Shortly before Tech Ed Developers 2007 I bought myself an Xbox 360.  I'd resisted buying a new games console for many years, my previous machine being a Sega Master System :-o.  My reasoning behind not buying one was that I don't get enough chance to play games as I'm usually busy with plenty other things, i.e. community events, preparing sessions, research, going to and playing football, going out etc, etc.  I succumbed though because I was able to get hold of an Xbox 360 through an excellent deal on the High Street.  I still don't have many games but I can see the possibilities and when I do get chance to play the odd game, usually enjoy it especially over Xbox Live.

I recalled a post by Richard Costall - What's your Xbox 360 Saying? whereby there is a service offered called 360Voice and this enables your Xbox 360 to write it's own blog - so you get to hear what your Xbox is thinking.  I thought it would be quite funny to see what my Xbox 360 would say about my gaming activity, especially as I am not a very heavy gamer.

It would appear my Xbox is not very happy with me, as I have not been on my Xbox for over 31 days now and it's decided to refuse to blog :).  Check out what it's been saying over the last few weeks at http://www.360voice.com/tag/CodeMonkey1973 I guess it just doesn't understand that it's not the only thing of importance in my life, it also has to battle with VBUG, Community, Speaking Events, Sunderland AFC, Facebook, Twitter.....

Dave McMahon has just sent through details of NxtGenUG's next conference, FEST 08, being held at Microsoft's Reading Offices on Thursday June 12th 2008.  More details:

NxtGenUG don't do conferences, they just have a good time and FEST08 which takes place at TVP Reading, promises to be in the normal vein of NxtGenUG events.  Great sessions, Pizza and Swag.  The theme this year is "Data Today, Data Tomorrow" and there are new sessions from Oliver Sturm on F#, Dave Sussman on ASP.NET Dynamic Data Controls and Ridgian's BI expert Dave Morrow on SQL Server Analysis Services.  There will be the keynote from Rich and Dave and a brand new gameshow called "Who's Session Is It Anyway?

As before its free to all NxtGenUG members and £49.99 to non-members.  FEST07 was a memorable event last year, FEST08 will be equally memorable. You'll learn some great stuff about Data related technologies, meet some great people, have some fun and leave with a bag load of Swag! Don't miss it!

For more info - http://www.nxtgenug.net/Fest08/default.aspx

There, that got your attention now didn't it?  Then the advice I was given a few weeks ago worked!  I am a virtual tee totaller and have always been amazed at how many people respond with complete shock and amazement when I tell them that I don't DRINK!!  I mentioned this to someone in conversation a couple of weeks ago and they said I should respond by saying I'm a recovering alcoholic!  This seems to be quite an extreme measure to take in order to explain why I have made a personal choice.  For the record I am not, nor have I ever been an alcoholic!  I have made a decision not to drink.  I am not a complete tee-totaller as I very, very occasionally will have an alcoholic drink.  My reasons for not drinking are that I usual drive a lot of places, plus I am in the position where I can take it, I am able to have a good time without it.  Plus a lot more of my friends like to have a drink when we're out so I'd rather be the driver in the group.

I don't often write about topics such as this on my blog, as I try an keep it technically based, until I can set up an additional personal blog for my personal thoughts - although should I add my thoughts to this blog - what do you think?  However I was reading a piece in todays Sunday Times by India Knight - Put Shame Back Into Boozing which stirred up a lot of my opinions on the subject.  In todays society it would appear that it is perfectly acceptable, and now considered the norm for a night out on the town to have to result in an individual getting absolutely bladdered, not able to remember what happened during the night, in order to have a good time.  Alarmingly this appears to be the opinion of many age groups, not just those younger than me (I'm 27) but also those older!!  I am not against people having a good time and enjoying a drink.  I am not preaching about the demons of drink all I am saying is that I agree with the article's sentiments and believe that no longer should it be accepted that binge drinking is a norm.  We should look to the examples on the continent, for example Spain, whereby 24 hour drinking is normal but moderated.  I worry that complacency and acceptance of extremes is setting a bad example for our youth, this coupled with the glorification of what I consider to be bad social examples in the media such as the antics of music stars such as Pete Docherty and more recently Amy Winehouse are having a detrimental affect. 

