We are delighted to announce that Richard Campbell (of .NET Rocks, RunAs Radio, Strangeloop Networks) will be presenting "Why Web Performance Matters" at DDD South West 3 on Saturday 11th June 2011. Here is the abstract:-

Developers love to make their web applications go fast. But do you know the real benefit of high performance web sites? In a word, it's money. This session digs into the real revenue returns of high performance web applications with detailed data on how each second saved adds to the bottom line - more customers buy (reduced bounce rate) and they buy more. Learn how to evaluate the ROI of performance tuning to justify the cost of effort to the revenue increase. Beyond e-commerce, saving employees time on internal applications also has a real cost. Explore how to gather the real-world metric of high performance web sites to know what your web site earns, and how it can earn more!

Richard is a fabulous speaker and this is a real treat for us. DDD South West 3 is full but a wait list is in operation and experience shows us that people at the top of the wait list are highly likely to get in as people who can no longer make it give up their places closer to the event.

The dust is settling on yet another success in the DDD juggernaut of free one day conferences. This one was Scotland's fourth started by Colin Mackay and run on the day by Andy Gibson who was a speaker at DDD Scotland 2, a co-organiser at DDD Scotland 3 and the main man at DDD Scotland 4 (I wonder what Andy will be doing come DDD Scotland 5 ?).

It was great. It was great on many levels. Personally it was great because I wasn't organising anything so I could sit back and watch and enjoy. From the outside it looks like everything just works (I know just how much work is involved in making it look like there's not much work involved). The dinner the night before went well (always good to catch up with everyone in the community), the day went very well (good presentations full of content) and the geek dinner was one of the best I have been to (an excellent All You Can Eat Chinese buffet which was cheap and very tasty).

I was very pleased to be drafted in as a replacement speaker on Friday morning (to replace David Muir who will now be presenting his Windows Workflow Foundation presentation in Glasgow and Edinburgh soon). I did my Touch Me, Stretch Me, Squeeze Me: The Windows 7 WPF Multi-Touch Story presentation (slides, source code) and was pleased that it went well. Thanks to everyone who attended especially as it was such short notice.

As for the stats, this was the biggest DDD Scotland ever: 88 submissions for presentations, 6 tracks (including a certain Alternative Track imported from DDD South West), 345 registrations (although Andy Gibson said it was 301 so I'm not sure which is right) and 225 attendees on the day.

Well done Andy Gibson, Colin Mackay, Craig Murphy, Barry Carr and the Scottish developer community. See you next year.

And if you had fun at DDD Scotland and you don't want the party to end come down to DDD South West 3 in Bristol on Saturday 11th June 2011 and we can do it all over again.

Following on from the success of last year's Getting Started In .NET Track we will be doing the whole track all over again at DDD South West 3 on Saturday 11th June 2011. The Getting Started In .NET track is aimed at developers who are new to .NET and for whom many sessions at conferences like DDD South West are too far down the learning curve for them to be immediately useful. It is aimed at existing staff or students that want to cross train from one development environment (e.g. Java, Delphi, VB6) to .NET. The subjects covered are:-

• Getting Started With C# (Rick Spence, WebTech)
• Getting Started With The .NET Framework (Richard Parker)
• Getting Started With Visual Studio (Steve Hallam, WebTech)
• Getting Started With ASP.NET MVC (TBC)
• Getting Started With WPF (David Ringsell, PC-Talk)

The presentations are mostly delivered by trainers and come from existing training courses. This represents another benefit of this track: the opportunity to try out training companies and evaluate their training style for free, a kind of a "try before you buy" approach to selecting a training company.

DDD South West 3 is almost completely full now and by the time you read this a wait list may be in operation but don't let this discourage you - experience shows us that the top part of the wait list is very likely to get in when people who can no longer make it start giving up their places.

So, want to receive a whole day of free training in Getting Started In .NET ? Register for DDD South West 3 now.

