The first European DevExpress training I announced recently was booked out so fast, it was almost unbelievable… so we set up a few more! We’re going to be in London, Frankfurt, Zurich and Paris early next year. Find the announcements here, or go directly to the detail page with the option to sign up.

If the first class is any indication, seats may go quickly. There’s also an early-bird offer until November 26th, so better not leave it too long!

I was tempted to call it a roundtrip like before, but that’s not really what it is on the map. Starting on September 17th, I’ll be on my way to several events in the Netherlands, Germany and Austria.

As usual, I’m looking forward to meeting lots of people – if you’re in the vicinity of any of my stops and want to meet up, let me know and I’ll see what I can do! Of course there’ll also be the odd DevExpress license given out as well, so come and join me!

On the 17th I’ll travel to Amsterdam and speak at dotNed, the “.NET gebruikersgroep Nederland” (I hope that means something like .NET user group, otherwise I’m in trouble…) about functional C# programming. This event is also sponsored by INETA Europe, so here’s a thank-you to those guys!

I’m spending part of the weekend with a friend of mine somewhere in Germany, and then I travel on to Mainz for the BASTA! conference. As usual this is going to be a brilliant show. I organized the C# days for the conference once more and there’s lots of interesting content, great speakers, cool night-time events (including my own “who wants to be a millionaire” game show) as well as crazy night-time events (see “Bastoberfest"), and of course, last but certainly not least, lots of German beer :-).

I’ll be speaking at BASTA! about F# and several times about C#. For DevExpress we’ll have a booth there, and I’m bringing Rachel as well as Gary with me. A great opportunity to meet us there, ask questions, see new features in our products, carry away the swag, … you name it.

The next leg of my trip takes me to Graz in Austria. I’ve been there once before, for a guest lecture at Campus 02, and that’s what I’m returning for. F# it is once more – it’s the weekend again, but who cares! :-) I’m sure it’ll be great, it certainly was last time.

Back to Frankfurt on the Sunday, and the final event in Bad Ems (at Häcker’s hotel – pronounced “hacker’s” – if you can believe it!). My friend John Martin has recently started his own company Professional Developer Training and he’s set up this training event with Michele Leroux Bustamante. They call it a Microsoft Technology Roadmap and Michele is going to talk about everything that makes the current MS based development world hard to understand.

I’ll be joining everybody at that event (they call me a special guest, heh) and I’ll probably find a gap in the proceedings to do something myself – either some technical thing or some DevExpress thing, we’ll see – and once more I think I’ll have some DX goodies for everybody…

Wow, that’s it. I’m going home after that and I’ll see if I still recognize my wife and my dogs.

See you somewhere around Europe! :-)

If you're a developer, you know the feeling - and if you're not, I'm sure you can imagine it: you have just written the most amazing little piece of code, and nobody is there to kiss your feet, praise some deity for your existence and generally worship you in the way you deserve.

I set out to solve this problem by creating a DXCore plugin for Visual Studio. DXCore is a fantastic product to help you bring round Visual Studio to your point of view, in this case by making it a substitute worshipper of your computer programming intellect. With this plugin installed, every time you build a project successfully, Visual Studio will sing your praise, perhaps like this:

Or maybe like this:

Now, while I was working on bending Visual Studio to my will, I found I had to make certain concessions. So I gave VS the right to swear at me when I get something wrong - that way everybody is happy! So when your build fails, VS might show you one of these messages:

Great, isn't it? Instant gratification! Ah, okay, the odd swear word as well, but then you're not supposed to make mistakes after all.

If you want this, here's what you do:

• If you don't have DXCore yet, download it here and install it: http://www.devexpress.com/dxcore (oh yeah - it's free!)
• Download the plugin here: OS_CompilationResult-1.0.0.0.dll
• Drop the plugin dll into this folder (adjust if your installation path is different): C:\Program Files\Developer Express Inc\DXCore for Visual Studio .NET\2.0\Bin\Plugins
• Restart Visual Studio
• If you want to configure the lists of things the plugin says (or you even want to switch it off - what made me say that?), go to the Options dialog (DevExpress menu, Options) and find the page Hinting/Compilation Result

If you have other great ideas what the plugin should do or say, let me know!

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)