Following on from Liam Westley's excellent presentation on "Virtualisation for developers" at The .NET Developer Network in October 2008 Liam and I are teaming up to do our first double act at The Next Generation User Group in Birmingham on 12th February 2009. The evening consists of two presentations:-

• Virtualisation For Developers with Liam Westley
  Not used virtualisation technology yet? As a developer, you are missing out on some great time saving technologies. Concentrating on the use of Virtualisation for developers on workstations and servers; What is virtualisation ? What virtualisation tools are available (especially for free) ? Why is virtualisation advantageous ? Where should you utilise virtualisation ? Tips and tricks - configuration and tweaking performance. Legacy application development (VB6, VS2003), installation tests, clean client images, documentation for screen capture as well as confirming how to get to configuration settings, consolidation of development hardware, internationalisation, breaking the 3Gb memory barrier, CI/build/test servers? .....
• Automating Testing With Virtual Server 2005 with Guy Smith-Ferrier
  Virtual Server 2005 is a free virtualization download from Microsoft. 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. Virtual Server 2005 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.

The evening starts at 6:30pm instead of the regular time of 7:00pm. You can sign up for this one here.