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).

I'm off to the Cambridge chapter of the Next Generation User Group on Tuesday 20th January 2009 to present another outing of What's New In C# 4 ?. Here's the abstract:-

• 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.

You can register for the event here.

In the last three weeks I have been to PDC and TechEd Europe and at both events I collected swag for the user group. I deliberately took as little as possible on both outbound trips so I could carry back as much junk swag as my weight allowance would let me. On the PDC outbound trip my bag was 17kg and I returned with two bags totalling 33kg. At TechEd Europe I managed to reduce my outbound bag to 14kg and I returned with 26kg (the bag was more full than before but I wasn't carrying any books back this time so it all weighed less). So in total I returned with 28kg of swag. Not bad considering that I was limited to my personal baggage allowance. Sadly I am unable to compete with the Kings Of Swag who had 10 boxes of the stuff sent home (don't worry, chaps, it's mostly all inflatable plastic microphones).

PS thanks to everyone at PDC and TechEd (especially Microsoft e-Learning) who gave so kindly to the cause.

Yesterday I presented Internationalizing WPF And Silverlight (non-TechEd branded slides here) at TechEd Europe 2008 in Barcelona. I was quite pleased with it and felt it went fairly well. I went straight from the session to the Ask The Experts stand to answer questions about my subject. So I missed the excitement. But fortunately for me Richard Costall took the following photo:-

This is the speakers leader board and it shows how well the sessions are doing at any one moment in time. Sadly this is one of those times when a picture is worth a thousand misleading words. I would love to end the story here but it only lasted a short while and my moment was over:-

And now I'm no longer in the top 10 (there are 210 speakers here and 330 unique breakout or interactive sessions and mine is currently 31st) but I remain chuffed to bits with my 15 seconds of fame. BTW take a look at Bart De Smet and Jeff Wharton on the leader board in third and fourth places in the first picture (at the time the photo was taken). Bart and Jeff are the Speaker Idol Winners for TechEd Europe 2006 and 2007 respectively (Jeff is still fifth place on the board). FWIW Daniel Moth is currently top of the leader board but I'm sure Daniel would be the first to point out that as Rafal Lucawiecki and Anders Hejlsberg are not speaking at TechEd Europe this year it doesn't really count (just kidding, Daniel).

A while ago I blogged about the solution to creating strongly typed resource classes for Silverlight so that the classes had a public constructor to allow them to be loaded by the Silverlight XAML loader. Apologies to the people who downloaded the PublicResourceCodeGenerator and discovered that it worked in Visual Studio 2005 but not in Visual Studio 2008. It is fixed now for Visual Studio 2008. You can download it here.

Following on from Liam Westley's excellent presentation on "Virtualisation for developers" at The .NET Developer Network in October 2008 Liam and I are teaming up to do our first double act at The Next Generation User Group in Birmingham on 12th February 2009. The evening consists of two presentations:-

• Virtualisation For Developers with Liam Westley
  Not used virtualisation technology yet? As a developer, you are missing out on some great time saving technologies. Concentrating on the use of Virtualisation for developers on workstations and servers; What is virtualisation ? What virtualisation tools are available (especially for free) ? Why is virtualisation advantageous ? Where should you utilise virtualisation ? Tips and tricks - configuration and tweaking performance. Legacy application development (VB6, VS2003), installation tests, clean client images, documentation for screen capture as well as confirming how to get to configuration settings, consolidation of development hardware, internationalisation, breaking the 3Gb memory barrier, CI/build/test servers? .....
• Automating Testing With Virtual Server 2005 with Guy Smith-Ferrier
  Virtual Server 2005 is a free virtualization download from Microsoft. It allows you to run and maintain multiple virtual machines running different Microsoft operating systems in different configurations. Virtual Machines allow you to test your software in different configurations without the need for buying and maintaining separate physical machines. Virtual Server 2005 includes an API for programmatically controlling these virtual machines. This session describes this API and shows you how to use it to run automated tests on multiple platforms.

The evening starts at 6:30pm instead of the regular time of 7:00pm. You can sign up for this one here.

Next month is the The .NET Developer Network's Christmas meeting on Tuesday 2nd December 2008 and I'm giving two presentations. The first is hot off the press:-

• What's New In C# 4 ?
  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.

The second is a look at one of the latest collaborative development tools (ahem):-

• Strategic Development Methodologies Using Rock Band
  Developers tend to get stuck in a rut using the same old tools over and over again. Visual Studio, C#, .NET Framework, SQL Server, NUnit, Cruise Control. It might come as a shock to learn that one of the best development tools is Rock Band on the Xbox 360. This session introduces us to Rock Band and through the use of numerous demos drawing on heavy audience participation we learn to code better, be not just better developers but better people and, most importantly to solve world hunger and develop peace and harmony for everyone. (And just so we're clear here - this session has absolutely nothing to do with strategic development methodologies - it's just a clever title).

There will be mince pies and stuff and a jolly .NET Christmas time will be had by all. You can learn more about this meeting and can sign up here.