One of the best things I ever did was to start NxtGenUG with Dave McMahon and John Price - To see how it's grown beyond Coventry and Birmingham is remarkable - We couldn't ask for any better coordinators running, Southampton, Cambridge and Oxford and growing the NxtGenUG brand. So it's with great pleasure we are announcing a 6th Region - Hereford headed up by Ryan O'Neill and Richard Wilde starting in March - Welcome aboard guys - good luck

Press Release Below... 

"NxtGenUG are well chuffed to announce the start of the sixth UK region this time in Hereford. The group is being run by local developers Ryan O'Neill and Richard Wilde.

The group will have it's first meeting on 17th March 2009 between 7.00pm and 9.00pm in the Shirehall, Union Street, Hereford HR1 2HX. The main speaker will be Guy Smith-Ferrier with a session on Visual Studio 2008 Tips 'n Tricks. There will be the usual NxtGenUG activities of eating Pizza and Swagging-out.

To book your place goto here where registration and meeting is free. Come along and enjoy yourself and get involved in the UK Community in the West of England!"

go on, pop in...

Silverlight Assault Course - Ireland Tour!!!

36 Sessions, 3 hotels,  2 train rides and return flights to Ireland. (plus Swaggily Fortunes). The Silverlight Assault Course is coming to Ireland on the 17th (Dublin) and 18th (Cork). Newly Minted MVP - Chris Hay and Myself  will be covering 16 session between us each day with Microsoft Ireland's DPE Martha Rotter providing some additional sessions. We'll be covering many aspects of Silverlight at all levels in our own unique fun and snappy way. We'll also be ending the day with the World Renowned Swaggily Fortunes Gameshow - Starring You! - There's more.. It's FREE to attend.

17th Dublin - Details to Follow - see Martha's Blog http://blogs.msdn.com/martharotter/
18th Cork - http://www.cork.mtug.ie/Events/EventInfo.aspx?ID=a607584a-2fa2-475b-ba8e-4ba9786d9814

