Under their new ownership VBUG are having their annual conference at TVP in Reading on Thursday 26th November 2009. There's some great speakers including the DevExpress Twins, Gary Short and Oliver Sturm, David Ringsell of PC-Talk and Rob Blackmore. I'll be doing a new version of an old presentation:-

• Automating Testing Using Windows Virtual PC
  Windows Virtual PC is a free virtualization download from Microsoft for Windows 7. 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. Unlike previous versions of Virtual PC, Windows Virtual PC 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. Subjects covered include basic use of the API, logging on to virtual machines, various methods for copying tests to virtual machines, running processes on virtual machines and collecting test results.

The 14th annual LRC (Localisation Research Centre) conference will be held on Thursday/Friday 24th and 25th September 2009 in Limerick City, Ireland. I will be there presenting a poster. This is a new kind of presentation for me; the idea is to stand in a communal area during the break for lunch next to an A0 poster that you have prepared and be prepared to chat to anyone who is interested. It seems a bit like the Ask The Experts format but with better focus. If it works I might try it at dev events in the UK. My poster is on Internationalizing Silverlight and is based on the presentation that I have started giving this year. All in all I'm very excited about LRC as it will be a rare treat for me to be at a conference that is solely on localization and everyone there is guaranteed to be interested in the subject.

Martin Bell has just announced that the next SQLBits, the nomadic SQL event, will be in Newport, South Wales, from Thursday 19th November to Saturday 21st November 2009. The Thursday and Friday are paid days but the Saturday is free. The Call For Speakers will open soon.

Thanks to everyone who came to the Internationalizing Silverlight (aka How To Achieve World-Ready Domination In Silverlight) talk at NxtGen Southampton on Thursday. The slides are at http://www.guysmithferrier.com/Downloads/I18NSilverlight.pptx and the source code for the completed demos are at http://www.guysmithferrier.com/Downloads/I18NSilverlightSource.zip. Note that the font I was using is not included in the download as the licence prevents redistribution but you can substitute an alternative font.

The first DDD event to be held in the South West of England was held on Saturday 23rd May 2009 just a couple of weeks ago. The dust has settled now and I thought I'd write a bit about how it went. DDD South West was held at Queens College in Taunton and was attended by 158 people. There are a bunch of statistics on the DDD South West Statistics page including a map of where everyone came from (predominantly the South West of England!) and a pie chart showing that for 66% of attendees DDD South West was their first experience of a DDD event. The stats page also shows comments from the attendees on the day and it tells us that it went really well and everyone had a good day and learnt lots. In particular this was a recurring theme amongst the comments ? the quality of the speakers and their depth of knowledge. And on this subject, congratulations to Steve Sanderson and Gary Short who came 1st and 2nd respectively in the speakers ranked By Knowledge Of Subject and congratulations equally to Gary Short (again!) and Richard Fennell who came 1st and 2nd respectively in the speakers ranked by Presentation Skills.

DDD South West experimented with a few new ideas with the Alternative Track being the most prominent. Loads of background work went into these 5 sessions hosted mostly by Adam Towler and the Bluewire Technologies team and with a guest appearance of Ross Scott for the Poker Planning and 4 more guys championing their cause in the Balloon Debate. The Balloon Debate was especially fun. The room was packed to the brim to watch Eric Nelson, Gary Short, Gareth Cokell and Marc Gravell slug out a fairly well reasoned debate on whether C#, IronRuby, Visual Basic.NET or F# is the one true development language of choice. There was some serious tactical voting going on at each round and to many people's amazement Gareth Cokell and Marc Gravell were voted off the balloon first (very unjust this). Eric Nelson desperately tried to sabotage his own arguments but it only seemed to draw people into his cause more. Perhaps just to see the look on his face the audience voted him the winner.

At lunch time we had a fantastic round of grok talks that all of our presenters should be really proud of especially when they had to compete with the beautiful day outside. One of my favourite moments of the day was when Ross Scott came to give his grok talk and I mentioned that he was in charge of catering for the day and I didn't get to finish the rest of my sentence thanks to the spontaneous applause - the food (Cornish pasties, cream teas et al) was really was received (we'll work on the coffee for next year).

