Upcoming talks and sessions

So I didn’t make it into DDD Scotland either, again the competition was fierce! Worried? Me? Not at all! I’ve currently got 3 sessions submitted to DDD South West! MUHAHAHAHAAA! As before I’ve submitted my intro to PRISM and intro to Workflow 4.0, but this time I’ve also added in a new Unity based session. So vote for me! I’ll get into DDD eventually! :D

In other news I’ve got a few talks lined up at the GL.NET and VBUG User Groups. The dates are:

24th May VBUG Portsmouth – Introduction to PRISM

5th June DDD South West – Hopefully I’ll get in!

16th June VBUG Bristol – Introduction To Workflow

? September GL.NET – Unity & IoC (link and better name to follow)

So what about NxtGenUG Southampton I hear you cry! Well we’ve got a cracking line up coming up over the coming months. Tonight we’ve got Neil Robbins coming down from the big smoke to do his talk on Document Databases.

Then on the 15th April we join in the UK Tech Days launch festivities with our own Richard Costal talking about Silverlight 4, and have a special guest from Microsoft joining us. Details to follow on the special guest!

On the 27th May we have all round Guru Liz Keogh joining us to talk about BDD. This should prove to be an excellent session, because if you have any examples you’d like Liz to apply BDD during the session then submit them to me via email me at JohnMc@NxtGenUG.net and she’ll select the best ones.

Then on 24th June we’ve got Phil Pursglove coming down to discuss Microsoft’s exciting new Velocity technology.

An absolutely cracking line up I’m sure you’re agree! In fact what are you waiting for?! Go register now! :D

Win a ticket to TechEd Berlin!

As we approach TechEd 2009 in Berlin, NxtGenUG will be running our yearly contest to win a ticket (no flights or accommodation included) for the event.

So what do you have to do?  Well, pop over to the competition page and give us a caption on what’s happening between Richard Costall and John Price :)  Simple eh?  So what are you waiting for?  Get over to the competition page and starting captioning!

Upcoming events at NxtGenUG Southampton

Over the next couple of months we will be continuing our Web technologies theme by having Ben Hall down to talk about Testing ASP.Net applications on the 20th August. We’ve also managed to grab some uber swag from TypeMock and some of Roy Osherove excellent “The Art of Unit Testing” eBooks to give away! You can register here.

Then on 17th September we’ve got Yossi Dahan stopping by Southampton again, no BizTalk this time, but the new Windows Identity Framework! The Windows Identity Framework is Microsoft's offering for dealing with federated security. You can register here.

Then on 22nd October for our 2nd Birthday(!) we’ve hosting the follow up grudge match between Phil Winstanley and Sebastien Lambla as they duke out the merits of ASP.NET WebForms against ASP.NET MVC (and OpenRasta!). This was a very highly rated session in London, and promises to be very entertaining and informative. You can register here. More details to follow for this session on the site soon!

PRISM Assault Course and Julys event at Southampton NxtGen

Yesterday I passed the WPF MCTS, YAY! One of the reaons I wanted to get this done is to help me with the PRISM Assault Course I'm currently putting together with Peter Cook (who's blog can be seen here). If there's an area of PRISM you'd be interested in seeing, drop me an email or leave a comment and we'll see if we can work it into the agenda.

We're currently tracking down a venue and sorting out the agenda, but we hope to be kicking off the event in either August or Septemeber. Further details to follow :)

Also this month at NxtGenUG Southampton on the 16th (July) we're be hosting Mike Ormonds ASP.NET 4.0 talk, which promises to be damn interesting as it will be covering all the new exciting areas of the upcoming release.

We're also be having a nugget from Mark Heath on managed Audio wrappers in in .Net.

You can register for the event here.

Slides for my PRISM-tation

Here are the slides for my Introduction to PRISM session that I given at Birmingham and Southampton.

The code examples are to follow.

Thanks to everyone who attended! All comments welcome :)

UPDATE - The code is now up as well :)

Upcoming talks at Southampton & my talks around the country

Next month (14th May) I’m going to be doing a session on the PRISM (Composite WPF & Silverlight). This session will give an introduction to PRISM and give examples of how to use it various excellent features :) Further details and registration can be found here.

