Developer Developer Developer, the free day-long conference for developers, by developers is back for a third time on Saturday 3 June.  The call for speakers is open.  If you've got a topic that you'd love to share with other developers in the community, please submit a session.

Attendee registration will open later, but you can always view some of the videos from DDD II last October.

I did a presentation on Indigo to the VBUG London group last night.  The turn out was pretty good, although it was obvious that many English football fans were missing (though they probably would have enjoyed the User Group more than the humiliating defeat).

Off the top of my head, here are the things that keep standing out for me about Indigo:

• The power of separating choices about the binding from the code that a developer writes.  Being able to switch from the tcp with a binary encoding, to reliable messaging over HTTP, to MSMQ just by changing the configuration file is great.
• The simplicity of the programming model.  The majority of the functionality that required Enterprise Services, such as Instancing and Sessions, are available using attributes on either an interface/class or a method such as ServiceBehavior or OperationBehavior.
• The fact that the details of the protocols are hidden under the covers.  Instead of focussing on the WS-* protocols, the focus is on the functionality required.  This has taken me a while to get my head around after having used WSE, which is powerful, but involved having to understand a lot of the details of the underlying protocols.

I'm looking forwad to some of the Level 400 sessions at the PDC, such as Kenny Woolf's presentation on Channels.

As Mehran noticed, I couldn't help but show off the Refactor! tool that's shipping for free in Visual Basic 2005.  This was in response to an attendee who believed that Visual Studio was 'a multi-megabyte bloated version of notepad'. 

Mike Taulty has a sign-up page for UK PDC Attendee Bingo.  I'm going to be at PDC and it would be great to catch up with others, especially those from the UK.  There's already a very interesting bunch of people heading over from the UK whom I look forward to catching up with.

Save the date - Saturday 22nd October 2005 is the next DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper day!.  We're planning another free community-driven day of talks on developer-related topics.  Craig Murphy has more details.  Jonathan Hodgson has updated the event website (including a countdown ... 84 days to go!).  There's a form you can fill in if you'd like to present a session.

For now, feel free to join in the discussion on the Channel 9 site.

It's been a long time since I last posted.  I've been busy with a mix of presentations, work and life, such as:

• Helping Kalido ship version 8 release 2 of their two core products, the Kalido Dynamic Information Warehouse and the Kalido Master Data Manager. 
• Speaking at the Microsoft UK Architect Council and Architect Forum about Services on the Microsoft Platform today.  You can find the slides on the Connected Systems Architect forum page.
• Presenting to the London .NET User Group on Programming Indigo.
• Facilitating a 'park bench panel' on Smart Client vs Web Development at the Microsoft UK MSDN Roadshow in London.
• Doing plenty of behind-the-scenes or out-in-the-community work with local User Groups.

Some technical topics that have been taking my time:

• We set up CruiseControl.NET in my team at Kalido.  This just rocks.  It monitors source safe for checkins, checks the code out, runs a Nant script (these are great: you can compile the code using a solution file (instead of hassling with the vbc.exe or csc.exe directly) to build the code, then it runs our NUnit tests as well as providing coverage reporting with NCover and even duplicate code checking using Simian.  It all comes together with a tray icon that monitors what's happening on our build server and lets the whole team know if a build fails.  Tracking down the reason for failure is easy since there's a central web page that pulls together the log file from all of the tools (including comments from the source safe checkin box - finally, an easy way to see these comments!).  It's so exciting I'm rambling even while blogging about it.  The key point for me was that it only took one developer a couple of days to set up, even with no previous experience of any of these tools.
• Schema design.  I'm working on a new WSDL interface and have been playing around with various strategies to build the interface most efficiently and effectively.  More on that in future posts.
• Consolas.  Like Scott Hanselman, I love this font.  I've embarrassed myself my gushing about this to colleagues who are less aesthetically inclined than I am.  It's a mono spaced font, which is part of the Longhorn font set, especially designed for reading code on screen.  I've also set it up as the Windows Console Font as well.

