my interests. If you haven’t seen Ian present before then you’ve really missed something. Ian provided his usual high energy, enthusiastic raison d’etre for WPF, combining significant information content with wicked humour - a recipe for the ultimate presentation IMO. The majority of sessions in the Chicago and Memphis rooms were recorded and you can view them at http://www.developerday.co.uk as and when they are made available.

I was pleased with my own presentation "What’s New In .NET Internationalization In Visual Studio 2005 ?"; I had an interested and
interesting audience who asked great questions and I managed to cover the most important points in the subject despite the fact that the subject is huge and cannot reasonably be covered in 60 minutes (but then again I think this is probably the cry of all speakers covering .NET 2/Visual Studio 2005 subjects). In summary: a good time was had by all and the organisers (Microsoft and community alike) should be heartily congratulated for another success. Get your proposals for sessions in early for DDD3 and get your registration in even earlier.

I’m delighted to announce that I will be presenting the new features of the .NET Framework 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 in Swindon on the 14th November 2005. VS2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 are compelling and undeniable. The upgrade choice is an easy one. Every kind of .NET development has been enhanced with must-have features which should make the adoption of the new standard as widespread as possible. The subject itself is huge. Please don’t come to the presentation expecting to learn everything there is to know about the .NET Framework 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005; it would take weeks, months and probably years to cover this subject properly. Instead it will be a 2 hour whistle stop tour of the highlights.

The event is a VBUG event and is being held at Nationwide Building Society, Nationwide House, Pipers Way, Swindon, SN38 1NW (see http://www.vbug.co.uk/events/default.asp and http://bristol.vbug.net/Default.aspx?tabid=35 for details). The meeting officially starts at 7:00pm but the doors open at 6:30pm and I always spend the time up until 7:00pm as a kind of problem clinic and "Top Tip" session so if you have any burning problems you’re having and want to see what the combined might of the Swindon VBUG can do bring them along. Also if you’ve just discovered some tip or trick that’s really cool come along and share it with everyone else (we’re not looking for rocket science here, we’re looking for ordinary stuff that you just discovered - what you think of as ordinary is often the solution to someone else’s long standing problem).

See you there.

You can find the slides and files for my DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper2 presentation on What’s New In .NET Internationalization In Visual Studio 2005 ? presentation here. Remember that this is not an exhaustive list of enhancements. The list simply represents those subjects that I chose to cover in the 60 minutes available. In practice covering all of the enhancements properly would take considerably longer.

The source code for the book is available here.

On this 21st day of the month of October in the year of 2005 I have officially joined the rest of the community in the adventure that is blogging. Like most bloggers I feel that this is way overdue but at last I’m here.

Over the coming weeks and months I hope to give you a feel for who I am and what I do but to summarize for now I am a Microsoft .NET Solutions Architect, author, speaker and trainer. On this blog you will see posts on the .NET Framework, software development in general and considerable content on a subject of great interest to me: .NET Internationalization.

I hope you enjoy this blog and trust you will be patient with my first attempts.

Guy Smith-Ferrier

Tomorrow sees the second DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper event (http://www.developerday.co.uk) at Microsoft UK, Reading. If you’re not already registered then apart from the fact that you probably aren’t reading this until after the event you have no hope of getting in: DDD2 was sold out ages ago. This is a very popular event; possibly because its free, possibly because it is hosted at Microsoft’s headquarters but probably because it is a community event. I am very pro-community. I seem to gravitate towards institutions and people who promote the development community and this event is the epitomy of this ideal. The event uses non-Microsoft speakers from the UK community. The speakers are taken from major names like Dave Sussman and Alex Homer and also developers who are interested in trying out the speaking circuit without having to jump straight in at the Tech Ed level.

I’m delighted to have been asked back again this time and I get to present one of my favourite subjects: What’s New In .NET Internationalization In Visual Studio 2005 ? I’ll be putting up more on this subject on this blog over the coming months. I will also put up the slides to this presentation shortly.

If you’re one of the lucky few who are going tomorrow then have a blast. If not then be sure to register promptly for DDD3 to ensure you don’t miss out next time.

See you there.