One other gripe I have is the exhorbitant cost of soft drinks in pubs!  Why does it cost more for a pint of coke etc than for a pint of lager!  Yes this can be the case!  I believe the mark up on soft drinks is massive and that publicans and owners make massive profits on the often vile and incorrectly mixed soft drinks, personally I stick to fruit based drinks.  I can go to a local supermarket and buy a 2 litre bottle of soft drink for anything from 40p to £1.50 yet I can expect to pay £1.50 for half a pint of soft drink in many pubs and clubs!  Some towns and pubs have a scheme for drivers to get their first drink at a bar for free on production of car keys, but not many and even when it is present it's not well publicised.  How about a fair deal for those who chose to drive for their group or who chose not to drink.

My friends accept that I don't drink and I wish I lived in a society whereby others accepted it and didn't react in amazement when I explain my position.  I have very good nights out with friends, I will dance and ride bucking broncos etc and generally have a good time out with friends without a drink and I get to laugh at what they get up to when they're half cut! :-).  Remember myself and other people who choose not to drink can be great to have along in any party as they make sure you get home safe and stop the temptation to potentially drink drive.

Great news and well done to all the teams involved with Windows Server 2008 - Earlier today it was announced that Windows Server 2008 has RTM'd

- http://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver/archive/2008/02/04/windows-server-2008-rtm.aspx  Now all I need is for discountasp.net to upgrade their servers and I can get my blog moved to IIS7!!

Also check out a video of Alex Hinrichs talking about shipping Windows Server 2008 on Channel 9 - http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=379688 and there is also an interview with Carlos Aguilar Mares, Development Lead on the IIS team, which I recorded for VBUG whilst out at Tech Ed - http://www.vbug.com/MP3-Interviews/Podcast-5-Carlos-Aguilar-Mares.aspx

Hot on the heels of Scott's announcement on the future roadmap for Silverlight.   The UK Community are pleased to announce INETA Europe's First Silverlight Challenge Competition.  The details of which are as follows:

INETA Europe, is running an European Silverlight Competition.  The competition is open now and runs until January 2th 2008.

How to enter?  Easy.  Create a .Net Component or Application using Silverlight and release it through an Open Source license (MS-PL) so INETA User Groups, Communities, Developers and Designers can use it on their own sites.

Each participating country will select a winner and then an European Silverlight Challenge winner will be drawn among the winners of the participating countries.

Entries will be awarded marks in the following four areas: Originality, Software Technique, Design and Utilisation.

Take part and take on the challenge and you could win amazing prizes with a market value close  to €150,000

For more information on the UK Competition go to http://unitedkingdom.silverlightchallenge.eu and for more information on the whole competition go to http://www.silverlightchallenge.eu

For banners and other images go to: http://www.silverlightchallenge.eu/About.aspx

Prize details - http://www.silverlightchallenge.eu/Premios.aspx

Today I traveled to Barcelona for Microsoft Tech Ed Developers!  This is my second trip to Tech Ed and I am equally excited about this opportunity and looking forward to playing a part in the UK Community element of Tech Ed.  Tim and I are representing VBUG and it's members at Tech Ed and we are both looking forward to meeting and chatting with many UK developers and making new friends and contacts over the course of the next week.  I flew from Newcastle to  Barcelona with KLM via Schiphol and the flights weren't as bad as I'd feared as I have in the past suffered greatly with pain in my ears on landing but so far it's not been to bad.  Also we managed to see a cracking sunset as we flew over Holland on our way to Barcelona.  I hope to provide a series of Blog Posts from Tech Ed during the course of the week.  If you're out at Tech Ed, Tim and I will be spending a lot of our spare time in the Community Lounge within the Exhibition Hall so come and say Hi.