We also used the event to allow 'new' speakers to speak at a larger event. Our 4 new speakers did a great job. There were some really excellent comments in their session evaluation forms and they faired well in the rankings against speakers who have had a lot more experience at this kind of thing.

And at the end of the day Richard Costall, John Price and Chris Hay of The Next Generation User Group gave another outing of their .NET game shows and chucked out carefully, gently and safely handed out buckets of swag to everyone who took part.

On behalf of the DDD South West Team (Martyn Fewtrell, Chris Myhill, Steve Sanderson, Ross Scott, Jose Simas, Adam Towler and myself) thanks to everyone who came, a big and huge thanks to the DDD South West sponsors, thanks to all of our speakers and lastly thanks to the many people who helped us make this happen on (and before) the day (registration, room monitoring, ferrying people around etc.). See you all again at DDD South West 2.

Photos are available on Flickr.

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.

MVP, author and international speaker Kathleen Dollard is making a rare visit to the UK and Ireland in June and will be visiting six user groups:-

• Cambridge: The Next Generation User Group (Thursday 18th June 2009)
• Edinburgh: Scottish Developers (Monday 22nd June 2009)
• Glasgow: Scottish Developers (Tuesday 23rd June 2009)
• Dublin: Irish User Group (Wednesday 24th June 2009)
• Galway: Irish User Group (Thursday 25th June 2009)
• Bristol: The .NET Developer Network (Monday 29th June 2009)

The subject for the meeting at The .NET Developer Network in Bristol is open to the public vote (http://www.dotnetdevnet.com/Surveys/tabid/59/Default.aspx) and can be chosen from:-

• Your Application in Pieces - MEF and MAF
• .NET 4.0 Language and IDE Features
• Literals in Visual Basic 9.0 - XML and Text Processing
• The Challenge of Silverlight Architectures
• Cross Coding
• Code Generation
• Windows Presentation Foundation: Beyond the Bling
• Refactoring with Generics
• Rethinking Object Orientation

Full session abstracts are available on the same page. So get voting and we?ll see you in June.

Rupert Murdoch doesn't often get ruffled but recent events in Manchester have the tycoon calling for his closest aides. A few months ago I revealed that a secret leaked NxtGen document showed plans for their Risk-like domination of the UK and all has come true. NxtGen are opening another outpost and this time its in Manchester on Wednesday 20th May 2009 (no doubt they were anxious to get the first event in before DDD South West on Saturday 23rd May 2009) where Andy Wilkinson and Steve Robbins are the latest recruits for the Midlands' fuhrers. Rupert Murdoch probably brushes aside such expansion plans as "just some guys running a few .NET user groups" but he's heard the rumours of The Daily NxtGen and worse still the plans for the Russian TV network NxtSkyGen. If Murdoch is afraid just think how Obama feels.

On a less speculative note I'm sad to say that I won't be doing the grand opening this time as DDD South West is just a few days later and there will be lots to sort out in our land of freedom.

In a long overdue first return to the Southampton chapter of The Next Generation User Group I will be giving the following presentation on internationalizing Silverlight on Thursday 18th June 2009:-

• How To Achieve World(-Ready) Domination In Silverlight
  So you've written your Silverlight application and you want it to work in another language ? Then this session is for you. World-Readiness is all of the work that a developer needs to do to globalize an application and make it localizable (i.e. capable of being localized). Whereas these concepts are well established in Windows Forms and ASP.NET, Silverlight is not only a cut-down version of the .NET Framework but also cross platform and client-side. In this session you will learn how to localize Silverlight applications using .resx files, download culture-specific resources on demand so that users only download resources for the culture they need, understand what System.Globalization types and properties Silverlight does not support and why, what CultureInfo and RegionInfo support you can expect on different operating systems, what the Silverlight installation user experience is for non-English users and what language support you can expect from the Silverlight framework.

You can find the slides and source code for my DevWeek 2009 presentations this week here:-

• StyleCop (or How To Start A Fight) (Slides)
• Automating Testing Using Virtual Server 2005 (Slides)
• Automating Testing Using Virtual Server 2005 (Source Code)
• Visual Studio 2008 Tips And Tricks (Slides)
• Internationalizing WPF And Silverlight Applications (Slides)