I then travel up to Birmingham on the 9th June to bring my PRISM talk to the Brum NxtGen crowd. Further details and registration can be found here. So if you miss the Southampton one in May, come on up to Brum!

On the 18th June we have our excellent friend Guy Smith-Ferrier coming down to do a talk on Internationalising Silverlight. Internationalisation is Guys speciality, so this should be an excellent talk! We’ve also hopefully got a members nugget! Further details and registration can be found here.

Then on the 16th July we complete our visits from the MS DPE team with Mike Ormond talking on ASP.NET 4.0. He’ll be covering such sexy things as AJAX.NET, MVC and Dynamic Data. An excellent speaker with an excellent topic, it should be cracking! Further details and registration can be found here.

In August I’ll be putting in an appearance at the Gloucestershire .Net User Group to do one of my Windows Workflow Foundation based talks. Date and detail to follow :)

The conclusions of the PDC Podcast Trilogy

The third and final part of Chris and my PDC Odessey is now available as a podcast on the NxtGen site here.

Out of all the awesome people we interviewed at PDC, this was probably the most exciting for me as we interview what seemed like the entire WF team! We also managed to bag a rather excellent WCF interview amoung others. So come download it and enjoy :)

Silverlight Assault Course - Ireland

On the 16th January, 4 NxtGenUG bods flew out to Ireland to give the Silverlight Assault Course in Dublin and Cork our hostess for the weekend was Martha Rotter. I compiled a list of questions during the sessions, and they will be posted here in due course with answers and resources mentioned during the nuggets.

Dublin - 17th January 2009

The event kicked off early on a blustery day at the Microsoft Campus in Dublin. Speakers Rich Costall and Chris Hay felt a news conference was needed for this historic event of Irish and English developer communities working together.

As you can see the massed crowds were overcome with excitement and joy at their announcements.


A large crowd of developers (and one designer!) crowded into the lecture theatre ready to be wowed and educated.

The morning started with Rich and Chris taking the attendees through the basics of Silverlight, What is a Silverlight project composed of, how do you host a Silverlight app, what is contained within the mysterious XAP file?, and how to communicate with Silverlight. This gave the attendees the vital basics of how a Silverlight app hangs together. Time for a quick coffee break before marching onto the second part which got into the juicy details of the DLR, Styling, Templating, Images and Media.

The second part rocketed along with an impressive array of Silverlight Tip and Tricks for creating the basics needed to put your Silverlight app together! We also discovered Chris was a big Monty Python fan with a particular love of the "Knights of the Round Table" Lego tribute video and the "Lumberjack Song". Lunch swiftly arrived and everyone tucked into the traditional food of choice, pizza.

Pizza consumed everyone piled back into the lecture theatre for the increasingly exciting Silverlight topics. Part 3 contained the real meat of Silverlight Brushes, Transformations, Animation, Data Binding and Isolated Storage.

The attendees were now armed with everything they needed to be wowed in part 4 by Rich and Chris's games examples and coffee from the break. Rich took the audience through his Manic Miner port, and Chris rolled out his Spectrum emulator, both of which showed what could be achieved using the previous nuggets. Part 4 also contained the essential advanced topics needed to create a truly custom experience in Silverlight, such as User Controls, Encryption, Compression and Martha's excellent integration nugget which included a demo of how easy the Deep Zoom Composer is to use and how to control Flash from within Silverlight (No, really!).

With the attendees' brains bursting to the limits with Silverlight info, it was time to roll out the NxtGen game show, Swaggily Fortunes. Having just achieved NxtGen Game Show Console Trainee certification, we were all set to swag the attendees!

10 attendees leapt from their seats, in what can only be described as a "Swag frenzy" we started the Show.

It was tough going, with the contestants battling heroically to gain dominion. But there could be only one team of winners. All contestants made away with an impressive selection of swag.

The winners swag.


The runner ups swag.