At the recent VBUG conference I had an issue with my video adapter in my laptop.  I arrived after sitting in traffic getting from one side of Reading to the other to get to TVP, and got through registration and went into Chicago 1 to prepare for the opening and keynote of the VBUG Conference.  I plugged my laptop into the equipment so I could present the opening section of the conference.  But found that although the display via the projection equipment was fine, the display on my laptop had resized my screen down to just a small 1024x768 resolution screen in the middle of my laptop screen :-(.  I was more than a little concerned by this as I was presenting again in Chicago 1 over the course of the two day conference, and back in June I had presented in Chicago 2 with no problems.  I spent a little while trying to get it to expand the display to the full width and height of my screen to no avail, and so decided to look at it later.

Later on during the day I found out what the problem was to do with an update to the nVidia driver (which I installed in July) settings changing a default setting relating to the way in which the display extended.  I managed to fix this minor issue and thought I'd post details for anyone else who has a similar setup to avoid the ensuing panic and frustration which built up as I tried to figure out what was wrong.

I have a Dell Latitude D820 and the graphics device in this setup is the nVidia Quadro NVS 120M 256MB. To get your display to expand to the full available screen no matter which resolution you are running under do the following:

Go to the nVidia Control Panel (This can be accessed via the context menu on the desktop or via Control Panel)

Select the Display option and then on the following screen:

Next Select Change the panel scaling

Next select "Use NVIDIA Scaling" to force the display to scale out to use the full screen available.

I hope this is useful to owners of this laptop graphics card, let me know if you've suffered this pain too.

 

I've finally moved to a new Blogging Engine, I've been taking a look at the various options available for a while now, and have finally taken the plunge and I'm trying BlogEngine.Net.  I had looked at Subtext and DasBlog but I've been trying BlogEngine.Net for a couple of months while I tested functionality and decided that I would give this one a try and so far I have been impressed.  BlogEngine.Net is a CodePlex Project and is regularly updated and the team behind it have a very impressive roadmap and vision for the engine.  No sooner had they released the recent v1.2 build than they are already looking at v1.3.  My only gripe so far has been with the Blog Import tool, but I managed to find a way round it by importing my blog into the v1.1 release then upgrading to v1.2 and then published the blog.  I'll give a full run down of features in a future post.

My reason for moving to an engine was that I didn't have time to constantly tweak and develop my self created blog and even at some points the time it was taking to prepare a post and actually publish the post was prohibitive.  By using an engine which is being worked on by the community the work is shared and a lot of the functionality which I wanted to develop is already here.  Also I can now use, and am currently with this post, Windows Live Writer to prepare posts and post directly from any PC, I'm also going to be taking a look at blogging direct from Microsoft Office Word 2007.  Hopefully with a better engine behind my blog I'll be able to blog a lot more frequently, so expect to see lots of new content.

I have also moved to a new hosting package with Discount ASP.Net.  Discount ASP.Net are a well known Award Winning Web Hosting provider and are always ahead of the game in providing functionality for ASP.Net developers to take advantage of.  For example Discount ASP.Net are currently offering a free Beta Account with ASP.Net 3.5 and IIS7 Hosting together, showing there commitment to innovation and industry leading services.  I've not been happy with the lack of speed with which 1and1 move as regards to providing there customers with new features, especially with the high end shared hosting package like I was on, such as AJAX and SQL Server 2005 Support (both still not provided), plus with the costs and pricing plan that Discount ASP.Net employ I will also be making a significant cost saving.  My experience so far with set up and facilities provided my Discount ASP.Net has been excellent and I would fully recommend their services.

Recently I have been looking into moving my Blog over to a new engine and have been looking at a few different ones. I am close to moving my blog over to not just a new engine but also a new hosting package. Therefore I have set up a new feedburner account for syndication with my blog feed. If you have subscribed to my blog please update your subscription to point to http://feeds.feedburner.com/apwestgarth.  I will continue to maintain the original blog feed for a couple of weeks but will be turning it off at the end of October 2007.

I was approached by a North East company at the recent VBUG & SUGUK meeting, to ask to publish information about a vacancy they are looking to fill. Having recruited and been a recruit in the North East I know how difficult it is to get the right people into your organisation, so I said I'd post the details of the vacancy here - Hydratight Developer Job Spec.  If this is a position you are interested in, please pursue it!