It is a tradition at DDD events that the lunchtime activity is a collection of grok talks. This works well because these talks last about 10 minutes and if it isn't so interesting to you then you can just eat your lunch whilst you wait for the next one. This year at DDD South West 3 though we are doing something a little different. I am delighted and excited to announce that we will be having a lunchtime of micro-presentations (aka pecha kucha, aka 20/20). These presentations are structured differently. They are always 20 slides long and each and every slide is always exactly 20 seconds. We know this because PowerPoint (or whatever is set to auto-advance after 20 seconds). Consequently every 20/20 presentation is always exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds. And they are very exciting. See the presenters struggle as they attempt to speak on a subject for exactly 20 seconds, 20 times in a row. Watch them squirm as they reach 15 seconds and run out of things to say. Watch them get flustered as they run over by 3 seconds and have to speak twice as fast for the next slide. This is a tough presentation format and all of the speakers deserve a whole load of credit for stepping up to the mark and saying "I'll do that!". So please show your appreciation and admiration for the following micro-presentations that will be taking place at DDD South West 3 over lunch:-

• Gary Short, "Algorithms and Asymptotes, What You've Forgotten Since University"
• Richard Costall, "20 Sliders in 20 Seconds"
• Phil Collins, "Build Radiators: Hot or Not"
• Mark Rendle, "Kaizen for Coders"
• Ross Scott, "How I made PocketDDD"

If your appetite is whetted and you can't wait until DDD South West 3 here are a few previous attempts:-

• Dave McMahon and Richard Costall "Running A User Group" (2007 ?) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBuKgHSS4-Y&feature=youtube_gdata
• Me on "Extension Methods Will Save The World" (November 2007): http://www.guysmithferrier.com/downloads/ExtMethods.wmv
• Me on "Twitter" (October 2010): videos of slides and audio at http://www.guysmithferrier.com/Downloads/Twitter.wmv, video of me (but didn't start quite at the beginning) http://vimeo.com/16278666

So if you're going to DDD South West 3 (Saturday 11th June 2011) then grab your lunch and make your way to 4Q56 (the track 1 room) and join in the fun.

Congratulations to Glen Mehn, the top speaker at DDD Scotland 4 for his session in the Alternative Track entitled "Beyond Hackdays/Weekends: Finding Problems To Solve". Thanks also to Andy Gibson not only for compiling all the feedback but also for releasing the top of the Speaker Board (below). Some conferences keep this information a secret and I am disappointed by this because I think great speakers deserve recognition for their presentations (we also list the top speakers at DDD South West).

Speaker	Track	Slot	Responses	Average
Glen Mehn	F	4	9	4.74
Guy Smith-Ferrier	D	2	15	4.62
Paul Stack	B	4	28	4.60
Nial Merrigan	B	2	33	4.52
Gary Short	A	2	47	4.47
Phil Winstanley	A	3	64	4.45
Kendall Miller	A	1	49	4.42

The average score is the average of all questions except the question on meeting your expectations.

We are delighted to announce that Richard Campbell (of .NET Rocks, RunAs Radio, Strangeloop Networks) will be presenting "Why Web Performance Matters" at DDD South West 3 on Saturday 11th June 2011. Here is the abstract:-

Developers love to make their web applications go fast. But do you know the real benefit of high performance web sites? In a word, it's money. This session digs into the real revenue returns of high performance web applications with detailed data on how each second saved adds to the bottom line - more customers buy (reduced bounce rate) and they buy more. Learn how to evaluate the ROI of performance tuning to justify the cost of effort to the revenue increase. Beyond e-commerce, saving employees time on internal applications also has a real cost. Explore how to gather the real-world metric of high performance web sites to know what your web site earns, and how it can earn more!

Richard is a fabulous speaker and this is a real treat for us. DDD South West 3 is full but a wait list is in operation and experience shows us that people at the top of the wait list are highly likely to get in as people who can no longer make it give up their places closer to the event.

The dust is settling on yet another success in the DDD juggernaut of free one day conferences. This one was Scotland's fourth started by Colin Mackay and run on the day by Andy Gibson who was a speaker at DDD Scotland 2, a co-organiser at DDD Scotland 3 and the main man at DDD Scotland 4 (I wonder what Andy will be doing come DDD Scotland 5 ?).

