Following on the success of DDD South West 1 last year we can announce that the imaginatively titled DDD South West 2 (Twitter tag #dddsw) will be held on Saturday 5th June 2010 at UWE in Bristol. The format will be similar to last year except that this time the Call For Speakers is open to everyone - not just new speakers. Here's the full list of dates:-

• Call For Speakers opens: Tuesday 2nd March 2010
• Call For Speakers closes: Monday 22nd March 2010
• Voting Opens: Monday 29th March 2010
• Voting Closes: Friday 9th April 2010
• Registration Opens: Tuesday 20th April 2010
• DDD South West 2: Saturday 5th June 2010

Jesse Liberty, Silverlight Geek (Microsoft US Developer Evangelist for Silverlight), is doing a tour of the UK and Ireland in April to coincide with Microsoft UK's week of TechDays (#techdays) events. Jesse is speaking at Bristol, London, Cambridge, Leeds, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Belfast and Dublin between Monday 12th April 2010 and Friday 23rd April 2010. You can match the dates to the venues at Jesse's post. Jesse's first stop on the tour is at The .NET Developer Network on Monday 12th April 2010 where we will also be celebrating our third birthday (with cake!). Jesse will be presenting:-

• Silverlight 4, MVVM and TDD: A Brave New World (level 300)
  1.       MVVM and Silverlight to build test-driven programs
  2.       Understanding Refactoring and Dependency Injection
  3.       A Walk through of a non-trivial application

Another DDD and another major success. Saturday saw the eighth in the ever popular DDD event at TVP in Reading. This one broke new records that must be getting increasingly difficult to break. DDD 7 in November 2009 'sold' out in 4 hours. DDD 8 'sold' out in 12 minutes and 47 seconds (that's 320 places). The wait list of 200 filled up later that day. It is difficult to tell whether this actually means an increased demand (although I suspect it does) because for DDD 7 the organisers upheld the tradition of not telling anyone what day and what time registration would open but for DDD 8 the date and time was well known in advance. The Twitter tag #ddd8 was also the third most used tag on Twitter on Saturday 30th January 2010. And even better we got to say goodbye to Barry Dorrans (off to Redmond to work on WPL etc.).

I played my small part with another showing of "Automating Testing Using Windows Virtual PC" (slides, source code) which I thoroughly enjoyed as usual and went well despite Windows Updates.