Back by popular demand is the DDD Speaker Training Day on Friday 27th May 2011 at UWE in Bristol. This is a free day of training on giving presentations and improving your public speaking skills. Topics covered will include:-

• How To Explain Absolutely Anything
• Planning Your Presentation
• How To Give Great Demos
• Getting Your Laptop Ready For Your Presentation
• Presenting Your Presentation

To apply for a place on the day email speakertrainingday@dddsouthwest.com. Places are very limited. Priority will be given to DDD South West 3 speakers and new speakers. Attendees must prepare a short presentation on any subject (technical or otherwise) that will be presented to other attendees and a group leader once at the beginning of the day and once again at the end of the day. If your presentation requires anything other than PowerPoint you should bring your own laptop. We are delighted to have the following group leaders:

• Dave McMahon (speaker and co-founder of the NxtGen empire)
• Steve Sanderson (MVC guru and best speaker of DDD South West 1 by knowledge of subject)
• Ross Scott (speaker and co-organiser of DDD South West)
• Chris Myhill (speaker, co-founder of The .NET Developer Network and co-organiser of DDD South West)

The day doesn't cost anything but you do need to either bring your lunch or buy it on the premises (there are several cafes). Also it goes without saying that you do need to actually turn up - places are limited and it would be unfair on other speakers to reserve a place and not use it.

UGSS (Microsoft's User Group Support Services) have just published a video series that I recorded last year on How To Give Great Presentations. This free series of 8 videos covers the following subjects:-

1. Introduction (6 minutes 23 seconds)
2. Choosing The Right Presentation (8 minutes 30 seconds)
3. How To Explain Absolutely Anything (8 minutes 51 seconds)
4. Planning Your Presentation (22 minutes 52 seconds)
5. Nervousness And How To Overcome It (13 minutes 7 seconds)
6. How To Give Great Demos (26 minutes 9 seconds)
7. Preparing Your Laptop (19 minutes 21 seconds)
8. Presenting Your Presentation (35 minutes 39 seconds)

If you're new to presenting and feel that the leap is a bit daunting this video series will help you. It is aimed at first timers but experienced presenters will also find tips and tricks to help hone existing presentation skills. The series is also accompanied by a paper that you can download at http://www.guysmithferrier.com/Downloads/HowToGiveGreatPresentations.pdf.

Members of the resistance, important developments are occurring. The Next Generation User Group Empire are expanding their territories yet again. First Poland now Shenfield (near Brentwood, Essex). Wednesday 23rd February 2011 sees the inaugural meeting of the Shenfield chapter with a presentation on "Touch Me, Stretch Me, Squeeze Me: The Windows 7 WPF Multi-Touch Story" (I'll be there as a spy for the resistance cleverly disguised as a presenter). As their inexorable march towards the capital city continues I ask "who will stop them ?". In the South West we are fighting back with the newly formed and, of course, free, SQL Server User Club. Indeed London has its own new (free) Canary Wharf .NET User Group but has the venerable giant of the community grown fat on its pizza ? How long before we see NxtGen London ? Scaremongering or inevitability - you decide.

This is Guy Smith-Ferrier. If you're listening to this, you are the resistance.

In September I presented Internationalizing Silverlight at the Silverlight UK User Group (#SLUGUK) and Ian Smith (@irascian) has done a fabulous job of recording and editing it.

Before you watch it here are a couple of things to note:-

• I have now automated the process of creating localized XAP files and you do not have to go through the manual steps that I mention in the video. You can read my blog post on this here.
• On one of the slides I have a screen grab of "konnichiwa" in a Japanese font and my brain was clearly in neutral as I called it kanji when it is hiragana.
• I concede Gordon Mackie's point that the correct translation of "Hello World" to French is indeed "Bonjour Tout Le Monde".

You can download the slides here, the source code here and the Silverlight MSBuild tasks here.

Going to TechEd Europe 2010 in Berlin ? Come and see my session (WEB307) How To Make your Silverlight 4 Application World Ready. This is the same session I'm doing at the 34th Internationalization and Unicode Conference (#IUC34, where it is called How To Achieve World-Ready Domination In Silverlight 4) and I did last night at the Silverlight UK User Group (where it was called Internationalizing Silverlight 4). Here's the abstract:-

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 globalization and font support you can expect on Windows and the Mac, what the Silverlight installation user experience is for non-English users and what language support you can expect from the Silverlight framework.

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.

When Silverlight 2 was released I wrote a short document comparing the classes in the Silverlight System.Globalization namespace with those of the .NET Framework's same namespace. Last year I updated it for Silverlight 3 and now I have done the same again for Silverlight 4. Before you get too excited, however, the System.Globalization classes and their methods and properties in Silverlight 4 have not changed since Silverlight 3. That is not to say that there aren't internationalization changes in Silverlight 4 (right-to-left support being a very welcome addition), just that the classes themselves have not changed (not even to include TextInfo.IsRightToLeft). You can download the document here.