My blog has moved

Hi,

My blog has moved to blogs.msdn.com/psiman

you can email me at simon dot middlemiss at microsoft dot com

Cheers

Simon

DDD 5 : Call For Speakers

Developer developer developer is a community driven “un-conference” that is hosted at the Microsoft Campus in Reading.  It’s an informal opportunity for developers to learn, share & interact with each other in a relaxed environment. 

Whilst Microsoft UK provide the venue, logistical support and also lay on lunch, there is a guarantee that no Microsoft speakers will be presenting.  This leaves the door open for the UK .NET community to choose what they want to hear and who they want to hear it from.  Head on over to the Developer Day website and check out the currently proposed sessions and if you don’t like the sound of those why not submit your own proposal?

The last two events, DDD4 & WebDD, were so good that it will be very hard to better them. I’d love to be proved wrong and given the amount of effort the organisers put in I won’t be surprised if I am!

If you’ve never been before and you want to know a little about them there are recorded sessions, copious amounts of feedback and lots of reviews on the web.  You can check out my thoughts on the last 2 events here and here.

One more thing, there is a tradition that after an event of this type, those that want to, head out into Reading town center for a ‘geek dinner’.  They are great opportunity to meet more of your peers as well as talk to the organisers and some of the Microsoft staff that help out on the day.

It really is a worthwhile and enjoyable day so make sure you keep Saturday, June 30th free!

As a final note I always point people to this which explains what it’s all about in a language we all (hopefully) understand.

Expression of Feedback

Soma Segar announced earlier today that the Web and Blend tools from the Microsoft Expression Suite are going to be included in the Premium MSDN subscription content.

This is a bit of a coup for the .NET community who expressed considerable feedback on the subject.  I personally know a lot people will be very happy at the decision.

It’s yet another example of Microsoft listening to community voices with regard to toolsets.  A similar decision was made around Team Foundation Server early last year following customer feedback which resulted in the Workgroup Edition of the software lifecycle tool being included in MSDN subscriptions.

À bientôt

I mentioned in a recent post that I was going to take a break from blogging for a few weeks and that I’d explain why later.  Well later has arrived.

As of Monday 26th March 2007 I became and FTE (full time employee) at Microsoft UK.  I am working as part of Microsoft Consulting Services as a consultant; hopefully on lots of cool WPF projects.  I had refrained from blogging about it thus far so I could get the lay of the land regarding Microsoft’s policies on the subject.  Having done so I am now officially back!

The content shouldn’t change, but unfortunately the location will.  I’ll now be resident at blogs.msdn.com/psiman, sharing space with a lot of very good people.  Whether this adds or detracts from my credibility is for you to decide, but given how much I constantly rave about WPF, .NET and Microsoft in general, I am uncertain if my opinions could be much more biased as it is!

I am going to cross post things for a while and I may well repost some of my better stuff there too.  Also topics that are specific to Cowes Week may well get posted here in the future, although that isn’t certain.

See you at the new place!

Expresion Blend RC1

The RC1 release of Expression Blend is available here!

The download is a lot bigger than before (~25MB rather than ~10MB) which I assume is taken up by ‘Sample Pack 1′ which ships with this release.

Checkout these screen shots!

International Women’s Day

Today is International Women’s Day, so this is one of the few occasions I’ll fill these hallowed pages with non-technical content.

If they aren’t already, add the following to your blog roll.

Feministe
Feministing
I Blame The Patriarchy
Litbrit
Majikthise
Pandagon
Shakespeare’s Sister

And just so I can keep this post vaguely on topic as well, Sarah Blow posted this on Tuesday.

An English professor wrote on the board: A woman without her man is nothing.

The class was then asked to punctuate the sentence.

The men wrote: “A woman, without her man, is nothing.”
The women wrote: “A woman: without her, man is nothing.”

As this is almost certainly apocryphal I’ve modified it slightly from what Sarah posted.  This version removes the assumption that the professor must be a man.

WPF Collections & Threads

Karl seems to have a couple of good articles (here & here) on dealing with wpf collections from threads other than the UI.  Check them out.

Chris Lightfoot, 1978 – 2007

It came to my attention this morning that Chris Lightfoot – the person behind ‘writetothem’, ‘no2id‘, ‘pledgebank‘ and others – has died unexpectedly. I knew him only by his projects and others can speak more of him, but I think it appropriate that some remark is made about his contributions to increasing both the transparency of our government and the accessibility of our representatives.

Things are on hold…

I’ll not be blogging at my usual rate for the next couple of weeks for reasons that I’ll disclose at a later date.  I’ll continue to reply to comments and may submit the odd thing as and when I get the chance.  Hopefully come April I’ll be able to resume my usual tantilizing commentry. 

Premium passport service

Due to laxness on a grand scale I had the need to avail myself of the Home Office Identity & Passport Service’s premium same-day passport service.  Whilst the cost was exorbitant (£108 for the passport, £40 for the train fare, a day’s holiday etc) it was a surprisingly slick operation. 

You *do* have to very carefully fill in the application, make sure you have your photo’s taken by a photographer with a home office certified Polaroid camera, have inordinate amounts of verifying identification and something to do during the four hours it takes to process the application, but having organised all of that I don’t think I spent more than 15 minutes in total in the passport office.

So I now have a chipped and machine-readable biometric passport and am part of ‘the system’ once more.