Great News! The next VBUG Meeting in the North East will be the VBUG EVO Launch event. This will be on a much smaller scale than the Microsoft Event being held in TVP on 19th & 20th January 2007. In approximately two hours, myself and Gary Rowntree, Leeds VBUG Regional Coordinator, will be giving all attendees an insight into the EVO products, primarily Vista, Office and .Net 3.0.

We'll try to cover as much as we can but obviously won't be able to cover everything, but hopefully it'll be a fun and informative evening for all. So for more information see the VBUG website for more information and details of how to register for the event. Currently the details of the Venue is to be confirmed. Keep an eye on the VBUG website and this blog as confirmed details will be posted as soon as they're confirmed!

As many of you will know, I am the North East Regional Coordinator for VBUG, and last night we had a get together in Newcastle to discuss the year ahead. A small group of us met to discuss the developments expected in the next year, new events, new developments but primarily we had a very fruitful discussion about topics which members would like to see covered in the support meetings next year.

From such a small group (There were seven of us), we managed to come up with enough topics to cover a meeting a month where possible. This is something I am actively working on and I am planning next year's events now.

The topics that were discussed were

• EVO (Exchange, Vista and Office) VBUG Launch Event
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007)
• Internet Information Server 7.0
• Internationalisation of Applications
• XAML; WPF and WPF/E
• Visual Studio Orcas
• Iron Python
• Web Development (General Topic Covering ASP.Net)
• Ruby On Rails
• Expression Products
• Live Platform
• Ajax - Building a Control from scratch

Phew! Thats quite a lot of interest and sessions to plan, I'm going to have a busy few weeks!

If you are a VBUG member and attend the Support Meetings, and have any requests for topics, contact either me directly or VBUG and let them know and I'll do my best to source a speaker and see if we can fulfill the request. Also if you've never been to a Support Meeting, Member or Non Member keep an eye out for the next event in your region on the VBUG website and register and come along.

At DDD4 on Saturday it was announced that there is to be a Web Developer Day held at Microsoft UK, Reading on Saturday 3rd February! This is going to be a days event for all Web Developers and Designers and will cover topics such as CSS, AJAX and User Experience. This should be a great event and I am really looking forward to it! As a web devloper personally, I'm really looking forward to mixing with the community and learning from their new experiences. Phil Winstanley is organising it and from what he's told me it is really shaping up to be great. More news will be released and I'll post the registration details as soon as I hear about them. In the meantime why not subscribe to the rss feed - http://www.webdd.org.uk/NewsFeed.ashx to keep up to date with announcements.

This weekend I went down to Microsoft UK, Reading, for Developer Developer Developer Day 4. This is a day run by the community for the community and is hosted by Microsoft but is completely the community's event. This is an excellent event and I have managed to attend DDD2, 3 and 4. I really enjoy it and although it is a 600 mile round trip for me to go to Reading and back I find the trip very worthwhile. The format of DDD is a day of technical seminars by community Speakers and at DDD4 topics covered included - How to Write Crap C#, Enterprise Library, WF, Microsoft Robotics Studio, Securing apps and comms in ASP.Net, Asynchronous Processing in SQL Server 2005 to name but a few.

This time we also had Grok Talks at lunchtime which gave attendees to present on a topic for ten minutes covering something they're into and think is pretty cool. This was the first time this had been tried and was very well received. Topics included Microsoft Windows Vista Speech - which is very cool, Writing apps for Media Centre, DIY Certifcates and Http Modules. This was a very welcome addition to the day and gave delegates a chance to have a go at speaking.

There will be more DDDs in the next twelve months and I suggest adding the DDD Feed to your aggregator to keep an eye out for announcements as they appear.