On Monday November 26th and 27th, Bob Swart will be here in the UK to teach two courses as part of the Developer’s Group.
Database Development Essentials on Monday November 26th
The agenda is here: http://www.richplum.co.uk/meetings/20071126.pdf
Web Development Essentials on Tuesday November 27th
The agenda is here: http://www.richplum.co.uk/meetings/20071127.pdf
Technorati Tags: Bob Swart, Web Development Essentials, Database Development Essentials, Developers Group, DDG
On Monday October 22nd and 23rd, Ray Konopka will be here in the UK to teach two courses as part of the Developer’s Group.
Effective User Interface Design on Monday October 22nd
The agenda is here: http://www.richplum.co.uk/meetings/20071022.pdf
Effective Programming in Delphi on Tuesday October 23rd
The agenda is here: http://www.richplum.co.uk/meetings/20071023.pdf
Technorati Tags: Ray Konopka, Effective User Interface Design, Effective Programming, Developers Group, DDG
Saturday October 6th sees the first SQL Community conference: SQLBits – http://www.SQLBits.com
20 sessions in 4 tracks (Business Intelligence, DBA, Development and Katmai) on a Saturday in Reading at a cost of £0.
Registration is now open, places are going fast, we have room for just 350 attendees.
Voting – you choose the sessions
You need to register on the www.sqlbits.com site and then select the 10 sessions (http://www.sqlbits.com/information/PublicSessions.aspx) you would most like to see. We will use this voting to help decide which sessions are to be run. We have over 36 sessions crossing the full SQL Server spectrum and only 20 slots.
Once you have selected and saved your selection you will be given the conference registration URL.
To register for SQLBits, please go visit this site:
http://www.sqlbits.com/information/PublicSessions.aspx
Technorati Tags: SQLBits, DDD, Reading, TVP, UK Community Event, Katmai, DBA, BI
About Mix:UK 07
Mix:UK 07 is the premier event for web designers and web developers to:
- Get creative inspiration from design and development gurus, web agencies and innovators
- Discover how technologies like Silverlight, Expression and Live Services are already being used to create a new generation of rich media experiences and RIAs (Rich Interactive Applications)
- Connect with others in the industry who, like yourself, have a passion for innovation and creativity and have built personal and business success on that passion.
Further to my earlier post, time is running out if you want to attend! As of yesterday there were less than 50 places left!
More information can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/uk/mix07/
Richard Costall, Craig Murphy, Alun Rogers, Dave McMahon
What happens when four Microsoft MVPs find themselves sitting at a round table, in a pub, in Seattle, with beer? Well, you get a comedy moment with some choice use of language – you have been warned! It’s pretty tame really, but there are a couple of words that you wouldn’t expect to hear! There are also a couple of “you had to be there moments”, the odd strange pronunciation, etc.
NxtGenUG chaps, Dave, Rich, Alun and myself found ourselves in our hotel bar, sitting at a round table. I switched on the camera’s voice recording feature, we got some beers and we wax lyrical about the day we just had.
Three Purposeful Chaps
In this show, Alun reminds us of the best way of getting swag: “see guys carrying boxes of swag, confirm it’s swag, ask for some”. Use the phrase: “what’s in the box” if you have to. Schwagistis. Schwagtastic. A lot of that swag has been distributed at various user group events, including FEST07 (where I was given some swag…the same swag that we’d blagged in Seattle two months earlier!) Huge thanks to these guys, the UK user groups really appreciated your kind offer of swag. Alun and Craig: swag champions!
Quotes, listen carefully!
“Who’s got a long horn then?”
“I’m going for a wee”, “I’m going for a 360”
The Colour-Picker Didn’t Please Everybody
http://codebetter.com/blogs/karlseguin/archive/2007/05/25/i-m-a-sensitive-mvp.aspx
Our Stripper Names
Dave = Rex Westickle
Rich = Rocky Stonerider
Alun = Dirk Fastcruise
Craig = Adam Dangleboss
Download the podcast here.
I have a podcast feed available too, you can subscribe to it here – and it works with Apple’s iTunes!