It was great. It was great on many levels. Personally it was great because I wasn't organising anything so I could sit back and watch and enjoy. From the outside it looks like everything just works (I know just how much work is involved in making it look like there's not much work involved). The dinner the night before went well (always good to catch up with everyone in the community), the day went very well (good presentations full of content) and the geek dinner was one of the best I have been to (an excellent All You Can Eat Chinese buffet which was cheap and very tasty).

I was very pleased to be drafted in as a replacement speaker on Friday morning (to replace David Muir who will now be presenting his Windows Workflow Foundation presentation in Glasgow and Edinburgh soon). I did my Touch Me, Stretch Me, Squeeze Me: The Windows 7 WPF Multi-Touch Story presentation (slides, source code) and was pleased that it went well. Thanks to everyone who attended especially as it was such short notice.

As for the stats, this was the biggest DDD Scotland ever: 88 submissions for presentations, 6 tracks (including a certain Alternative Track imported from DDD South West), 345 registrations (although Andy Gibson said it was 301 so I'm not sure which is right) and 225 attendees on the day.

Well done Andy Gibson, Colin Mackay, Craig Murphy, Barry Carr and the Scottish developer community. See you next year.

And if you had fun at DDD Scotland and you don't want the party to end come down to DDD South West 3 in Bristol on Saturday 11th June 2011 and we can do it all over again.

Following on from the success of last year's Getting Started In .NET Track we will be doing the whole track all over again at DDD South West 3 on Saturday 11th June 2011. The Getting Started In .NET track is aimed at developers who are new to .NET and for whom many sessions at conferences like DDD South West are too far down the learning curve for them to be immediately useful. It is aimed at existing staff or students that want to cross train from one development environment (e.g. Java, Delphi, VB6) to .NET. The subjects covered are:-

• Getting Started With C# (Rick Spence, WebTech)
• Getting Started With The .NET Framework (Richard Parker)
• Getting Started With Visual Studio (Steve Hallam, WebTech)
• Getting Started With ASP.NET MVC (TBC)
• Getting Started With WPF (David Ringsell, PC-Talk)

The presentations are mostly delivered by trainers and come from existing training courses. This represents another benefit of this track: the opportunity to try out training companies and evaluate their training style for free, a kind of a "try before you buy" approach to selecting a training company.

DDD South West 3 is almost completely full now and by the time you read this a wait list may be in operation but don't let this discourage you - experience shows us that the top part of the wait list is very likely to get in when people who can no longer make it start giving up their places.

So, want to receive a whole day of free training in Getting Started In .NET ? Register for DDD South West 3 now.

Back by popular demand is the DDD Speaker Training Day on Friday 27th May 2011 at UWE in Bristol. This is a free day of training on giving presentations and improving your public speaking skills. Topics covered will include:-

• How To Explain Absolutely Anything
• Planning Your Presentation
• How To Give Great Demos
• Getting Your Laptop Ready For Your Presentation
• Presenting Your Presentation

To apply for a place on the day email speakertrainingday@dddsouthwest.com. Places are very limited. Priority will be given to DDD South West 3 speakers and new speakers. Attendees must prepare a short presentation on any subject (technical or otherwise) that will be presented to other attendees and a group leader once at the beginning of the day and once again at the end of the day. If your presentation requires anything other than PowerPoint you should bring your own laptop. We are delighted to have the following group leaders:

• Dave McMahon (speaker and co-founder of the NxtGen empire)
• Steve Sanderson (MVC guru and best speaker of DDD South West 1 by knowledge of subject)
• Ross Scott (speaker and co-organiser of DDD South West)
• Chris Myhill (speaker, co-founder of The .NET Developer Network and co-organiser of DDD South West)

The day doesn't cost anything but you do need to either bring your lunch or buy it on the premises (there are several cafes). Also it goes without saying that you do need to actually turn up - places are limited and it would be unfair on other speakers to reserve a place and not use it.

I will be presenting my WPF multi-touch presentation at:-

• TechEd North America on Wednesday 18th May 2011 at 1:30pm
• The Next Generation User Group in Hereford on Monday 9th May at 7:00pm

Here's the abstract:-

Arguably the most innovative and forward thinking feature of Windows 7 is its multi-touch support. And it should be no surprise to see that WPF 4 boasts the same multi-touch support that utilizes this Windows 7 multi-touch support where available. In this session we will explore this new feature in WPF 4 and see what we get for free (i.e. without having to do any work), what you can get with only minimal additional work and what takes a bit more time and effort. Along the way we?ll discover the basic touch support together with support for rotation, scaling and inertia as well as how to handle low level touch events using the raw API. Please note: the presentation shows true multi-touch - this is not a trick with two mice simulating multi-touch.