I've also been enjoying time with my daughter who's now walking, starting to 'talk' and generally just getting into trouble (I spent last Saturday morning in the accident and emergency section of the local hospital after a walking accident.  The doctor said 'ah, we always see a lot of head injuries from kids who've just learnt to walk').

Around 160 delegates turned out on a sunny warm English Saturday to attend the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper day.  Judging by the comments on Channel 9 (great to see so many UK people using that site) it seems to have been a great success.  It was great to catch up with so many different people, such as Santosh Benjamin, Phil Winstanley, Ian Cooper, Mike Taulty, Jonathan Hodgson and many other blogless, but nevertheless interesting people.  Simon Harriyott moblogged the event and was kind enough to give me a lift back into Reading.  He also continued his analysis of Australian accents in IT ("data down under").

Although I enjoyed giving my talk 'Web Services in .NET 2.0: Solving Today's Problems' I made a fundamental mistake of staying up too late the night before the talk.  Filled with the pleasure of finally having Visual Studio 2005 installed on my laptop (Jon Rowett caught the bug as well), I got carried away crafting a flashy demo with streaming JPEG images (using IXmlSerializable) and databinding to the results of the webservice calls.  As a result I was 'dog tired' as Ian Smith noticed and didn't present as well as I would have liked.  Dave Oliver wasn't so sure of the value of using IXmlSerializable to stream a large file over web services.  Lesson learnt.  Next time I'll get a good night's sleep and focus on small, easy to understand demonstrations.

The highlight of the sessions for me was seeing Brian Long go through .NET debugging capabilities.  He obviously had a command of the topic, managed to demo the command line debuggers for an hour without a single typo and had a great dry sense of humour.  He's done a lot of talks with the Developers Group here in the UK, which came out of the Borland Developers Group.  I love the fact that the .NET community has benefited from so many people with Delphi experience. 

To finish, Jon Rowett has a good write-up of the day as does Dave Oliver and Richard says "All in all, a very worthwhile way to spend a Saturday - the kind of training day that usually would cost the best part of £1000 per participant. Something I’d definitely do again if the opportunity arose."

Thanks again to Craig Murphy for taking the lead in organising the event and Jonathan Hodgson for doing the website.

If you like a free day of training on Microsoft technologies presented directly by developers with experience using technologies then sign up for the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper day that's being held on Saturday 14 May at Microsoft's Thames Valley Park campus.  Don't wait to sign up - we're 75% full already and based on similar events in the US we're likely to sell out completely.  Microsoft have graciously provided the venue and are handling the registration and logistics, but all of the speakers are independent community developers! The www.developerday.co.uk site has a full overview of the event, the agenda and sessions and the speakers involved.

There are three different tracks with 6 presentations in each.  Here are a sample of some the talks from developers I know that I'm looking forward to:

• Alex Homer and Dave Sussman will be talking on SQL 2005 and another secret topic
• Ian Cooper, who runs the London .NET User Group, on Patterns of Data Access in .NET (here are my notes from a previous version of this talk I heard)
• Phil Winstanley, ASP.NET MVP, will be talking about preparing for ASP.NET 2.0
• Craig Murphy, Jedi Scrum Master and XML Web Services MVP, on Managing Iterative Development with Scrum
• I'll be covering What's new with Web Services in .NET 2.0.

I'm also looking forward to hearing about custom attributes in .NET, refactoring, test driven development, debugging tips and writing custom FxCop rules.

As well as the presentations it's also a great chance to network with other .NET developers.  For instance, I know that Jamie Cansdale is likely to be there, so if you've got any questions/comments for him on his fantastic TestDriven.NET addin there's an opportunity.

A big thanks to Mike Ormond and his team (Mike Pelton who first posted about the event) for providing the venue and logistics support.