This podcast:
Technorati Tags: Microsoft MVP, Microsoft MVP Programme, four yorkshiremen, bootloader, apple malware services, AMS, Apple Malware Services, book signing, david platt, rollingthunder, MVP Summit, MVP Summit 2007, Dave McMahon, Richard Costall, Alun Rogers, Craig Murphy, why software sucks, swag, swag run, longhorn beta, Schwagistis, Schwagtastic, Swag Godfather, sean o’driscoll, bill gates keynote, swag gun, DDD, Metallica, NxtGenUG, FEST07, MVP Emergency Telephone Number, swaggun, swag gun, Rex Westickle, Rocky Stonerider, Dirk Fastcruise, Adam Dangleboss
The chaps over in Wuppertal, Germany have pulled off another successful conference: NRW07. Like last year’s NRW06, this event was held in a venue that is used to seeing heavy metal and rock act performing – a far cry from the 22 speakers and 100 attendees craving for an IT community event! Also like last year, the weather was great. In the UK, we have pretty much missed the best of the summer weather, it was nice to have three days of sunshine, even if I was indoors for a lot of the time.
My current knowledge of the German language is limited to the very basics! I even bought a Fast Talk German book (more of a booklet actually) just so I could acquaint myself with some of the more popular phrases, including travel signs and basic restaurant menus. I didn’t “get by”, or even come close, but was lucky enough to share my time with attendees and speakers who were happy to chat using English. I really must try and make the time to progress to basic conversational.
Pre-Session
I sat in on Thomas Freudenberg’s session about Community Server 2007. Thomas is in favour of social networking and makes use of Facebook and Twitter.
Lunch was sponsored by Subway. There seemed to plenty “Subs” about, enough for three each.
After lunch, I set myself up at the back of the room that I was going to be presenting in. I sat through Roland Weigelt and Jens Schaller talking about Visual Studio anpassen und erweiter. This session ran over in the break and as such caused my session to start a little later than I had hoped. Unfortunately I was unable to recover the time from the delayed start, I had to overrun myself – thus I was “involved” in one of the cardinal sins of presenting: delaying attendees from getting their free beer. Fortunately, there was plenty of beer so the damage was nowhere near as bad as it could have been. In case you are wondering, the other such sin is overrunning in the session before lunch whereby you are keeping attendees from getting their food.
Post-Session
After my session, I sat in on Patrick Lauer’s session about Python (under Gentoo Linux). It was interesting and offered a unique approach to presentation delivery: lots and lots of very small demonstrations with audience discussion directing the course of the coding. Patrick was kind enough to share some tips with me. One of the tips was to use Twitter as part of the build process – the team then follow the Twitter feed as a means of monitoring the build. I though this was a rather neat and innovative solution.
Podcasting
I was lucky enough to grab podcasts with Mischa Huschen, Thomas Freudenberg, Frank Solinske, Michael Willers, Vinzenz Feenstra, Daniel Fisher and Stephan Oetzel. Most of the podcasts where recorded outside. Unlike the DDD5 podcasts where the rain could be heard in the background, Wuppertal enjoyed glorious sunshine. I’ll be producing the podcasts over the course of week, expect to see them appear real soon now!
Swag
There was a prize giving session that took place in a 30-minute slot after the final session of the day. Over the course of the day attendees put their business cards into a pot. If the business card was lucky enough to be selected at random, that person won a prize. A number of books, a few products and a router were given away! Bribing the attendees with the promise of a swag bag in return for a completed evaluation form worked well! Swag consisted of a lanyard, a mug and a T-shirt.
Quote of the day. Speakers were issued with a rather nice button down collar event shirt. It had the conference logo on the collar and the HP logo on the sleeve. I was busy practicing my session when somebody asked if I worked for HP…and then went on to ask why this was an HP event and I was working on a Dell laptop!
A Few Speaker Blogs
Lars Keller
Thomas Freudenberg
Mischa Huschen
Karim El Jed
Frank Solinski
Marcel Gnoth
Daniel Fisher
Stephan Oetzel
Michael Willers
Andreas Hoffmann
I have missed a few, please feel free to let me know and I’ll add them!
An aside
Things are so different in Europe. Travel for a start is much more efficient – trains do what they are meant to do – they just run, on time. But, having become used to the smoking ban in the UK, I must admit that I found it a “blast from the past” being amongst smokers – remember, in Scotland we had the ban in place before England, hence it being a blast from the past. Note to self: when sitting in the departure lounge at Dusseldorf airport, sit in the non-smoking section – two guys have just lit up….I am sitting just a few feet away from an open counter with food. C’est la vie I guess.
