The DDD South West Call For New Speakers is now live and we are looking for proposals from new speakers who would like to speak at DDD South West on Saturday 23rd May 2009 in Taunton. The offer is open to 'new' speakers who meet the following requirements:-

• You must live in the United Kingdom.
• You must not have presented at a major event before (including but not limited to any DDD, TechEd, DevWeek). Speaking at a user group is fine (and encouraged!).
• You must have presented your full session at a user group at a date prior to DDD South West (in other words there must be a live practice run to a public audience other than your work colleagues).

The closing date for proposals is Tuesday 31st March 2009. You can find full details about the Call For New Speakers at http://www.dddsouthwest.com/CallForNewSpeakers/tabid/61/Default.aspx. You can find full details about DDD South West at http://www.dddsouthwest.com.

Wednesday 25th February 2009 sees the very first meeting of the Gloucestershire .NET User Group run by Jimmy Skowronski. I will be joining Paul Jackson in a double header:-

• Sockets In Silverlight 2 with Paul Jackson
  A live coding session building a TCP sockets based Silverlight application, touching on all the aspects required to get the smallest sockets application up and running.
  
• What's New In C# 4 ? with Guy Smith-Ferrier
  At PDC 2008 Microsoft unveiled C# 4 and all of the new features within. So now we start the roller-coaster of catch up all over again as we desperately struggle to keep up with what's new and why we should be interested in the latest flashy feature. In this session we will look at dynamically typed objects, optional and named parameters, type embedding, type equivalence, loose type coupling and more. In addition if we have time we will look at the "compiler as a service" feature to be released after C# 4.

Craig Murphy and Andy Westgarth interviewed me at the "Heroes Happen Here" Visual Studio 2008 Launch last March and Craig posted the podcast on his site here as part of his Twelve Podcasts Of Christmas. It's about 15 minutes and I talk about Visual Studio 2008, extension methods, internationalization, community and The .NET Developer Network.

A huge and warm welcome to the latest user group to join the UK .NET community: The Gloucestershire .NET User Group. Run by Ziemowit "Jimmy" Skowronski, who you may have seen at DotNetDevNet and VBUG meetings in Bristol, the intention is to hold monthly face to face meetings. Membership and attendance is free (always a great feature in a user group) and the first meeting is expected to be held in February 2009.

DDD returns to (Northern) Ireland on Saturday 4th April 2009 in the great city of Belfast.

The fourth incarnation of the popular SQL-based DDD lookalike, SQLBits, will be held in Manchester on Saturday 28 March 2009.

Last month I spoke at the Coventry chapter of The Next Generation User Group. It's my third time at this user group and it is a classic user group in that the people are friendly and interested and enjoy learning about .NET related stuff. I expect good things from this user group but I was really touched with the attention to detail showed this time. Firstly there was the faggot and pea batches. I've mentioned these before but these guys took the trouble to source these from somewhere in Coventry even discovering in the process that faggot and pea batches are now difficult to find in Coventry as they have been banned in many places (considerably escalating their position in my Disturbingly Unpleasant Junk Food Taste Sensations Hall Of Fame). Then they gave out personalised chocolate bars ? mine read "This Chocolate Bar Has Been Internationalised For Guy Smith-Ferrier" and had both the NxtGen and DotNetDevNet logos on it. And best of all John's wife made the muffins (I had two faggot and pea batches and two muffins ? they were excellent ? thanks, John's wife).

Thanks to everyone who came along on the night and listened to me struggle my way through the presentation (I could barely speak so it wasn't one of my best nights) but mainly thanks to John Price who I suspect had the biggest hand in sourcing everything on the night (John is NxtGen's Quartermaster).