AltNet Beers October 28

AltNet Beers tomorrow night (October 28, 2009) is being hosted by Tequila London at their office at 82 Dean St in Soho. Nearest tube is Tottenham Court Road station which is on the Central and Northern lines.

Map with directions from the tube station: http://tinyurl.com/tequilalondon

To get there after StackOverflow DevDays your best route is to walk north from Kensington Town Hall to Notting Hill Gate station which is on the central line. From there travel east to Tottenham Court Road station.

Directions from Kensington Town Hall to Notting Hill Gate: http://tinyurl.com/ylrvekz

See you at Tequila!

Alt.Net Beers #7 was a good time

Thanks to everyone who attended Alt.Net Beers #7 and made it such a fun, interesting night. I hope everyone learned a whole heap about DDD – I know I did.

ALT.Net Beers Tonight at Tequila

A reminder that ALT.Net Beers is tonight at the bar in the Tequila London building.

Question/comment here or contact me or Seb on Twitter.

Beer and pizza will be supplied, cheap but not free I’m afraid. £2 beers though – better than a poke in the eye, no?

Seb’s post with more information about format and stuff.

London .Net User Group 28 January

The next London .Net User Group takes place 28 January from 6pm at the Tequila London office (map). I *think* I’m doing a grok talk.

DDD Scotland

This evening I head to Glasgow for Developer Day Scotland. Looking forward to it! Wondering if there’s a Twitter feed for it…

Developer day Scotland

Looking forward to Developer Day Scotland! Going to catch up with a few people I used to work with up there, before I fled to London with my tail between my legs.

mixed

I was intending to write regularly about how things were going at Mix. I was even intending to keep a regular presence on Twitter and interact with the community (also to find out where good clubs were). I now regret opting out of adding the extended battery to my Dell laptop package. My laptop could just barely last a single session, and given we had 15 minutes between talks to do what we needed to do, I prioritised smoking (it’s a networking opportunity!) above charging my laptop. So for the second and third days of the conference I left my laptop in my hotel room and stuck with pen and paper.

It was actually a great decision too. I met dozens of people, simply because I was free to just wonder around, note things down, slip through crowds and get where I wanted to be. I wasn’t ruled by my Device and it’s need for the Mains. It was like leaving the kids with a babysitter.  And I think took even better notes than I would have if I’d been typing.

On the whole I stuck with the Silverlight path during the conference – Building Rich Applications 1&2, User Controls, Data Applications etc etc. Also caught the Sharepoint talk on Friday (I was on company orders but it was actually pretty good), Silverlight & Analytics talk. I actually can’t remember what I attended last on friday, mainly because I was experiencing narcilepsy due to lack of sleep.

Right now I’m at the gate waiting to board my plane. I have a stack of cards from people who I need to contact, and notes to disseminate and blog about. I haven’t really had space in my head for the ‘business’ side of things so I need to get home and unwind before I can start making use of the information I’ve absorbed.

Needless to say I’ve had a friggin amazing time. I even saw Scott Guthrie walk past me at one stage and asked Steve Ballmer a question at the keynote. Pretty awesome.

More when I get back.

MIX Day 1

Absolutely fantastic day. There are loads of bloggers who are quicker and better than me, so I’ll leave  it to them. Highlights of today were the two Silverlight 2 sessions, particularly Mike Harsh’s talk, where he demonstrated DeepZoom. Wicked.

Here’s one post about today’s keynote. I need to shower and get down to Tao for the party!

I got ID

So I rocked up to the Venetian today at about 3.45 to register for MIX. There weren’t many there so I breezed through and had my tag and goodie bag by 4.15. Nice! So then it was on to the Pit…

When entering the Pit, immediately to your left is one of the biggest deals for Microsoft this year – Microsoft Surface. We were given a demonstration of the various sample applications we’ve seen before, as well as the opprtunity to try the surface out. It’s works essentially as advertised – multi-touch and very intuitive. I wasn’t massively impressed by the response times; even in the simple Paint application, you didn’t have to move your finger very quickly before the brush would lag behind. I suppose it’s having to do a lot of calculating behind the scenes (it’s running on top of Vista for god’s sake), but it definitely detracts from the illusion that you’re manipulating virtually-tactile screen objects. Sometimes it just plain can’t keep up and misses subtle actions. And when I go back and look at Jeff Han‘s multi-touch display demonstration at TED 2006, I just hope the market doesn’t get flooded with Microsoft’s offering before he can get a foothold. His one is just sexier, isn’t it?

Also at the Pit are various labs, for Silverlight, Windows Live and ASP.Net AJAX. The Silverlight labs are Silverlight 1.0 unfortunately, but one of the helpers assured me that after tomorrow’s keynotes there will be Silverlight 2.0 labs available. Totally looking forward to it.

I had a quick lookie at the Rock Band stage, just in time to see three slightly confused guys ‘playing’ (inputting?) Weezer’s Say It Aint So. I haven’t played Rock Band or even Guitar Hero, and I have no intention to, ever. But it’s a pretty good game for spectators, I have to say.

In the goodie bag was a MIX t-shirt (I underestimated my shirt size…), program guides, trial versions of electric rain’s StandOut, ZAM32 and swift.3D software, Telerik RadControls for Silverlight, an Infragistics Resource DVD and a DVD of Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition, which I’m installing right now. Nice.

Also had the pleasure of meeting Karl Shifflett and Chris Love, at Denny’s no less. Total coincidence – I sit down and order, and next to me are these two guys discussing their blogs and the .Net community; Chris was wearing a Silverlight t-shirt. I took a stab: “Uh, excuse me… are you guys here for the MIX conference by any chance?” Naturally they looked at me as if I was an idiot (or a lunatic!), and said yes. Had a nice chat with them and Karl mentioned he’ll be coming over for DDD in Glasgow in May. Really nice to meet you both – hopefully I’ll see you again over the next few days. Probably at the BlogZone?

Looking forward to tomorrow!

MIX08 Schedule

In retaliation to the abysmal MIX Schedule Planner implementation, the very helpful Long Zheng has put together an Excel spreadsheet detailing the MIX 08 schedule. Props to Long for doing it as it must have taken him a few hours.

I’ve created a public Google Calendar version also which I hope comes in handy for some people.