Come along and say hello and we can chat multi-touch!

UGSS (Microsoft's User Group Support Services) have just published a video series that I recorded last year on How To Give Great Presentations. This free series of 8 videos covers the following subjects:-

1. Introduction (6 minutes 23 seconds)
2. Choosing The Right Presentation (8 minutes 30 seconds)
3. How To Explain Absolutely Anything (8 minutes 51 seconds)
4. Planning Your Presentation (22 minutes 52 seconds)
5. Nervousness And How To Overcome It (13 minutes 7 seconds)
6. How To Give Great Demos (26 minutes 9 seconds)
7. Preparing Your Laptop (19 minutes 21 seconds)
8. Presenting Your Presentation (35 minutes 39 seconds)

If you're new to presenting and feel that the leap is a bit daunting this video series will help you. It is aimed at first timers but experienced presenters will also find tips and tricks to help hone existing presentation skills. The series is also accompanied by a paper that you can download at http://www.guysmithferrier.com/Downloads/HowToGiveGreatPresentations.pdf.

Members of the resistance, important developments are occurring. The Next Generation User Group Empire are expanding their territories yet again. First Poland now Shenfield (near Brentwood, Essex). Wednesday 23rd February 2011 sees the inaugural meeting of the Shenfield chapter with a presentation on "Touch Me, Stretch Me, Squeeze Me: The Windows 7 WPF Multi-Touch Story" (I'll be there as a spy for the resistance cleverly disguised as a presenter). As their inexorable march towards the capital city continues I ask "who will stop them ?". In the South West we are fighting back with the newly formed and, of course, free, SQL Server User Club. Indeed London has its own new (free) Canary Wharf .NET User Group but has the venerable giant of the community grown fat on its pizza ? How long before we see NxtGen London ? Scaremongering or inevitability - you decide.

This is Guy Smith-Ferrier. If you're listening to this, you are the resistance.

Saturday (29th January 2011) saw the ninth (official) incarnation of the Developer Developer Developer .NET community phenomenon started by Old Father Murphy way back in 2005 (when Liam Westley really did have hair). This one had 280 registrations within 6 minutes of registration opening and was sold out (360 registrations) in a total of 12 minutes (the waitlist had hundreds of people on it). A new record for the conference that continues to break its own records with each new event.

The day itself was excellent as always (there is no such thing as a bad DDD). The highlight of the day for me was John Price's excellent "Computer, earl grey tea, hot" session on home automation. I think presenters are always giving their best presentations when they are talking about something they are passionate about. Boy, was this ever true for John's presentation. John really knows his subject and packed it full of loads of information. If you get a chance to see this one I really recommend it.

My own presentation was on "Enforcing Code 'Beauty' Using StyleCop" (you can download the slides here). I was really pleased with this one - I delivered the content I wanted to and I had a great time with the audience. A real pleasure for me. One point worth making to anyone who attended who is getting started in giving presentations: did you notice how full the room was ? Did you also notice how both myself and the audience were having a great time ? This is an example of the dynamics of using humour - it is much easier to make a full room laugh than a partially full room. Put the same people with the same presenter and the same presentation in a bigger room and it wouldn't have been so much fun.

The other big player in DDD 9 was Twitter. As some of you know I don't have any particular opinions on Twitter (video: here, full slides and audio: here) but it played its part during the advertising, registration, build up, during the event and post event and it played its part admirably. It also played its part during the pre- and post- conference meals. The lowlight for me was sitting at a table with 10 people where only 3 of us didn't have our phones out tweeting away. The saddest part of it was that some of the 7 people on our table were tweeting to other people on our table. Guys! Just open your mouths and speak! If you don't start using them they're going to heal up.

But the takeaway thought is that it was yet another major success and huge congratulations go to Craig Murphy, Phil Winstanley, Dave Sussman and Zi Makki (Ian Cooper is taking a DDD break for a bit). If you enjoyed DDD 9 and want some more, or you missed out and need some DDD love or you want to know why this is such a major event try out DDD Scotland in Glasgow on 7th May 2011, DDD South West in Bristol on 11th June 2011 or DDD North East in September/October 2011.