October 17th and 18th this year, the VBUG conference 2007 takes place at Microsoft Campus in Thames Valley Park in Reading. Here’s the official info PDF about the conference. I’ll be speaking there about LINQ as well as WPF, and if you’re interested in Developer Express technology, this is the place to be because I’ll have a booth there and I’ll be ready to demonstrate all the products and answer all your questions. Looking forward to meeting you there!

I just got back yesterday from the Basta! conference in Germany. It was a great event, very busy for me but also lots of fun. My sessions all went very well and I had a great time talking to people at the Developer Express booth. Thanks to everybody who stopped by the booth or came to one of my sessions!

Here’s all the content from my sessions (if you attended Basta!, you should also receive a CD shortly with all the session slides and samples):

Power Workshop: .NET 3 - The Game Challenge (314896 bytes)

VB Day - Tipps und Tricks zum DataGridView (544838 bytes)

Dynamische Sprachen mit .NET (298443 bytes)

Bluffers’ Guide to C# 3.0 (318172 bytes)

10 coole Sachen, die man mit C# 3.0 machen kann (344387 bytes)

In case you haven’t heard about it before, the event takes place on May 23rd at Microsoft Thames Valley Park in Reading. Rafal Lukawiecki, who was voted best TechEd speaker for 7 years running, is the headline speaker. He does two sessions, and he’s joined by other interesting speakers like Lorna Brown from Microsoft Research, Mike Taulty and Daniel Moth from Microsoft’s development and platform group, and of course the NxtGenUG guys themselves, with John, Richard and Dave responsible for the keynote and the final gameshow and swag giveaway combination. I hesitate listing myself in the “other interesting speakers” category (must be a certain modesty creaping in <g>), but I am in fact speaking at the event myself, completing the lineup.

Developer Express is sponsoring the whole thing, so I’ll be there in professional capacity as well. I hope to see some of you there - feel free to stop by for a chat or a demo of something from DX!

Here’s the link again to the page about the event, where you can register. It’s free if you’re a NxtGenUG member, otherwise it costs £59.99. I’m sure it’ll be worth it either way, for a day of interesting sessions, plus food, swag and the chance to win an XBOX 360. This event is not funded by Microsoft, so obviously there’s some cost to cover. If you have any questions to the organizers, feel free to use this email: enquiries@nxtgenug.net

Finally: Another one of Zi Makki’s fantastic geek dinners is being organized for the evening before the event. Here’s the Wiki page to sign up. Looking forward to seeing you there as well!

Yesterday I did a session on Refactor! at the London .NET User Group, the same talk I submitted for DDD day 3.  Everything went well and I think people really liked the product. I’d like to thank the group for having me as a speaker, even though my presentation was mostly focused on a specific product. Ian asked me to definitely come back and do another talk sometime, so I guess it’s going to happen.

Were you there? Did you like it? Did you think it was horrible? Please feel free to leave comments!

I have recently published a few more XPO related posts on the new Developer Express community site. Previously I have sometimes posted XPO stuff on this blog, and these posts are now all eaten up by the DX site – so I thought I’d let you know if you’re watching this space and not the DX community site.

Here are the posts I wrote:

• Session Management and Caching
• My persistent classes are real classes – or not?
• Relations and custom collections
• Advanced queries
• XPO is good for distributed applications

I recommend watching at least the XPO related blog if you are interested in this, as I can’t promise I’ll always find the time to notify readers of this blog about posts in the other. The main page of the XPO blog is here, and there are links available for RSS and Atom aggregation.

This has been announced today: There’s a Developer Express site now for blogs written by people working for the company.

This is it: community.devexpress.com

I have published two posts there so far, related to the newest major release of XPO (6.1): “Session Management and Caching” and “My persistent classes are real classes – or not?”.

I have just published this: Transactions and Units of Work

The next version of XPO (eXpress Persistent Objects) from Developer Express has finally been released. A list of new features is here. I’m currently working on a number of technical articles that will soon start to appear in the list on this page – look out for that if you’re into XPO. And if you’re not (yet), be sure to download a demo of the complete suite including XPO from here.

Mark Miller demonstrates writing plugins for DXCore live in the latest episode of dnrTV. He sounds a bit hurried, but if you want to get into DXCore programming, this is definitely a Must View. And if you’re not yet convinced you want to get into DXCore programming, let me tell you of course you should. In either case, click here to view the show!

Well, if I’m wondering about that every now and then, I’m sure some of the more loyal readers of my blog must be wondering the same thing, given the sparse nature of blog updates in recent months. The answer is, since I’ve started working for Developer Express, I’ve been doing that many different things that it’s just hard to keep track of them, and I haven’t found myself with the free time needed to continually update my blog. But I see that this is a Bad Thing™ and I’ll try to do something about it.

So what have I done? Let’s see:

• I’ve worked on concepts, testing, samples and documentation of eXpressApp Framework, which was made available as a CTP on January 12th. Since then we’ve been getting great feedback from our subscribers (who have access to the CTP) and I’ve spent a lot of time investigating issues, exchanging posts with customers and coordinating things with our development teams. Obviously development has continued since we released the CTP version, so even more plans to be made…
• Since the beta of XPO 2 came out, I’ve spent a lot of time with customers testing this product, and also with internal discussions about the final feature set, some article writing, sample explaining, …. As with eXpressApp Framework, feedback has been great and we’ll be able to make the final product a lot better even than the beta was. Just recently I wrote a DXCore plugin to support XPO 2 in the final release… I hope that feature will actually make it. And no, I’m not telling what it is
  Obviously XPO 2 is an important base of eXpressApp Framework, so we need to be careful to coordinate things between these two projects.
• XtraCharts and the XtraLayout control have also been released into their beta phases and I’ve done some testing on these releases. Specifically XtraLayout is another important component in the Windows Forms part of eXpressApp Framework.
• I created a DXCore plugin that can store my Window/Tool Window configuration in VS and restore it later - very nice to work with multiple window configurations. For example, on my multi-monitor setup I typically use VS stretched over two of the three screens. But when I just want to edit some XML, I like to have the window on only one screen and get rid of most of the tool windows I normally use.
  I offered making this plugin available in the DXCore plugins newsgroup, but as I got only one reply to that post, I haven’t taken the time yet to actually do this. Drop me a mail if you want to vote for having this plugin available as a download
• I’m currently working on a DXCore plugin that will let me ink on my VS editor with my Tablet PC.

• I’m currently working on an article about DXCore for German dot.net magazin. Not sure when that will be published.
• DevWeek 2006 is here in London Feb 20-24. Looks like I’m going to be there - if you’re around, feel free to drop by the Developer Express booth for a chat.
• As far as I know, I’m going to do a talk about CodeRush and Refactor! at the March 14 meeting of The Developers Group in Hammersmith. Their official agenda for that day is not yet up, that’s why I’m saying "as far as I know" Should be interesting though - the talk will not be too long and it will provide an overview over functionality offered by these two great products.
• Several other things I can’t currently tell about

Carl Franklin’s show .NET Rocks! now has a TV show - and Developer Express is a sponsor of the first episode. Go watch it!

I’m not going to say too much about it, that would only be misinterpreted as advertising - read the public information yourself here.

I think this is going to be a fantastic product to create business applications (and probably others) with. Only if you’re not (yet?) a Developer Express .NET subscriber, you’re out of luck for now… 

I haven’t been posting anything in a while, sorry about that. The past two weeks I’ve been quite busy since I have started working for Developer Express as their new Director of Developer Relations. I’m having a lot of fun, but obviously there’s also a lot of new stuff to look at, so I haven’t had much time to think about blogging.