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.

 

On my recent trip to the US I picked up an iPod Shuffle.  Overall I'm lovin' it for a number of reasons:

• I like the price (US$99).  I went to the Apple Store in Bellevue and was impressed that they seemed to have an iPod at US$50 intervals between the Shuffle and the 60GB iPod Photo at US$450.
• I like the size.  I get a lot of grief from my wife for having too many things in my pockets so it's nice that the Shuffle is nice and small.
• I like the image.  I feel 'cool' to be wearing the distinctive white/grey headphones.  I agree with Peter Provost that there are much better headphones available and I'll probably go with Omar Shahine's recommendation of the Etymotic ER6's.
• I like having music around all the time. 

There are still some things that I'm finding hard to adjust to:

• The whole random shuffle business.  Deep down I'd be happy with an "iPod Linear".  I know that it can be used in a linear fashion but it really annoys me that I can't (or haven't worked out how) change the order that they play in (basically first track copied is the first played).  I'd like to be able to re-arrange the tracks using the iTunes software (please leave a comment if I'm missing something)
• This sinister dialogue box that comes up when I charge the iPod on my laptop while I'm logged onto my client's domain (rather than local computer account).  While it masquerades as a helpful dialogue box it is basically evil, offering to delete all of the music on my iPod with an accidental click of the Yes button.  This is a terrible design.  At worst they should have enabled a 'don't show this again' checkbox.

I've just landed back in the UK after a three-week round the world holiday to Australia and back via Redmond for the Indigo Software Design Review (SDR) last week.  The SDR gave me a chance to play with a slightly updated Indigo build than the publicly available Indigo Community Technical Preview.  I was going to list the highlights of my week but then I saw that Omri Gazitts, from the Indigo Team, posted a list of his favourite Indigo features that maps pretty closely to what I was going to mention.  My key take-away was that the team have done a great job designing Indigo so that it is feature-rich and easy to use with good extensibility points throughout the system.

While I've been away Mike Taulty (Layers of Indigo, IInputChannel and IRequestChannel, Channel encoding and filtering messages) and William Tay (Message Tracing, Logging and Activity Management and the details of the default Indigo bindings) have both been doing some excellent job of kicking the Indigo tyres and exploring the CTP builds.

I'll write more when I get a fresh VPC image installed with the CTP bits.

Kirk Allen Evans has put up a set of Visual Studio .NET Item Templates that make it easier to create WSE SoapClient or SoapReceiver classes including removing the grunt work of adding a reference to the Web Services Enhancements 2.0 library.   John Bristowe gives some background on SoapClient and SoapReciever.  This layer of the WSE programming model provides more direct access to sending and recieiving messages (rather than hiding those details behind method calls).  Thinking more explicitly about sending and receiving messages, and the kind of message exchange patterns that can be used, is a useful exercise that will pay off when moving to Indigo.