As Christian Nagel notes the INETA Europe - UK and Ireland web page launched today, including the new INETA UK and Ireland Regional Speaker Bureau.  The Regional Speaker Bureau is a collection of technology experts and highly-rated speakers who are now available to present at regional User Group events.   If you’re in the UK or Ireland and would like to hear any of these people speak at your User Group then tell your User Group co-ordinator to contact me or let me know directly (benjaminm at benjaminm.net).

INETA already has a European Speakers Bureau, but to highlight the local talent and encourage more events we’ve established the INETA UK and Ireland Regional Speakers Bureau.  This group includes:

• Peter Blackburn – SQL Server MVP co-author of Hitchhiker's Guide to SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services, currently receiving a 5-star review on amazon.com
• Jonathan Greensted – ASP.NET MVP
• Ian Griffiths – C# MVP, Technical Author and an expert on Avalon
• Rob McDonald – Technical Author, internal trainer to Microsoft and founder of co-founder of DevTrain and highly-rated conference speaker.
• Benjamin Mitchell – Regional Director
• Graham Parker – VB.NET MVP and retiring chairman of VBUG

These speakers are on top of the three existing UK members of the INETA European Speaker Bureau:

• Alex Homer – ASP.NET MVP, Technical Author, Conference Presenter
• Richard Grimes – Visual C++ MVP, Technical Author, Conference Presenter
• David Sussman – ASP.NET MVP, Technical Author, Conference Presenter

This work is part of my role as the INETA User Group Liaison for the UK and Ireland which I’ve been doing since late last year.  My aim is to further improve the .NET Community in this corner of the world by ensuring the regional User Groups get access to great speakers for their meetings.  If you know of a great speaker who’s not on the list (we’re currently looking for MVPs, MCTs, Technical Authors or anyone with a proven track-record of great presentations), or you are interested in speaking at User Group events yourself, let me know.

For anyone who wants to take the pulse of the UK .NET bloggers, James Crowley who runs the Developer Fusion site, has put together a page of aggregated UK Developer blogs, with an RSS feed as well.

Ian Cooper gave a presentation last night's London .NET User Group on Data Mapping Patterns in .NET.  He explained many of the patterns from Martin Fowler's book Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.  He started with the basic Transaction Script pattern through to the Table Model and finally the Domain Model.  Along the way he demoed the Data Access Application Block (which to my surprise, only half the audience admitted knowing about).

I enjoyed seeing many of these patterns shown in action using nHibernate.  I haven't looked at the ORM frameworks for a while and was pleased to see how far things have developed.  Ian recommended the book 'Hibernate in Aciton' by Christian Bauer and Gavin King as a good introduction.  You can read a sample chapter and a book review on theserverside.com.

Ian's main point was that you should look to use nHibernate or another existing ORM tool rather than writing your own (avoid the ORM Vietnam issue that Ted Neward mentions), but to be careful not to see ORM tools as a hammer that makes all problems look nails.

Graham Parker, the retiring VBUG Chairman, was on before Ian talking about Java and .NET Interoperability.  I missed the start of the session but there was lot of good discussion from the attendees.  A large number of people  were aware of the Mono project and it's recent developments such as support for ASP.NET, Windows.Forms and ADO.NET.  There was also discussion about how Source Forge Source Gear are using Mono for their Vault commercial product.

Max Kington chipped in from the floor with a number of good insights based on his experience with Java.  I had a good chat with him afterwards on a range of topics from grid computing, web services to his claim that '2005 is the year of the domain specific language'.

All up another good LDNUG event.  Ingo Rammer is going to speak at the next event on Wednesday 23 February!

The VBUG UK 10^th Anniversary Conference is on next week.  Apparently there are still seats left – you can sign up here. Here are some reasons to attend:

While I'm at it, I'd like to point out that VBUG do a great job of running support meetings across the UK.  They also maintain a up-to-date list of user group events across the UK.

