A huge and warm welcome to the latest user group to join the UK .NET community: The Gloucestershire .NET User Group. Run by Ziemowit "Jimmy" Skowronski, who you may have seen at DotNetDevNet and VBUG meetings in Bristol, the intention is to hold monthly face to face meetings. Membership and attendance is free (always a great feature in a user group) and the first meeting is expected to be held in February 2009.

Last month I spoke at the Coventry chapter of The Next Generation User Group. It's my third time at this user group and it is a classic user group in that the people are friendly and interested and enjoy learning about .NET related stuff. I expect good things from this user group but I was really touched with the attention to detail showed this time. Firstly there was the faggot and pea batches. I've mentioned these before but these guys took the trouble to source these from somewhere in Coventry even discovering in the process that faggot and pea batches are now difficult to find in Coventry as they have been banned in many places (considerably escalating their position in my Disturbingly Unpleasant Junk Food Taste Sensations Hall Of Fame). Then they gave out personalised chocolate bars ? mine read "This Chocolate Bar Has Been Internationalised For Guy Smith-Ferrier" and had both the NxtGen and DotNetDevNet logos on it. And best of all John's wife made the muffins (I had two faggot and pea batches and two muffins ? they were excellent ? thanks, John's wife).

Thanks to everyone who came along on the night and listened to me struggle my way through the presentation (I could barely speak so it wasn't one of my best nights) but mainly thanks to John Price who I suspect had the biggest hand in sourcing everything on the night (John is NxtGen's Quartermaster).

In the last three weeks I have been to PDC and TechEd Europe and at both events I collected swag for the user group. I deliberately took as little as possible on both outbound trips so I could carry back as much junk swag as my weight allowance would let me. On the PDC outbound trip my bag was 17kg and I returned with two bags totalling 33kg. At TechEd Europe I managed to reduce my outbound bag to 14kg and I returned with 26kg (the bag was more full than before but I wasn't carrying any books back this time so it all weighed less). So in total I returned with 28kg of swag. Not bad considering that I was limited to my personal baggage allowance. Sadly I am unable to compete with the Kings Of Swag who had 10 boxes of the stuff sent home (don't worry, chaps, it's mostly all inflatable plastic microphones).

PS thanks to everyone at PDC and TechEd (especially Microsoft e-Learning) who gave so kindly to the cause.

I started this blog just over two and a half years ago on 21st October 2005. Today "blog mark 2" has gone live. There have been a number of changes I have been wanting to make for a long, long time now and recent events have ensured that now would be that time. This new blog has much improved functionality and I'm looking forward to using it for some of the ideas that I've been holding back for a while. The blog's not quite finished yet and you can still see a few rough edges but I'll be tweaking and updating over the coming days and weeks to shape it into what I want.

 Here's to the next two and a half years.

Unfortunately one on’t cross beams gone owt askew on’t treddle and I’ve been have some blog disturbance recently. The good news is that this has been temporarily resolved and will be permanently resolved shortly. At such time if you are using an RSS aggregator to read this blog then you will probably need to re-subscribe to the feed to enjoy uninterrupted coverage.

Watch this space...

Daniel Moth is going. 14 years he’s been in the UK and the last two and a half have been as a Developer Evangelist at Microsoft UK. And now he is off to Redmond to be a Program Manager on the .NET Parallel Extensions team. Fest 08, this Thursday 12th June 2008, will see his final UK presentation before he is gone and the UK will have lost another quarter of the finest Developer Evangelist team on the planet. Daniel has definately played his part over the last few years in the golden age of the UK .NET community delivering consistently excellent presentations in a style that is very uniquely Daniel.

Good luck in your new world, Daniel, and I hope it all goes horribly wrong so you come back to the UK to continue your good works.

And if you want to hear a great podcast all about Daniel Moth (by Daniel Moth doing a great impression of Richard Costall and Dave McMahon) featuring tributes from members of the community then download the latest NxtGen podcast at http://www.nxtgenug.net/Podcasts.aspx?PodcastID=54.

