Today (25th September 2007) saw the opening of Building 5 at the Microsoft Campus in Thames Valley Park, Reading. Building 5 is state of the art with all kinds of environmental features (recycling rain water, solar panels etc.), restaurants, office space, cafes and a gym. I added to my list of Claims To Fame by being the first person ever to have a personalised stir-fry in the restaurant. As Claims To Fame go I admit that it is a bit lacking but I’m counting it all the same. I suspect that Colin Angus Mackay (the current champion of Claim To Fame) isn’t going to lose any sleep over this one.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Building 5, Colin Angus Mackay

Back at DDD5 in June 2007 a bunch of user group leaders and community people took part in a video to raise the awareness of the thriving community in the UK. Dave McMahon (the one from the Dave McMahon Is A Hero fame) recorded and mixed everything and produced the video. You can see it at http://soapbox.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=e1291874-84ee-4d9f-bc14-7d2d04c009ea. The video was shown by Bill Gates at MGX (Microsoft Global Experience in Orlando in July 2007, MGX is an internal conference for sales and business people). The video itself probably doesn’t tell you anything about our community that you don’t already know but it is fun to watch, has been edited really well and is a good statement of the fact that our community in the UK is alive and well. I believe that Dave is also available for user groups, weddings and bahmitzvahs.

Technorati Tags: UK Community, MGX, Microsoft Global Experience, Dave McMahon

Another city has fallen to the NxtGen empire in a campaign whose success has not been seen since the Romans walked on our fair land. Southampton is the latest to go all NxtGenUG. Live in a city without a user group ? Be afraid - they’re coming to get you, armed with their pizzas and their swag and their good natured party atmosphere. Be very afraid.

The Southampton NxtGen region is run by Richard Allen and John McLoughlin and the launch night is on Thursday 18th October 2007 (see here for details). Captain Swag himself will be there (that’s Dave McMahon in case you weren’t sure) showing off his 3rd favourite SQL keyword. I think I read somewhere that having a favourite keyword in a particular programming language is one of the top 10 pre-requisites for being a geek. Dave doesn’t have just one though, he has 10 (or at least 10 that he is prepared to go public on).

I am also very proud to be part of the opening night and I have a slot on Astoria:-

• Microsoft Codename "Astoria"
  The emergence of Web 2.0 technologies has brought new opportunities and caused us to solve old problems in new ways. AJAX and Silverlight applications need read/write access to data and business objects without performing full page refreshes and without dumbing down the data so much we are just left with primitives. Microsoft’s answer to this problem is Microsoft Codename "Astoria". In short "Astoria" is a data access layer for client-size technologies such as AJAX and Silverlight. This session shows how it works, how you can write "Astoria" data servers and how you can customize "Astoria" to your applications requirements.

If you live anywhere near Southamption be sure to give it a look. Remember there is only ever one first event.

See you there.

Technorati Tags: NxtGen, NxtGenUG, Southampton, Richard Allen, John McLoughlin, Dave McMahon, Astoria

The Call For Speakers is now open on the DDD6 site. If you feel like giving public presenting a go then submit a session now. If you haven’t spoken before and want some inspiration go here. Here are the other important dates for the event (the dates might be subject to change):-

• Sunday 7th October 2007: Call For Speakers Closes
• Monday 8th October 2007: Session Voting Opens
• Friday 19th October 2007: Session Voting Closes
• Friday 19th to Sunday 21st October 2007: Speakers Notified Of Results
• Tuesday 23rd October 2007: Schedule Published
• Wednesday 24th October 2007: Registration Opens
• Saturday 24th November 2007: DDD6

Technorati Tags: DDD, DDD6, Call For Speakers

This week MIX:UK was held in London and this post covers a few moments that stood out for me.

On Wednesday I attended the Micro Presentations sessions in which presenters have to present 20 slides with each slide timed to automatically move on after 20 seconds so the whole presentation is 6 minutes and 40 seconds. This is a lot tougher than it looks and you really need to be sure of your subject, what you are going to say and exactly how long 20 seconds is. I haven’t done this format before but hope to give it a go sometime. From the presentations that I saw my guess is that it would be really useful to have a digital timer on the desk in front of you counting down 20 seconds ad infinitum. Dave McMahon and Richard Costall were in excellent form with their "Running A User Group" duet presentation where they "accidentally" messed up their start point and all of the slides were out of step by one slide with their speech. This one must have required quite a bit of preparation. Never a dull moment with these guys. Poor old Jack Hoxley had to follow them and you had to feel sorry for him as the unspoken words "follow that!" went through my mind and almost certainly his as well. Alex Homer gets everyone’s award for coming closest to breaking the rules without actually breaking them by starting his presentation going, sitting down, not talking for the whole presentation and letting his slides do the work.

Scott Guthrie gave 4 presentations over the two days and almost filled the keynote room in every one. As usual Scott was excellent and well worth the money. When the sessions are available on line you should watch these if you aren’t up to speed with WPF, Silverlight, Visual Studio 2008 and LINQ.

Dave McMahon and Richard Costall were back again to revise their Swaggily Fortunes game show. This is one of those parts of our community that we’ll look back on in 10 years time and say "do you remember Swaggily Fortunes ?".

The social event on Tuesday evening had a very talented caricaturist, Luisa Calvo (http://wickedcaricatures.com), who kindly drew this picture of me. People say it looks like me. It’s hard to say when it’s yourself.

The closing session was entitled "Sneak Peeks" and was a collection of new technologies and ideas coming in the future. In technology terms I would have to say that Jon Harris’ demonstration of C Dragon was the most interesting for me. C Dragon is realtime zooming in Silverlight 1.1. This means that you can zoom in on any image supplied by Silverlight 1.1. At first sight you might dismiss this but consider how it works: the images on your page can be tiny, low-resolution thumbnails that take no effort to download but C Dragon supports real time zooming into an image where the high-resolution image is streamed to the client as the magnification factor increases. The result is that you can have very, high resolution images on a page where the high resolution version is only downloaded as and when it is needed. Very clever. The other highlight of Sneak Peeks for me was Simon Peyton Jones’s Software Transactional Memory presentation. Simon is from Microsoft Research in Cambridge and he was certainly the best presenter of the conference. Fantastic delivery and enthusiasm. If you’re interested in improving your speaking skills watch the video of this guy and learn.

Technorati Tags: MIX, MIX:UK, Dave McMahon, Richard Costall,