Related Posts
Oliver Sturm’s write up
My slides: Automating the Build Process Using FinalBuilder
Running NUnit Tests Using FinalBuilder
Thomas Freudenberg’s write-up of the event
Daniel’s write up
Post-event gaming
Video: NRW07 – let the games begin!
Technorati Tags: NRW07, Dussledorf, podcasts, Wuppertal, Mischa Huschen, Thomas Freudenberg, Frank Solinski, Michael Willers, Vincenz Feenstra, Daniel Fisher, Stephan Oetzel, Facebook, Twitter
Slides and demo notes from my session at NRW07 are available here.
In order to “buy some time”, I skipped a demo. Luckily, I blogged it here. I inherited a delayed start so had to try and recover!
–uploaded via the conference venue’s wireless connection, I will add some more text to this, or another post shortly.
Technorati Tags: NRW07, automated build, FinalBuilder, Community Events, justcommunity.de, justcommunity, lennybacon, daniel fisher
I’m starting to see huge benefits in the use of Twitter. If you doubt me, please try it: but do make sure you follow the right people, otherwise your first thought of “this is just noise” will put you off.
If you get the right people, the community spirit is just awesome. You get a real sense of belonging and an easy means of asking questions.
Equally, streamed or threaded Twitter could have massive benefits in the corporate world – where a company has its own Twitter server running internally for internal messaging only. Improved communication and awareness are the obvious benefits.
It puts e-mail, IM and SMS into a different category of communication…everything changes!
You can follow me if you wish: http://twitter.com/CAMURPHY
Technorati Tags: Twitter, community, community spirit
Date: Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Time: 4:30pm – 9:00pm
Location: BT Centre
Street: City of London, EC1A 7AJ
City/Town: London
Supported by BT and Policy Unplugged, with media partners including New Media Age (NMA), Intruders.TV, NMK, Blognation.com and tbites.com, The Great Facebook Debate promises to be a great event.
Sign up via the British Interactive Media Association (BIMA) web-site.
Want to avoid using Facebook? There are more details available here.
I’ll be there, with my podcasting kit!
Further References
Facebook Debate registration now open
Facebook Debate, 200 confirmed within 1 day
The Facebook debate
Technorati Tags: Facebook, BIMA, debate, BT, Policy Unplugged, New Media Age, NMA, Intruders.TV, NMK, Blognation.com, tbites.com
The Boyz from NxtGenUG are absolutely delighted to announce the opening of a brand new NxtGenUG region – this time in Cambridge. So now Developers from the flatlands of East Anglia can gather together to learn, chat, eat Pizza and get ‘swagged’ in the ‘NxtGenUG Way’ along with their counterparts in Birmingham, Coventry and Oxford. The region will be run by Chris Hay and Allister Frost who live and work in the area. Chris and Allister have put in a great deal of effort to get the region off of the ground including securing a fantastic venue, courtesy of non-other than Microsoft Research Cambridge!
The ‘Launch’ meeting will be held at Microsoft Research on Tuesday 18th September 2007 and will feature Mike Ormond from Microsoft DPE speaking on Silverlight Microsoft’s new Rich Web Application Development Platform. We’ll also have a speaker from Microsoft Research covering a the fascinating new F#, watch out for details! Finally Rich, Dave and John will be there to do something or other, probably involving ‘swag’ (tut). Anybody is welcome to attend the meeting whether they are a NxtGenUG member or not. Just go to the NxtGenUG site at http://www.nxtgenug.net, register for FREE and book your place!
As with other NxtGenUG regions details of events at Cambridge will be available at http://www.nxtgenug.net/EventList.aspx, and we know that Chris and Allister have a bunch of great sessions planned for Cambridge over the coming months.
Also check out the NxtGenUG site for Articles, ‘Radio Style’ Podcasts http://www.nxtgenug.net/Podcasts.aspx, Interviews, News Items, Competitions, details of membership and much more at http://www.nxtgenug.net
Technorati Tags: NxtGenUG, Cambridge, UK IT Community
Further to my earlier post, here’s a gentle reminder about Mix 07 UK
Registration is now open! Follow the MIX 07 blog here.
Help out the NxtGenUG boys by answering a few simple questions over here:
http://www.nxtgenug.net/Mix07UK/
Technorati Tags: MIX, MIX07, MIX 07, UK Community, Microsoft, NxtGenUG
I’ve just received notification of a Mobile BarCamp, more details can be found here.
Technorati Tags: Sarah Blow, barcamp, mobile, mobile barcamp, UK IT Community