Unfortunately one on’t cross beams gone owt askew on’t treddle and I’ve been have some blog disturbance recently. The good news is that this has been temporarily resolved and will be permanently resolved shortly. At such time if you are using an RSS aggregator to read this blog then you will probably need to re-subscribe to the feed to enjoy uninterrupted coverage.

Watch this space...

After last year’s MIX:UK 07 comes the obvious successor: ReMix UK 08. This year it is on Thursday and Friday 18th and 19th September 2008 in Brighton (remember, Daniel Moth has gone now so it’s ok to hold events in Brighton again - it’s been a long wait). If you’re one of the first 300 people to book you can get in for £239 (inc. VAT) otherwise the full price is £349 (inc VAT). Here’s the official abstract:-

ReMix UK 08 is a 48 hour conversation between web designers, developers and business decision makers; showcasing topics and solutions that are helping to forge the future of this medium. Exploring beyond both Microsoft and non-Microsoft points of view; this event gives you the unique opportunity to participate in the inclusive and participatory nature of the next web.

And whilst we’re on the subject of MIX:UK you can now watch the videos of all of the MIX:UK 07 sessions at http://www.microsoft.com/uk/mix07.

Technorati Tags: MIX, MIX:UK, Remix, Remix UK

I rarely present at my home user group (The .NET Developer Network) in Bristol but next month I’m making an exception. On Tuesday 8th July 2008 I’m giving two separate presentations:-

• How To Give Great Presentations
  Ever wanted to give great presentations at work, user groups, conferences or DDD ? This presentation is for you. It is designed to teach you everything you need to know about making your presentation an excellent presentation. Almost anyone can learn how to give great presentations; it is all a matter of knowing how to choose your subject, how to prepare your presentation, how to give your presentation and what not to do in your presentation. The information provided in this session is the accumulation of tips and tricks of over 20 years of giving and receiving technical presentations, running a technical training company and being the trainer for Borland’s European Train The Trainer programme. No previous experience required.
• Top 10 Tips For Internationalizing ASP.NET Applications
  The localization model introduced in ASP.NET 2 is effective and easy to learn. On the face of it you select Tools | Generate Local Resources and you’re done. But this process is only effective if you know localization and globalization issues to look for. This session provides a Top Ten list of localization and globalization issues that are specific to ASP.NET applications and shows how to overcome these problems. Without giving too much away a few of the issues covered are localizing images, localizing JavaScript, globalizing regular expressions and preparing aspx and ascx files for effective localization.

These two don’t have much in common but they’re on two of my favourite subjects so it should be a good night. For full details go here.

Technorati Tags: DotNetDevNet, The .NET Developer Network, I18N, Internationalization, ASP.NET

Daniel Moth is going. 14 years he’s been in the UK and the last two and a half have been as a Developer Evangelist at Microsoft UK. And now he is off to Redmond to be a Program Manager on the .NET Parallel Extensions team. Fest 08, this Thursday 12th June 2008, will see his final UK presentation before he is gone and the UK will have lost another quarter of the finest Developer Evangelist team on the planet. Daniel has definately played his part over the last few years in the golden age of the UK .NET community delivering consistently excellent presentations in a style that is very uniquely Daniel.

Good luck in your new world, Daniel, and I hope it all goes horribly wrong so you come back to the UK to continue your good works.

And if you want to hear a great podcast all about Daniel Moth (by Daniel Moth doing a great impression of Richard Costall and Dave McMahon) featuring tributes from members of the community then download the latest NxtGen podcast at http://www.nxtgenug.net/Podcasts.aspx?PodcastID=54.

The USB flak jacket mentioned in the podcast that was the parting gift to Daniel from the community is being modelled here by Daniel himself after we caught him unawares at the end of his session at DDD Scotland:-

Technorati Tags: Daniel Moth, NxtGen, .NET Parallel Extensions, DDD Scotland

The Call For Speakers for DDD7 is now open. Sessions that are relevant to our community are requested from one and all (you have to be resident in this community to be eligible). If you haven’t spoken before and feel like giving it a go you can get some hints here. You can expect the following rough timetable of events (but don’t be surprised if the dates are out by a bit):-

• 2 June 2008 - Call For Speakers Opens
• Last week of August - Call For Speakers Closes
• First week of September - Voting For Sessions Opens
• Last week of September - Voting For Sessions Closes
• First week of October - Speakers Notified Of Results
• Second week of October - Agenda Published
• Third week of October - Registration Opens
• Third week of October plus a couple of hours - Registration Is Full
• 22 November 2008 - DDD7

See you there.