If you'd like to understand more about how to do messaging in WSE and would like to see the  three levels of messaging within WSE in action then why not register for my first MSDN webcast here?.  I'm going to be presenting it on Mon 9 Aug at 1PM EST (GMT -8). 

I'll be covering some of the demos from the Keith Ballinger presentation from TechEd San Diego that I presented in Amsterdam, along with some new material.  Here's the abstract:

Using messaging systems to support application functionality allows technical solutions to better match business problems.  WSE 2.0 provides messaging implementations that range from low-level explicit messaging through to high-level, more transparent models.  This webcast demonstrates various messaging levels within WSE including a custom WS-Eventing sample and how message, network addresses, intermediaries and queues need to become first-class citizens of your application. Learn how messaging can enable you to create powerful web services applications that cross machine and network boundaries.

I've put these details on my updated presentations page as well.

Here are some photos and conference highlights from TechEd Amsterdam (completing my backlog of blog posts).  Aside from what I've blogged already, the highlights of the conference for me were:

• Being there when Don Box spoke for the first time about BOA.  See here for a summary of BOA postings. [update: The concept of Business Oriented Agents (BOA) was a joke designed to send up the hype about the 'next new thing' and the lack of clarity in press reporting about concepts such as SOA.  Unfortunately the joke was not clearly understood and some people are understandably upset about it.  This post was my only reference to it and I apologise if any readers felt mislead.]
• Hanging out with the other Indigo guys and others who I'd met at PDC and TechEd US.
• Meeting many people from the UK community at the BoF and Chalk and Talk sessions.  Thanks to everyone that came along and those who had the courage to spend some time on the park bench answering questions and making statements.
• Increasing my list of UK Microsoft bloggers - welcome Johnny Hall (XP afficionado) and Peter Foot (Compact Framework MVP)

Here are some photos from TechEd Amsterdam, completing my backlog of posts.

Some of the 6,000 drums at the start of the keynote.	Delegates enjoying the 3D presentation that finished the keynote.
Pat Helland trying out his Wizard costume in the speaker lounge.	Heidi, one of the amazing organising team, showing a way to deal with the size of the RAI conference centre.
A "family photo" of all of the Microsoft Regional Directors at the Staff and Speaker Dinner on Friday.	The Boom Chicago Team making fun of the competition for Best Speaker evals between Kimberly L Tripp, Rafal Lukawiecki and Steve Riley

I'll be on .NET Rocks! tonight talking about WSE 2.0 and building web services with Microsoft technology today.  I'll be joined by fellow Regional Director and Commonwealth Citizen, John Bristowe.  If you can't listen live, it should be available streaming on Monday.

Update: As Carl has mentioned, the streaming/download version of the show has been posted.

Mehran Nikoo mentions the new Thames Valley User Group - looks interesting:

If you live/work near Thames Valley Park then this is for you.

The kick-off meeting is at Microsoft Campus on June 21st. Scott Guthrie (co-founder of ASP.net) and Mike Ormond (Microsoft DPE team) are among the speakers.

I attended the UK launch of BizTalk 2004 today.  Nearly everyone else there was in suit and tie, highlighting that BizTalk is a business focused product.  I like BizTalk and the 2004 product is a great improvement on previous versions (Darrel Norton has a great list of BizTalk resources).  Messaging and integration are two areas where I think IT can add a lot of business value.  BizTalk is making technology that had previously been very expensive available to greater number of customers and developers.  As Cameron Reilly notes, one CIO he knows says he could buy BizTalk 'out of the stationery budget'.

There were some interesting customer presentations including how Virgin Megastore were using BizTalk to spot employee theft by analyzing real time point of sale information (case study here).  Loss Prevention Agents (I'm thinking Agent Smith from The Matrix) are notified on their mobile devices as business rules are triggered. 

My favourite customer moment was the CTO Scottish and Southern Energy who revealed their unofficial mission statement was "boring but successful".  Brilliant.