With heads (and in some cases arms!) filled to bursting the attendees dispersed into the evening, and we packed up to catch a train to Cork.

We caught the 7pm train to Cork and were relived to get in on time without any delays, as our very helpful and friendly cab driver from the Microsoft campus had informed us that every line had trees blown down on to it, but he'd happily drive us down to Cork if we wanted to :)

Cork - 18th January 2009

The second event kicked off Sunday morning in the Imperial Hotel (Where we'd been staying! :)) in the Morgan Suite. This event was being hosted by Joe Gill of the Microsoft Technology User Group Ireland (mtug.ie)

No press conference this time, which I think helped fill the Morgan suite with another large crowd of Developers and several Designers ready for Silverlight to be pumped into their brains.


Rich, Chris and Martha delivered their nuggets to the attendees with the same skill and knowledge as had been demonstrated the previous day, I won't reiterate them here as the schedule was the same :)

The attendees heads were soon bursting with Silverlight knowledge, tips and tricks, so what better way to round off the day than to bring on Swaggily Fortunes. Another 10 attendees leapt from the gathered ranks ready to be questions and swagged within an inch of their lives.

Again the competition was intense, the scoring dubious in places, but there could be only one winner! Rich's team won for a second time that weekend and the swag was distributed to both teams.

I speak for Rich C, Chris H, John P and myself when I say we had a stonking time and really enjoyed meeting the folks at both events and giving the courses.

We'd also like to thank Martha for all her hard work organising the weekend us, as we all know organising Devs is like herding cats, and thanks to Joe Gill for hosting and providing us with a venue in Cork.

See you next time! ;)

Dr Neils coming to Southampton!

As apart of our upcoming January session on design with Tricky, I'm very pleased to announce that Dr Neil (MVP & Regional Director) will also be presenting!

If you don't know who Dr Neil is (Shame on you!) then you can check out more on his blog and on his MVP profile. I saw Dr Neil present at ReMIX:UK 07 with Tricky and then again at ReMIX:UK 08, both sessions were absolutley cracking. Dr Neil can be considered a Guru on all things Live Service related from Microsoft.

I'm very excited about this session as it was one of the first we started planning when Southampton was just getting off the ground, in fact doubly excited now that Dr Neil will be joining us.

Go register now at the following link!

PDC Podcast number 2

The second podcast from my excursion to PDC is now up on the NxtGenUG site here.

In this one Chris and I talk to Silverlight Guru Shaun Burke, and PDC organisers Mike Swanson and Tim Sneath. Mike even lets slip a little nugget about when VS2010 should be around :)

Enjoy.

The third and final podcast should be out in time for the New Year :)

Presentation and Code for "Going with the Workflow"

I've popped the Slides and Code onto my Skydrive, you can get at it here:



Enjoy :)

Cambridge and Workflow

Last night saw Rich and I travel up to Cambridge to hijack the evening with our Watin and Workflow talks.

Chris and Allister certinaley have managed to bag themselves with an excellent crowd and venue! We were given a very warm welcome by the group and were asked some very complex questions on our talks.

I did get one question which I could not answer which was this:

"Doesn't creating more than one Workflow Runtime in an AppDomain raise an exception?"

This was interesting as I thought you could, but the attendee thought you couldn't. So I've done a bit of searching and found we were both right! Before the final release WF did indeed use to throw an exception if you tried creating more than one instance of it in an AppDomain, but after the final release you can create as many instance in an AppDomain as you like. Here's a link with a bit more info on the matter, including when you'd want to have multiple instances running.

Overall I thought the session went well, the feedback from Southampton run really helped improve the session, and apart from a couple of hiccups in the second half it went really well. So I'd just like to thanks the guys in Cambridge for hosting us, and the members for making us feel really welcome.

I'll be posting code and slides up soon, so check back later :)

Oh, and don't forget to harrass Chris and Allister to host the Silverlight Assault Course up there :)

Our Birthday Bash

So this months session will see NxtGenUG Southampton hit the grand old age of 1! We've had a cracking series of evening sessions from some absolutley top names, plus a very successful Saturday event in the form of the Silverlight Assasult Course.