The USB flak jacket mentioned in the podcast that was the parting gift to Daniel from the community is being modelled here by Daniel himself after we caught him unawares at the end of his session at DDD Scotland:-

Technorati Tags: Daniel Moth, NxtGen, .NET Parallel Extensions, DDD Scotland

If you’ve never been to a user group before but wondered whether this is something you should be interested in then check out the video of The .NET Developer Network on the top right hand side of the front page:-

The 3 mins 30 seconds video has been crafted by Chris Myhill, co-organiser of The .NET Developer Network, from over 3 hours of footage taken at meetings towards the end of 2007 (it takes an enormous amount of time to whittle 3 hours down to about 3 minutes). Sincere thanks to Chris and also to Mike Doherty and Martyn Fewtrell (regular members of the group) who explain what the group means to them. Also honourable mentions to the speakers included in the video: Oliver Sturm, Dave Bonner, David Ringsell and Pete McGann. Finally, special thanks go to one Richard Costall of The Next Generation User Group who can be seen almost at the very beginning of the video in the bottom left hand corner shouting with as much enthusiasm as anyone "DotNetDevNet!".

Technorati Tags: The .NET Developer Network, DotNetDevNet, Chris Myhill, Mike Doherty, Martyn Fewtrell, Oliver Sturm, Dave Bonner, David Ringsell, Pete McGann, Richard Costall

All this week at TechEd the NxtGen boys (Richard Costall, Dave McMahon, John Price) have been hosting Speaker Idol and I have been lucky to have been one of the judges. Waves of 3 and 4 contestants on each day since Monday have competed by giving a 5 minute presentation to an impromptu TechEd audience and set of judges. I get a real buzz out of seeing good presenters exercising their skill and this experience takes me back to one of the most enjoyable jobs that I have had which was being the trainer on Borland’s Train The Trainer programme.

The winners of each wave on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday went through to the Speaker Idol Finals on Thursday afternoon. There really were some great presentations and the exercise showed that there are some really talented people out there who haven’t yet managed to break into the TechEd speaker circuit. I have to give a special mention to Bilal Haidar (Lebanon) who came second in wave 4 and for me was the best runner up of all of the waves. He delivered his presentation with such energy and enthusiasm that I think he would be great to listen to for a whole session.

The four finalists were Bill Ayres (United Kingdom), Maciej Pilecki (Poland), Karl Davies-Barrett (Malta) and Jeff Wharton (Australia). They made our (the judges’) lives very difficult as each speaker had obviously improved since their original presentation as a result, hopefully, from the feedback they had received. Four top quality presentations made the final very close and the decisions were no longer based on what mistakes anyone had made (I don’t recall any of note) but rather on tiny degrees of particular excellence. Congratulations to Jeff Wharton, MCT and user group leader in Australia who was crowned TechEd Europe 2007 Speaker Idol Winner and as a result has won a speaker place into TechEd Europe 2008. Jeff was absolutely delighted and was still delighted well into the next morning. Also congratulations to Karl Barrat-Davies who made second place and won a free ticket to TechEd Europe 2008.

Want to get into speaking ? Put it in your calendar for next year. The rules for TechEd Europe 2008 are subject to change but at present they are that you must be a TechEd Europe 2008 delegate (otherwise how would you give your presentation ?), you must not be a speaker at TechEd Europe 2008 (either TechEd Developers or TechEd IT Forum) and you must not be advertising a non-Microsoft product. You might also like to have a read of "How To Give Great Presentations" on the Resources page.

Technorati Tags: TechEd, TechEd Europe 2007, Speaker Idol, Jeff Wharton, Karl Davies-Barrett, Maciej Pilecki, Bill Ayres, Bilal Haidar, Richard Costall, Dave McMahon, John Price