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.

Andy Westgarth has started a new user group for Microsoft technologies in the North East of England called North East Bytes (http://www.nebytes.net/). Like all of the best user groups it is free to join and free to attend (seems to be a growing trend). NEBytes had their inaugural meeting on Wednesday 20th January 2010. Congratulations, Andy, I wish you, the team and the NEBytes community every success.

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.

I'm a long time fan of Fiddler, an excellent tool for spying on and interfering with HTTP requests. Analyzing the headers and packets sent across the wire has been an invaluable source of information to me many times. Sadly Fiddler suffers from a drawback where it is unable to view localhost traffic by default. There are workarounds but these are not always practical. So recently I was interested to see HttpWatch.

HttpWatch integrates straight into Internet Explorer or FireFox and provides an analysis of browser traffic. In particular because it is simply using the browser it clearly sees all localhost traffic without any workarounds. Now, whether HttpWatch has more features and functionality than Fiddler is still open for debate but in this one issue at least HttpWatch is solving a problem for me. The "Basic" version of HttpWatch is free and the other versions you have to pay for (whereas there is only one version of Fiddler and it does everything and it is all free).

Here we are at TechEd Europe 2009 and there's no surprise to see a rather tragic game show in progress. The big surprise, however, is that it's not the UK's own Ant and Dec (aka The Chuckle Brothers, aka Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee, aka Laurel and Hardy aka Richard Costall and Dave McMahon) who are doing it. Nope, it's Germany's answer to The Kings Of Crappy Game Shows, Hyper-D and Hyper-T. And on The Sad And Tragic Scale it's right up there. This one's about putting hats on and taking them off (I don't remember Terry Wogan doing this one). And not a "sometimes working, sometime not" WPF app in sight. The double act may be the same but on The Swagometer you'd have to say that Hyper-D and Hyper-T are in a new league: their prize is a brand new laptop. Kind of takes the shine off a t-shirt and a NxtGen mug a bit.

As promised here are the slides and source code for yesterday's "Automating Testing Using Windows Virtual PC" presentation at the MVP Open Day. The sister presentation to this one is "Automating Testing Using Virtual Server 2005" and you can download the slides and source code for this one. If you are using Virtual Server 2005 you might like to download both as the Windows Virtual PC presentation is more recent and contains slightly more code that is still applicable to Virtual Server 2005.

Windows Virtual PC (for Windows 7 on machines with hardware virtualization enabled) and Windows XP Mode have RTMed and are available for free download at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx. There are many new features in Windows Virtual PC beyond those of Virtual PC 2007 but the feature of most interest to me is the fact that unlike Virtual PC 2007 Windows Virtual PC has an API which allows the virtual machines to be automated. The API is very similar but not identical to the Virtual Server API. If you're interested in this subject then stay tuned as I will be posting the slides and more importantly the code for my Automating Testing Using Windows Virtual PC presentation in the next few weeks.

BTW if you are planning on installing Virtual PC 2007 on your Windows 7 box it will not install with Windows Virtual PC present so you will have to uninstall it first.