Mehran was there with his assortment of Microsoft OS gadgets and even gave me a ride back to London in his very nice new BMW with Windows Automotive.   This is serious geek gadgetry.  There's 'Toy Boys' like Carl Franklin sings about and there's guys like Mehran who go out and buy the car.

I've been blog-lite while I prepared and then gave my Indigo presentation to the London .NET User Group.  The audience seemed to enjoy it and I had a good time presenting it.  Some quick points:

• The selling point of the Indigo Service model is that it is simple and easy to use.  The benefits for developers is that they get all the benefits of enterprise-quality features such as transactions, reliable messaging and security without having to write any code.  Letting Microsoft do the plumbing allows developers more time to write code that focuses on solving complex and interesting business problems.
• I took on board Clemens' experience and started talking about the 'why' of distributed technologies before delving into how Indigo works.  Luckily this group was very switched on.  I got some good questions about the performance of Indigo across AppDomains/Processes/Machines.
• Someone asked me to provide some background on why Enterprise Services are a better choice than Remoting for communicating between components on the local machine.  Clemens' has some more information on it here and here. 

Doing a presentation where you don't have the current version of the software to demo is a challenge (the PDC Indigo bits are from an older, M4 build, which has been substantially refactored in the now-being-coded M5 build, so there's not a lot of value in showing demos with the PDC bit).  In order to get some code samples I had to transcribe screen shots from the PDC videos (difficult since Steve Swartz didn't use word-wrap in Visual Studio).  I'm filled with (even more) respect for Don Box and Steve Swartz's presentation skills after realizing they managed to do four Indigo presentations at the PDC without even compiling, let alone running any of the applications.

Given the PowerPoint dependence and Clemens' reports on the complexity of the topic I decide I'd have to resort to audience bribery.  I drew on my experience in TheatreSports and brought several bags of Minties from the Australia Shop at Covent Garden (to my horror I discovered today that they are made in New Zealand!) and threw them to the audience whenever I detected the signs of PowerPoint-induced lethargy.

Pair programming with Jamie Cansdale at ThoughtWork's London Geek Night last Wednesday highlighted how much I like this practice.  Geek Night is basically an open night for developers who want to work on projects (ranging from open source development, to personal hobby projects or just for those who want to experience pair programming).  Jamie and I were working on creating a Visual Studio Add-In to remove unused 'using statements' in C# files (essentially, to replicate the 'Imports Tidy' functionality provided by C# Refactory that Scott Hanselman says is almost worth the price of the add-in alone).

Here were the things I enjoyed about Pair Programming:

• Knowledge sharing.  The knowledge transfer ranges from ways of using Visual Studio ("what did you press to get that?") to how to structure unit tests ("would you split that into a second method?") and features of the object model ("how can I find the assembly that defines this type?").  Even in a short session there's a great amount of knowledge that can be transferred.
• Continuous development speed. When sharing the 'driving' seat it means that it's possible to keep developing at a constant rate.  When I develop on my own sometimes I find it hard to keep going once I've achieved a certain milestone.  In Pair Programming it's possible to sit back for a while and let the other person drive.
• It makes you braver. Pair programming provides courage to start having a go even at complex problems.  It's easier to get started attacking a problem using two heads at the same time.

We started out by discussing how to implement the functionality.  Jamie was arguing for a brute-force but fool-proof mechanism of using a regular expression to search through the code, comment out any using statement that it finds and dynamically compile the code to see if it generates an error.  I was itching to write my own stripped-down C# parse that could scan through the source code and understand the using statements (including the alias keyword and nested statements).  To settle the stale-mate by switching our focus from the implementation to the functionality.  We decided to write the tests first (yes, XP is a simple set of practices but it's easy to get off track).

The beauty of writing the tests first was that the tests were independent of the implementation.  After writing a couple of tests it became clear that Jamie's approach was likely to be 'the simplest thing that worked' in the two hours that we had.  The best part was that we were able to achieve a working implementation inside this time!

