Thanks to everyone who came to the Internationalizing Silverlight 4 presentation at the Silverlight UK User Group last night. A particularly huge thanks to Mark Mann who provided a personalised and internationalized introduction to me. Never had something like this before and I was very impressed and touched. Best introduction ever.

Excellent chat in the pub afterwards too. Really enjoyed it ? thanks everyone.

The slides for the presentation are available at http://www.guysmithferrier.com/Downloads/I18NSilverlight.zip. The source code is at http://www.guysmithferrier.com/Downloads/I18NSilverlightSource.zip.

Ian Smith took a video of the presentation which will be posted soon.

DDD Dublin (the free community driven, one day conference) will be held on Saturday 9th October 2010. The Call For Speakers is now open and closes on 13th September 2010 followed by session voting and then the agenda being announced on Tuesday 21st September 2010. 'Reasonable' T&E for speakers are being covered. If you are part of the UK community and are keen to start speaking at bigger events this is a great opportunity.

We've got some great meetings coming up this Spring at The .NET Developer Network so I thought I'd let everyone know about them:-

• Thursday 25th March 2010 6:30pm (Doors open 6:00pm)
  "Hyper-V For Developers" with Liam Westley
  Liam Westley returns to Bristol fresh from his DDD8 exploits to give us a second dose of virtualization, this time focussing on Hyper-V.
• Monday 12th April 2010 6:30pm (Doors open 6:00pm)
  "Silverlight 4, MVVM and TDD" with Jesse Liberty
  Jesse Liberty (yes, that Jesse Liberty), Silverlight Geek from Microsoft US, starts his first UK and Ireland Silverlight tour in Bristol with a session on Silverlight 4, MVVM and TDD. Meet the man himself and see what this prolific guru has to say.
• Tuesday 11th May 2010 6:30pm (Doors open 6:00pm)
  "Leading-edge Web Development with ASP.NET MVC" with Steven Sanderson
  It's not often you have a published author right here in your home town. This month sees Steven Sanderson, author of the best selling MVC book talk about, well, ASP.NET MVC of course. Steve was rated the best speaker (by knowledge of subject) at DDD South West so this should be a great night.
• Wednesday 2nd June 2010 6:30pm (Doors open 6:00pm)
  "A Guided Tour of the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) in Silverlight 4" with Mike Taulty
  The fabulous Mike Taulty, Microsoft Developer Evangelist, introduces us to the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) in Silverlight 4. MEF is a powerful and valuable way to de-couple your applications from specific implementations. Mike is showing MEF in Silverlight 4 but the technology itself is valuable regardless of your choice of UI platform.

As usual membership is free, the meetings are free, everything is free and there'll be loads of swag. See you there.

Bristol now has its own chapter of the worldwide IT community group Girl Geek Dinners. The launch event was in February 2010 and their next event is on Thursday 25th March 2010 at UWE with guest speaker Ana Kronschnabl, CEO of FluffyLogic (it's actually the same date and the same venue as the next DotNetDevNet meeting but GGD are in S block and DotNetDevNet are in Q block). Men are welcome but the rule is you have to be invited by a Girl Geek.

Following on the success of DDD South West 1 last year we can announce that the imaginatively titled DDD South West 2 (Twitter tag #dddsw) will be held on Saturday 5th June 2010 at UWE in Bristol. The format will be similar to last year except that this time the Call For Speakers is open to everyone - not just new speakers. Here's the full list of dates:-

• Call For Speakers opens: Tuesday 2nd March 2010
• Call For Speakers closes: Monday 22nd March 2010
• Voting Opens: Monday 29th March 2010
• Voting Closes: Friday 9th April 2010
• Registration Opens: Tuesday 20th April 2010
• DDD South West 2: Saturday 5th June 2010

Jesse Liberty, Silverlight Geek (Microsoft US Developer Evangelist for Silverlight), is doing a tour of the UK and Ireland in April to coincide with Microsoft UK's week of TechDays (#techdays) events. Jesse is speaking at Bristol, London, Cambridge, Leeds, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Belfast and Dublin between Monday 12th April 2010 and Friday 23rd April 2010. You can match the dates to the venues at Jesse's post. Jesse's first stop on the tour is at The .NET Developer Network on Monday 12th April 2010 where we will also be celebrating our third birthday (with cake!). Jesse will be presenting:-

• Silverlight 4, MVVM and TDD: A Brave New World (level 300)
  1.       MVVM and Silverlight to build test-driven programs
  2.       Understanding Refactoring and Dependency Injection
  3.       A Walk through of a non-trivial application

Another DDD and another major success. Saturday saw the eighth in the ever popular DDD event at TVP in Reading. This one broke new records that must be getting increasingly difficult to break. DDD 7 in November 2009 'sold' out in 4 hours. DDD 8 'sold' out in 12 minutes and 47 seconds (that's 320 places). The wait list of 200 filled up later that day. It is difficult to tell whether this actually means an increased demand (although I suspect it does) because for DDD 7 the organisers upheld the tradition of not telling anyone what day and what time registration would open but for DDD 8 the date and time was well known in advance. The Twitter tag #ddd8 was also the third most used tag on Twitter on Saturday 30th January 2010. And even better we got to say goodbye to Barry Dorrans (off to Redmond to work on WPL etc.).

I played my small part with another showing of "Automating Testing Using Windows Virtual PC" (slides, source code) which I thoroughly enjoyed as usual and went well despite Windows Updates.

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.