Chris Myhill and I started The .NET Developer Network (aka #DotNetDevNet) four years ago on St. George's Day 2007. On Monday 13th June 2011 we held our fiftieth meeting. I was delighted to have a very special speaker for this meeting, none other than .NET Rocks co-host Richard Campbell. I was also particularly pleased because he was giving a session I had seen twice before and felt was one of the best presentations I have seen.

In these 50 meetings we have witnessed some very fine presentations and I have always felt that great speakers deserve recognition for their great performances. So here are the top 10 speakers over these first 50 meetings by Knowledge Of Subject and then by Presentation Skills.

Congratulations to Richard Campbell for a truly fabulous presentation on Monday and congratulations to everyone on these lists - you are stars and heroes.

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.

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

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.

Next month is the The .NET Developer Network's Christmas meeting on Tuesday 2nd December 2008 and I'm giving two presentations. The first is hot off the press:-

• 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.

The second is a look at one of the latest collaborative development tools (ahem):-

• Strategic Development Methodologies Using Rock Band
  Developers tend to get stuck in a rut using the same old tools over and over again. Visual Studio, C#, .NET Framework, SQL Server, NUnit, Cruise Control. It might come as a shock to learn that one of the best development tools is Rock Band on the Xbox 360. This session introduces us to Rock Band and through the use of numerous demos drawing on heavy audience participation we learn to code better, be not just better developers but better people and, most importantly to solve world hunger and develop peace and harmony for everyone. (And just so we're clear here - this session has absolutely nothing to do with strategic development methodologies - it's just a clever title).