Technorati Tags: DDD7, DDD

Like many people I’ve been waiting for this one for a long time. Last week Microsoft released Source Analysis (aka StyleCop). Source Analysis is a free utility for analysing C# source code (Source Analysis does for source code what FxCop does for assemblies). It ensures consistency of code style throughout a project (and across all developers on a team). Source Analysis has approximately 200 rules covering all those niggley bits like whether to include spaces, whether to use spaces or tabs, where curly braces should be used, how comments should be used etc. etc. Imagine anything you have ever argued about with other developers on your team with regard to ’good style’ and Source Analysis has a rule for it. Of course, like FxCop the first time you use it Source Analysis will throw up hundreds of errors but also like FxCop you can disable any of the rules and if you don’t have time to fix them all you can disable the whole lot and then enable them progressively as you can spare 10 minutes here and there. You can even write your own StyleCop rules but this isn’t officially supported in this release.

You can download it from http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/sourceanalysis. You can read the Source Analysis blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/sourceanalysis. After installing Source Analysis you will notice that the current release is 4.2 which will seem odd given that this is the first public release. The explanation is that Microsoft have been using this tool internally across most teams that use C# for years. Consequently this is a very mature product that has had many of its rough edges knocked off already.

Another Source Analysis feature that I really like is that apart from the fact that it can be integrated into the Visual Studio IDE and the build process you can set Source Analysis to treat its warnings as errors - so for those who are particularly strict on coding standards you can set Source Analysis so that any code style deviation breaks the build.

It’s worth pointing out though it’s just for C# - no Visual Basic support here. Although it can be argued that to some extent Visual Basic doesn’t need Source Analysis because the editor ensures code style consistency without additional help and this is a feature that Visual Basic developers have enjoyed for years.

And in the next version of Source Analysis there will be the option to automatically fix errors.

Thanks for releasing this one, Microsoft, it will make a big difference - not to mention the initial flush of religious code style wars that we will be part of over the next year.

Technorati Tag: Source Analysis, StyleCop, FxCop

The NxtGen crew are back again for their second annual shin-dig at TVP in Reading. It’s a day of tech sessions on subjects like F# and Dynamic Data plus pizza and the inevitable swag fixation that goes with NxtGen like pitta and kebabs. So if you’re not doing anything on Thursday 12th June 2008 and either you’re a NxtGen member or you’ve got £49.99 handy give it a go.

Technorati Tags: NxtGen, Fest 08

The third incarnation of the free, one day SQL DDD-lookalike event, SQLBits, will be held on Saturday 13th September 2008. Martin Bell, Simon Sabin and company will be doing their best to top their previous two successes.

Technorati Tags: SQLBits, Martin Bell, Simon Sabin, DDD

The second of this year’s regional DDD events is coming from Scotland. One week after DDD Ireland, the Scottish incarnation of DDD will be held in Glasgow this Saturday 10th May 2008. Colin Angus Mackay and John Thompson have organised the whole event and I’m expecting good things from this event based on the quality organisation and attention to detail so far.

I’m doing my current standard, ADO.NET Data Services, which I did in Edinburgh 8 months ago but Rangers were playing at home that night so the Scottish .NET community had to choose between seeing Rangers start their long, long European journey or else watch some bloke from Bristol wobbling on about data and why it’s so important. That night I lost. Next week we’ll find out whether Rangers should have given up that night and saved themselves 8 months of grief.

If you’re coming along to DDD Scotland be prepared for what I think will be a fantastic event.

See you there.

Technorati Tags: DDD, DDD Scotland, Colin Angus Mackay, John Thompson, ADO.NET Data Services

I’ve blogged about DDD Ireland before but at last it is finally upon us. DDD is coming to Ireland this Saturday (3rd May 2008) for the traditional free, one day event by the community for the community. This time it’s in Galway and there’s the usual mix of familiar and new faces that seem to make these events go well. I have an offering of ADO.NET Data Services starting at 9:30am and there are many other sessions that will be well worth going to. If you can get to Galway on Saturday this you should definately make the effort.

Technorati Tags: DDD, DDD Ireland, ADO.NET Data Services