Registration for DDD5 is open now:-

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032342589&Culture=en-GB

As usual you need to register for this one now or you’re not going.

Many thanks to everyone in Bournemouth who turned up to the VBUG meeting at the university last night. As promised you can download the slides here.

You can also download the slides that I used for the internationalization recap here.

The registration for DDD5 (Saturday 30th June 2007) will now be on Tuesday 29th May 2007 instead of Monday because Monday is a bank holiday.

In the last post I described the Fest07 day organised by the Next Generation User Group. I was sitting in the audience for the keynote when they gave out the NxtGen awards when I heard my name and discovered that I had won the NxtGen Coventry Best Presentation 2006/2007 award. I was delighted, surprised and humbled. Not sure in what order though. I gave a presentation back in March at the NxtGen Coventry meeting which was entitled "10 Things To Know Before Internationalizing An Application". This is one of my favourite presentations and I had a great time giving the presentation and everyone seemed to enjoy it and there were lots of interesting questions and we all had a good time. It seems strange to get an award for doing something that was so much fun but I am delighted and very grateful. Thanks to everyone who came to the NxtGen meeting and was so kind with their voting. And thanks also to Rafal Lucawiecki for not speaking at NxtGen Coventry this year. Long may it continue.

The NxtGen boys have done it again. Another success from John Price, Dave McMahon and Richard Costall.

Today I attended Fest07 and an excellent event it was too. The keynote with Rich and Dave started with a video montage of the NxtGen events of the last 12 months. Sadly the video won’t be available online so only the Fest07 attendees saw it but it really showed the creativity, energy and enthusiasm of this group. An excellent example for us all. They then went on to give out awards for the highest attendance (Jeff Lombardi with 28 (?) attendances in one year), best presentations and best nuggets at the Coventry, Birmingham and Oxford meetings. Excellent community spirit.

The first session of the day was the infamous Rafal Lucawiecki who I have eulogised about before. His first session of the day was on Vista Security and as usual was full of content.

I missed Daniel Moth and Mike Taulty doing their presentation on Language Enhancements and LINQ because this is the session that Mike Taulty gave at the first DotNetDevNet meeting.

The session after lunch was Rafal doing Software Development Paradigms and could be described as his finest hour if it weren’t for the fact that there were so many to choose from. This session was a masterful and unique journey through Rafal’s profoundly researched and convincing opinion on the future of software development including such ideas as using declarative workflows (ala Windows Workflow Foundation) in lambda expressions (ala LINQ). If Rafal presents this session at TechEd (and I suspect that he will) you should definately see this one - it is an absolute treat.

Next Oliver Sturm presented Dynamic Languages which fitted well into the sequence of sessions for the day. Oliver gave a good presentation but you’d have to feel sorry for anyone who has to follow Rafal.

The last tech session of the day was from Lorna Brown of Microsoft Research showing the fruits of the Microsoft Research team (in Cambridge)’s effort. Lots of devices and innovations for technology in your home life. Fascinating stuff. Lorna is on the same team as Richard Banks (the one with the fascinating blog that is read by Bill Gates).

The final event of the day was the obligatory NxtGen swag fest that this time was called Swaggily Fortunes. More mindless swag fun from the boys who have a swag fixation and don’t know how to stop. I got to be on the home team this time and we trashed the Microsoft team and saved the day for the NxtGen User Group (and when I say ’trashed’ I mean ’narrowly beat on the last question of the afternoon’).

Well done, NxtGen boys, an excellent event done in classic NxtGen style!

See you next year.

Next Monday (21st May 2007) sees the second .NET Developer Network meeting in Bristol, this time with Alex Homer giving two presentations:-

1) Using Enterprise Library 2.0 in ASP.NET

In recent years, the Microsoft Patterns & Practices (p&p) group has been producing guidance and software that makes building enterprise applications easier. Recent releases include the Enterprise Library – a combination of the various application blocks released in the past under as a single installable solution that combines integration between the blocks with a comprehensive configuration system that makes it easy to add the blocks to your applications, and configure them. The blocks also now support a standard system of exposing functionality to users, and enabling the creation of custom providers. This session looks at what the Enterprise Library can do for you, some of the ways you can use it (including in Partial Trust mode), and an introduction to creating custom providers. It also provides a preview of the upcoming version 3.0.


2) ASP.NET and Object Policy Injection with Enterprise Library

Enterprise Library, from Microsoft’s patterns & practices group, provides plenty of opportunities for simplifying and speeding up development of complex applications. One addition to the Library in the forthcoming version 3.0 is the ability to apply a series of handlers to the methods and properties of objects that your application uses, allowing you to add configurable policy-driven features such as validation, logging, exception handling, authorization, and caching. This session looks at what the new Policy Injection Application Block does - including how you can use it with the other blocks in Enterprise Library, and how you can create your own custom Matching Rules and Handlers.

You can see full details here.

Coming up we also have:-

• Monday 18th June 2007 - Windows Communication Foundation and Windows CardSpace with Martin Parry


• Tuesday 10th July 2007 - Developer Tools and Development Practices


• Wednesday 19th September 2007 - Team Foundation Server with Richard Fennell

In addition VBUG have their next Bristol meeting on Wednesday 30 May 2007 with Continuous Integration with Ziemowit Skowronski and My Journey with Matt Cantillon.

See you there.

The voting for DDD5 sessions ends this Saturday (19th May 2007). In case you haven’t cast your votes yet or you feel inspired to change them I have submitted 4 this time around:-

• Using ClickOnce and XBAPs To Deploy Windows Forms and WPF Applications


• Visual Studio 2005 IDE Tips and Tricks


• How To Give Great Presentations


• Internationalizing ASP.NET AJAX

See you there.

Here’s an interesting idea from Microsoft: C# For Kids. It’s an e-book for kids on how to program in C#. It includes cartoons and is aimed at first time programmers.

You could argue that Microsoft is getting them while their young but you could also argue that they are giving away a free e-book that many parents have been looking for.

One of the downsides with online HTML documentation such as that of ASP.NET AJAX is that the search facilities are either not as slick as searching .CHM or .HLP files or, as is the case for ASP.NET AJAX, they are non-existent. Of course, you can Google or Live it but then you have to filter out all of the noise. Colleague Pat Long took the obvious step and created a custom Google search solely for the ASP.NET AJAX documentation. You can get at it here:-

http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=012161591400813264642%3Ayziniunzfbo

MIX07 is over and as you are probably aware it sold out very quickly so there were a lot of disappointed people. However, the good news is that virtually the whole conference is available for download! So if you missed it you can go to http://sessions.visitmix.com/ and start downloading and watching every session. You’ll find lots of sessions on ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, WPF, SilverLight and UI- and designer-related technologies. For free. Normally the DVD of a conference like this can cost hundreds of pounds. Even when it is available. But this time it is free. A big thanks to Microsoft for this excellent move. Even better virtually the whole of MIX06 is up there too. Get watching.