Voting for your favourite DDD South West sessions is now open (go here). Voting for your favourites helps us to allocate the largest rooms to the sessions with the highest demand and therefore we can avoid over subscribed sessions. Here's a reminder of the sessions:-

• Everything you Wanted to Know About Refactoring but Were Afraid to Ask (Gary Short)
• Creating extendable applications using MEF (Ben Hall)
• Oslo and the future Microsoft Modelling platform (Robert Hogg)
• Embracing a new world - dynamic languages and .Net (Ben Hall)
• Introduction to Windows Azure (Chris Hay)
• Real-world MVC architecture (Steve Sanderson)
• What is Scrum ? (Richard Fennell)
• A Quantum of Computing (Dave McMahon)
• Silverlight 3 (Richard Costall)
• Express Yourself (Marc Gravell)
• Get Going With jQuery (George Adamson)
• Less Means More With WCF (Jimmy Skowronski)
• Introduction to Video Game Development with XNA (Kris Athi)
• What's New In C# 4 ? (Guy Smith-Ferrier)

Don't forget there's a full Alternative Track of great sessions but as these are all in the same room there is no opportunity to vote for these sessions.

(Note that the voting is just to give us an idea of how popular the sessions are - you aren't committed to anything by choosing one session over another). Voting closes on Thursday 25th April 2009.

'Tis the free conference season and DDD Scotland has opened its registration so if you live anywhere near Scotland (or you don't mind travelling for a free event) get over to http://www.developerdayscotland.com and get registering. DDD Scotland is being held on Saturday 2nd May 2009 and I will be presenting:-

• 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.

Go! Quickly! Stop reading this and register now! Registration for DDD South West is now open. Be able to tell your grandchildren that you were there at the very beginning. Remember, there can be only one first time.

DDD South West is a free one day technical event on Saturday 23rd May 2009 at Queens College, Taunton with 13 of the countries' best speakers providing 19 technical presentations.

Registration for DDD South West opens tomorrow (Tuesday 3rd March 2009) at 10:00am. To register for the event you must first register on the site and if you want to save time tomorrow you can do that part right now.

DDD South West will be held on Saturday 23rd May 2009 at Queens College, Taunton.

The DDD South West Call For New Speakers is now live and we are looking for proposals from new speakers who would like to speak at DDD South West on Saturday 23rd May 2009 in Taunton. The offer is open to 'new' speakers who meet the following requirements:-

• You must live in the United Kingdom.
• You must not have presented at a major event before (including but not limited to any DDD, TechEd, DevWeek). Speaking at a user group is fine (and encouraged!).
• You must have presented your full session at a user group at a date prior to DDD South West (in other words there must be a live practice run to a public audience other than your work colleagues).

The closing date for proposals is Tuesday 31st March 2009. You can find full details about the Call For New Speakers at http://www.dddsouthwest.com/CallForNewSpeakers/tabid/61/Default.aspx. You can find full details about DDD South West at http://www.dddsouthwest.com.

DDD returns to (Northern) Ireland on Saturday 4th April 2009 in the great city of Belfast.

Stop reading this post and register for DDD7 now. Go to http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032393874&Culture=en-GB. DDD7 is a free one day event arranged by the community for the community on Saturday 22nd November 2008 at Microsoft UK in Reading. You can see the agenda at http://www.developerday.co.uk/ddd/agendaddd7lineup.asp. Remember DDD6 was full within 24 hours of registration opening.