So whats happening for our first birthday? We thought we'd try something a tad more interactive than a normal talk, something people could particpate in. Our very own Rich A (Mr Ready Steady Speak Remix 08!) and member Plamen Balkanski are going to do a session on Agile development, including the agile Planning Game!

Sign up and get more details on the following NxtGenUG page.

We're of course have Birthday Cake! :)

My first full length presentation

On Thursday night I presented a full length WF session for the first time, I thought it went well and have gotten some very useful feedback from attendees on things I can improve :) My fellow coordinator Rich Allen also did a nugget on a rather excellent piece of technology called WatiN, which is a very formidable Web testing framework with added bells and whistles!

Watch out Cambridge! V2 is coming your way on the 7th October :) I think I'll rewrite the front end is WPF, as I hear thatCambridge bunch have been spoiled by Chris Hays Silverlight Guru status ;)

Sept & Oct talks at NxtGen Southampton

On September 11th we've got Andrew Hallmark coming down to do a talk on CSLA.Net, no nugget has been confirmed as of yet so if you're interested drop me an email :)

If you don't know what the CSLA is, then here's a quick brief. The CSLA is a Business Object framework by Rockford Lhotka that follows quite a few principles that are set down in the Object Thinking book. It comes in two flavours, either VB or C#.

It's a talk I've been keen on getting presented at Southampton since we started nearly a year ago, then Andrew Hallmark offered his services :)

In October we're be hopefully having our 1st Birthday, it should be a fun night with a mix of presentation and some more light hearted activties. Details to follow.

Manic Miner in Silverlight!

NxtGenUG Silverlight Manic Miner
http://www.nxtgenug.net/manicminer

NxtGenUG Co-Founder Richard Costall & Member Pete McGann are pleased to announce their “Silverlight” Manic Miner game Beta is now live on the NxtGenUG site. Manic Miner was originally written by Matthew Smith, under games company Bug-Byte in 1983. The game was a landmark title in the history of gaming.

The original classic features 20 caverns to negotiate, and Pete and Rich had lovingly created 9 of these so far, with more to follow shortly.

Silverlight Manic Miner shares a custom built ‘time based’ engine with an XNA version of the game. A library of c# files is shared between the two systems. The Silverlight edition is also integrated into the NxtGenuG site, through Application services, and registered visitors can have their high scores recorded and shown in a leader board which refreshes every 60 seconds.

Pete and Rich will be telling their story at NxtGenUG Coventry on August 11^th 2008

Going with the Workflow

On the 21st August I'll be presenting my first full length session on Windows Workflow Foundation in Southampton. I'm attempting to do something slightly different with this session compared to the other WF session I've seen in the community. Instead of the normal This is the designer, this is an Activity, look they make a Workflow talk, I'll be attempting to answer the three burning questions I hear from most of the developers I talk to: Why should I use WF? When should I use WF? and How should I use WF?

So if this sounds something you'd be interested in, come along and check the session out. Slides will appear here after the session.

Silverlight Assault Course

This past weekend saw the first run of the Silverlight Assault Course run by us at NxtGen. You can see a link for it here. The basic premise is to fill the gap between seeing a 1-2 hour technology session at a User Group event and playing with the same technology at home.

I found that most of the cool technologies I see at events I never have time to get to grips with afterwards, so I came up with the concept of the Assault Course. The Assault Course is a mix of Hands On Labs and presentations which the attendees can flt between as the subjects they're interested in are presentated. The presentations take no more than 20 minutes, each being a contained wealth of information.

Feedback from the event has been incredibly positive! Everyone ha sthought the value for money was superb, which is good :) And I think the swag from Immediacy (the excellent company that allowed us to use their premises for the day, thank you so much!) and Telerik made it doubly worth while. We will have a tinker with the format, as the HOLs were pretty much deserted the whole day because of the stonking presentations being given by Rich Costall and Chris Hay.

If you're running a User Group in the UK and would be interested in having us run the Silverlight Assault Course in your region, then drop me an email :)