Developer Event? Ah go on, go on, go on.

Check it out at http://www.DDDIreland.com

Yesterday I received an email from the Microsoft TechNet DesignIt Competition team, asking me to review the five finalists entries and to vote for the one which I thought should win.  Then I noticed that VBUG's very own Peterborough Coordinator, Jyoti Majithia, was one of the finalists.  We have posted an article about the competition on the VBUG Website - http://www.vbug.com/News/April-2008/VBUG-Peterborough-Coordinator-Finalist-in-the-DesignIT-Competition--Vote-Now.aspx . 

Voting is now open and will close at 5pm on Friday 11th April 2008 with the winner being announced on Monday 15th April.  The winning contestant will see their design implemented for the charity of their choice to the sum of £15,000.

 View the five finalists' entries and Vote Now  Good Luck Jyoti!

Here is a brief introduction to my session IIS 7 for ASP.net Developers which I will be presenting at IMTC 2008 in Dublin on Friday 4th April 2008 at 11:30.

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.....

Recently VBUG Vice Chairman Tim Leung, prepared a brief video about the work we do at VBUG and the support we give developers in aiming to achieve our goal of Developing the Developer!, for the Microsoft VS08/SQL08/Server 08 Launch Event in Birmingham.  We didn't want to waste all of Tim's hard work and not use the video for anything other than the launch event, so last night I took a look into how we could stream the video using Silverlight and was surprised to see how easy it is :).

First I was concerned with bandwidth usage, yes it's a small video but still I didn't have any idea of how many view it would receive, but then I remembered that Microsoft are offering Silverlight hosting as part of the initiative to get developers working with the technology.  They provide 10GB of storage for videos and applications with an aggregated 5TB of Bandwidth per user account per month.  All you need to get an account is a Windows Live ID.  So off I headed to silverlight.live.com and setup an account :). 

Next I uploaded our video.  From here you can choose to create an application for your content.  I didn't have time for this and to be honest I haven't had chance to do a great deal with Silverlight yet.  So then I was stumped at how to embed our video on our pages at www.vbug.com but then whilst managing my uploaded video I noticed that it offered a code snippet with details of how to insert an iFrame into any web page, so off I went and copied this snippet into our VBUG home page and voila we now have streaming video content on our web site. 

I've also put the video here at the bottom of this post, to demonstrate how easy it is and to answer a few questions about what VBUG is and does.  Let me know what you think :).

On Thursday 24th April 2008, in Birmingham, VBUG will be holding a 1 day Spring Developer Conference.  We have a great collection of speakers lined up for the day and the agenda is of a high quality with some excellent content.

Sessions and Speakers:

1. Visual Studio 2008 - Mark Quirk
2. Workflow Foundation 101 - Maurice De Beijer
3. WPF Business Apps (2 Parts) - Oliver Sturm
4. Silverlight Showcase - Richard Costall
5. Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 - Dave McMahon

The fee for the conference is £119.00 ex VAT for VBUG Members and £149.99 ex VAT for non VBUG Members - for more details and to book see http://www.vbug.com/Conference/Conference-April-2008.aspx

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

Developer Day Scotland is another great community event, being run by the community for the community.  The events is being held in Glasgow on Saturday 10th May 2008 and best of all it's free!!.  The agenda has now been published - http://developerdayscotland.com/main/Agenda/tabid/68/Default.aspx and there are some great sessions running.  Unfortunately I am not going to be able to make it to DDS, something I'm quite disappointed about but I have other family commitments in the North East on that day.

I urge any developers who live in Scotland or the North of England who can get to Glasgow on the 10th May to register for this event and attend - I'm confident you'll find it very worthwhile.

To register - http://developerdayscotland.com/main/DelegateRegistration/tabid/69/Default.aspx

The Irish Microsoft Technology Conference (IMTC) 2008 is a three day conference running from 7pm on Wednesday 2nd April till Friday 4th April, in Dublin.  Full details of the agenda can be found at http://imtc.firstport.ie/agenda.aspx, and it looks pretty impressive, with 8 tracks and 40 sessions of great technical content with some excellent speakers.

I'll be there to deliver a session on Internet Information Services 7 for ASP.Net Developers, and this will be my first ever visit to Ireland, so I'm really looking forward to going over and having another opportunity to speak on a topic which I have great passion for. 

There is a great offer for the first 300 people who complete their registration for IMTC as they will receive a personal copy of the IMTC 2008 DVD showing ALL 40 Sessions, interviews and Keynotes - so go on now - get yourself booked in for what looks to be an excellent conference and excellent value for money.

Next week is the UK Launch event for Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 in Birmingham and as part of the many, many community activities going on the NxtGenUG Boyz, will be running more rounds of their legendary gameshow - Swaggily Fortunes and they've sent a mail asking for some help from all of you out there - even if you can't attend the actual event!

Wednesday March 19th 2008 is of course the UK 2008 Launch Event.  As part of the event, those NxtGenUG Boyz http://www.nxtgenug.net are running one of their gameshows, which will take place about 6.00pm during the evening drinks and nibbles.  "Swaggily" Fortunes is a take on the well known TV Quiz show in which teams of contestants are asked, for example, "We asked 100 Developers ... To Name a .NET Language".  Those teams that guess correctly what the answers were get to win some fantastic "swag" -- after a few rounds of mayhem!

You can help be part of this 'great' occasion by going to http://www.nxtgenug.net/2008launch/swagfortunes.aspx and answering 8 short questions.  Your answers will go towards making up the choices which the teams have to guess.  The NxtGenUG lads have run this several times in the past always to great reviews, and it makes for a fun, relaxed way to wind down from the days sessions.