Andy Westgarth has started a new user group for Microsoft technologies in the North East of England called North East Bytes (http://www.nebytes.net/). Like all of the best user groups it is free to join and free to attend (seems to be a growing trend). NEBytes had their inaugural meeting on Wednesday 20th January 2010. Congratulations, Andy, I wish you, the team and the NEBytes community every success.

DDD 8 has been announced and will be held on Saturday 30th January 2010 at Microsoft UK in TVP, Reading. The Call For Speakers is now open so get submitting your sessions now. In addition the complete set of dates is available including the all-important registration date of Friday 15th January 2010 (although no time is given other than midnight and this may or may not be the actual time).

The Call For Speakers for DDD Scotland on Saturday 8th May 2010 is now open. DDD Scotland is an excellent, well run event and I would recommend applying for this one.

Those beer drinking, .NET chatting chaps are at it again. This time it's on Tuesday 8th December 2009 starting at 6pm for 7pm at The Portcullis (where the beer is excellent) in Clifton, Bristol. You can sign up here.

I'm a long time fan of Fiddler, an excellent tool for spying on and interfering with HTTP requests. Analyzing the headers and packets sent across the wire has been an invaluable source of information to me many times. Sadly Fiddler suffers from a drawback where it is unable to view localhost traffic by default. There are workarounds but these are not always practical. So recently I was interested to see HttpWatch.

HttpWatch integrates straight into Internet Explorer or FireFox and provides an analysis of browser traffic. In particular because it is simply using the browser it clearly sees all localhost traffic without any workarounds. Now, whether HttpWatch has more features and functionality than Fiddler is still open for debate but in this one issue at least HttpWatch is solving a problem for me. The "Basic" version of HttpWatch is free and the other versions you have to pay for (whereas there is only one version of Fiddler and it does everything and it is all free).

Here we are at TechEd Europe 2009 and there's no surprise to see a rather tragic game show in progress. The big surprise, however, is that it's not the UK's own Ant and Dec (aka The Chuckle Brothers, aka Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee, aka Laurel and Hardy aka Richard Costall and Dave McMahon) who are doing it. Nope, it's Germany's answer to The Kings Of Crappy Game Shows, Hyper-D and Hyper-T. And on The Sad And Tragic Scale it's right up there. This one's about putting hats on and taking them off (I don't remember Terry Wogan doing this one). And not a "sometimes working, sometime not" WPF app in sight. The double act may be the same but on The Swagometer you'd have to say that Hyper-D and Hyper-T are in a new league: their prize is a brand new laptop. Kind of takes the shine off a t-shirt and a NxtGen mug a bit.

As promised here are the slides and source code for yesterday's "Automating Testing Using Windows Virtual PC" presentation at the MVP Open Day. The sister presentation to this one is "Automating Testing Using Virtual Server 2005" and you can download the slides and source code for this one. If you are using Virtual Server 2005 you might like to download both as the Windows Virtual PC presentation is more recent and contains slightly more code that is still applicable to Virtual Server 2005.

I've been bitten a few times by a 'feature' in Windows Virtual PC where all of my virtual machines disappear so I thought I'd write about the problem and how to solve it to save anyone else the grief of rebuilding their virtual machine list.

My current Windows Virtual PC list looks like this:-

As you can see from Primary Disk column on the right I keep all of my virtual machines (except Windows XP Mode) on a separate USB drive. The consequence is that the drive is not always plugged in. The Windows Virtual PC 'feature' is that if I accidentally start a virtual machine and forget to have my USB drive plugged in then it fails to run the virtual machine (fair enough, no problem here) and then removes all references to all virtual machines on that drive (not fair enough and a truly stupid idea):-

The solution lies in understanding that the Windows Virtual PC console is just a view on a folder. On this Windows 7 machine this is C:\Users\Guy Smith-Ferrier\Virtual Machines. Here's what the folder looks like in a command window before Windows Virtual PC has 'fixed' it:-

And here's what it looks like again after Windows Virtual PC has removed all of my references:-

Clearly Windows Virtual PC has simply deleted all of the VMCX files that refer to virtual machines on the USB drive. There are a number of solutions to the problem. The first and simplest is to use the Recycle Bin to undelete the VMCX files from the Virtual Machines folder. This is the best option although I have to say that I am not always convinced they are always present in the Recycle Bin. Alternatively you could have the foresight to have saved a copy of your VMCX files so that you can just copy them back to the Virtual Machines folder. If neither of these options are available to you then the fallback solution is to start each and every virtual machine that used to be in the list by double clicking on the virtual machine's VMC file and then the VMCX file will be automatically recreated.

Windows Virtual PC (for Windows 7 on machines with hardware virtualization enabled) and Windows XP Mode have RTMed and are available for free download at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx. There are many new features in Windows Virtual PC beyond those of Virtual PC 2007 but the feature of most interest to me is the fact that unlike Virtual PC 2007 Windows Virtual PC has an API which allows the virtual machines to be automated. The API is very similar but not identical to the Virtual Server API. If you're interested in this subject then stay tuned as I will be posting the slides and more importantly the code for my Automating Testing Using Windows Virtual PC presentation in the next few weeks.

BTW if you are planning on installing Virtual PC 2007 on your Windows 7 box it will not install with Windows Virtual PC present so you will have to uninstall it first.

It is always a happy day for me when a new version of one of my favourite tools is released. ZoomIt 4, the presenter's best friend, was released in August. The main new feature is LiveZoom. To be honest LiveZoom (by default available from Ctrl+4) is the way I thought the regular Ctrl+1 zoom facility should have worked from the beginning: it allows you to zoom in on something on your screen but leaves the computer still functioning so you can click and type and generally use the computer whilst still zoomed. Perfect. The caveat is that the LiveZoom feature only works on Windows Vista and higher but this is not a problem for most presenters.