I'm still eyeing off the SharpDevelop open-source C# editor, which as C# parsing code which I'm tempted to use (or maybe it's time to get into Mono), but for now I'm sold on the value of pair programming and test first development.

When's ASP.NET Whidbey going to be available?
The aim is to ship a Beta in June and for RTM in Q1 2005.   There will be a 'go live license' that will let people put Beta 2 into production, later this year.  The Beta in June will be a public beta and it will be possible to download ASP.NET and Visual Studio Whidbey.  The build that Scott demonstrated with was from last Monday when he said they achieved 'Code Complete.  So they are now in that long stabilisation phase. 

Cooler applications in less time (even for enterprise applications!)
The key message is that ASP.NET allows you to create cooler applications in a fraction of the time it takes today. This sounds very 'marketese', but based on what I saw demoed it's very true. The hardest thing is that there have been plenty of demos like this before - from FrontPage and Visual InterDev. It used to be the case that you'd walk away saying 'good demo, but it will never work on a serious enterprise site'. But this time they've got the architecture right. Databinding to plain objects makes it possible to do proper 3-tier development. The Provider model means that there are interfaces at nearly every level that you can implement or override (apparently they'll ship the source code to the existing providers to make this easier).

It will be interesting to see how ASP.NET 2.0 works in real world situations.  Many of the features demonstrated like the login and authorisation and the paging and sorting of data are things that I've developed in the past so I know that they can literally take weeks to develop.  Now they are simple drop-and-drag and configure scenarios.  Also, since many of these ideas, like the data grid are now on their third or fourth iteration (I remember Visual InterDev 6.0 and it's 1.0 style implementation - urgh!) they have had time to develop to the point where they (look like) they are really going to work in the wild.

What a demo!
Out of the box Scott built a site with full security (login control, password reset and email page), customisable content using Web Parts, master-detail data pages (with paging and sorting enabled with simple checkboxes) using data binding in both 2 tier (direct to the db) or 3 tier scenarios (just plain public methods returning IEnumerable - no need for an interface or attributes!), easy internationalisation, support for navigation files (including treeviews and bread crumb trails) and Master Pages with Skins for easy site-wide look and feel manipulation. It truly does raise the bar about what will be expected as minimum website functionality in future.

The Full Notes
To save clogging up the aggregators and my front page, I've put my 3,500 word 'summary' of the slides and presentations here.

In summary I'd say that Scott is a great presenter.  He did a morning session on the basics, then the session I attended.  He spoke from 2pm to past 5pm and hung around until we were thrown out of the building to ensure that everyone's questions were answered.  It's obvious that he's pumped about the product and the platform that he's been instrumental in creating for developing web applications.

Feedster does a great job of turning an OPML file at a URL into a custom RSS feed.  I found this tip on Frank Arrigo's list of Australian .NET Bloggers (yes, I still monitor the Old Country).  If you have an OPML file visible at a URL it's possible to use Feedster to search them and then consume the results as an RSS feed.  Very cool.

Being able to consume a number of blogs in one feed certainly makes it easier to track a number of blogs in a news aggregator.

Here's the =2004}&sort=date&ie=UTF-8&limit=30&inopml=http://www.sneath.org/tim/ukbloggers.opml&type=rss">RSS feed for UK .NET bloggers and here's the =2004}&sort=date&ie=UTF-8&limit=30&inopml=http://radio.weblogs.com/0124955/gems/aus-dotnet.opml&type=rss">RSS feed for Australian .NET Bloggers.

Tim Sneath is maintaining a list of UK .NET Bloggers.  Hopefully we'll achieve his aim of having another Bloggers' Dinner after the success of last week's efforts.

Update:  Using the power of Feedster, you can track this list with an =2004}&sort=date&ie=UTF-8&limit=30&inopml=http://www.sneath.org/tim/ukbloggers.opml&type=rss">RSS feed for UK .NET bloggers.