Agenda

9:00-9:30	Registration
9:30	Welcome and Housekeeping Martha Rotter
9:40	Getting Started Richard Costall In this Session Richard Costall will get you up and running with Silverlight, explain the constituent parts, build a "hello world" application and even dive into Expression Blend for a bit of Designer stuff.
10:00	XAP File Explored Chris Hay So what is a Silverlight Application, What is a XAP file, how is our content deployed what is our best strategy?  In this nugget we dive deep into the XAP file, how a silverlight application is exposed in a web page and how we can dynamically load assemblies.  All in 20 minutes, surely not!
10:20	Layout Richard Costall Grid or Canvas? Richard takes  you on an introduction to basic layout, which to choose and how to configure them.
10:40	Silverlight Sockets (networking 1) Chris Hay In this nugget we will mess around with network communication via sockets or WCF duplex messages.  The supports for these features allow the ability to do chatty things in applications and we will dive straight into it.
11:00	WCF Communication (networking 2) Chris Hay Silverlight is all very nice and all but I'd like to talk back to the web server thank you very much.  In this nugget we will communicate with WCF and the most important stuff you need to know.  Communicating with a service, Generating a client, Asynchronous Calls, Cross Domain Calls.  Another packed nugget.
11:20	Break
11:30	Application Services Richard Costall Can Silverlight communicate with the ASP.NET Provider Model? – Of course it can – Join Richard on his journey of discovery to utilise, Authentication, Roles and Profile in a Silverlight Application.
11:50	Dynamic Languages Martha Rotter Want to use Silverlight but prefer coding in Ruby or Python to C# and VB.NET?  No problem.  Martha shows you how to write and debug Silverlight applications with the Dynamic Language Runtime so that you can use the development language skills you already have and integrate your existing web applications with Silverlight.
12:10	Syling/Templating Richard Costall From a simple font change to a redesign of the controls. Richard will show how you refactor styling information and build a control with any visual style you wish.
12:30	Images + Media Chris Hay In this nugget we look into Images and MediaElements.  At the end of this nugget you should be able to use images and media effectively in your apps. We will build a Media Player, build a media image map, it's going to be fun.  You should have a good idea of what's supported and what isn't also.
12:50-13:40	LUNCH
13:40	Brushes, Transforms + Animation Chris Hay At the heart of every good Silverlight application, is the ability to animate things, rotate things, and make things look funky with nice gradients.  This nugget is about doing rich stuff with XAML.
14:00	DataBinding Richard Costall Databinding is a first class citizen in WPF and Silverlight is no different. This session will introduce you to the basics of Databinding.
14:20	Using Isolated Stored (1) Chris Hay This nugget is all about understanding Isolated Storage and how you can interact with it.  Isolated Storage is the only place you can store data locally, it's probably one of the key features of Silverlight apps and this nugget is about showing you how to use it.
14:40	Using Isolated Stored (2) Chris Hay This nugget is a deep dive into Isolated Storage, where it is on disk, how it is represented internally, how to clean things up when it goes wrong.  At the end of this nugget you will know everything you need to know about Isolated Storage (and probably stuff you didn't need to know either), but hey knowledge is power.
15:00	Break
15:10	Gaming Richard Costall Silverlight has a great future as a viral gaming platform. Richard will show you how to utilise a gameloop, the basics on animation, before a demonstration of a true gaming classic.
15:30	User Controls Richard Costall XAML, like HTML can be very Verbose. In this session Richard will show how easy it is to build usercontrols and then utilise them in your applications
15:50	Silverlight Encryption + Compression Chris Hay Wow are we still going on about Isolated Storage.  Well this one is really about Encryption + Compression within Silverlight. You don't really want folks peeking at your hard earned data after all.
16:10	Custom Install and Loaders Richard Costall Give your Silverlight application a more compelling and enticing experience with a custom Silverlight Install and application installer.
16:30	Silverlight integration Martha Rotter Silverlight plays nicely with everyone.  Want proof?  Learn how to use Silverlight with your PHP applications, with Live Mesh and yes, even with Adobe Flash.  Yes, really.
16:50 – 17:30	SWAGGILY FORTUNES Gameshow What a better way to end the day than with the ‘Internationally acclaimed NxtGenUG GameShow’ Swaggily Fortunes – Answer Simple Questions and win SWAG!

 Hope to see you there....

I've now been to Disney World 10 times, but couldn't believe it when this arrived....- I've been given my own day in DisneyWorld

Announcing PDC2009:  November 17-20, 2009 in Los Angeles, CA.  After 3:00 PM PST (GMT-8), Thursday, October 30 you can add your name to the PDC2009 mailing list to receive all the latest information.

http://microsoftpdc.com/View.aspx?post=http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/PDCNews/Announcing-PDC2009/

Gray Short has posted a great video on YouTube of the MVP Open Day - No, you won't see lots of future projects and demos - but you will see some MVP's rocking out on Rock Band, including Rich Costall on drums. Highlights for me was Mark Dryden on vocals for Run to the Hills and Guy Smith Ferrier on guitar!

Great Night

Last week I was over at the Silverlight UK User Group at the Conchango Offices in London. We managed to fill a two hour slot with our Silverlight, XNA and Gaming talk - featuring Miner Willy the XNA/Silverlight Manic Miner Game. Thanks to Michelle and Mark  for inviting us. The feedback I saw was excellent. See Below...

“Very informative, interested me greatly due to the background. Designers probably felt left out but the technical ability was outstanding. Really good presentation. Peter is a real talent!”

“Probably a bit less typical designer view as I am interesting in games and games graphics but although technical aspects of the presentation hasn’t completely lost me. Plus really useful to get a idea of what aspects of game graphics are affected by aspects of the games engine. How the way we make graphics can help the game developer, improve performance etc....”

“Really enjoyed the session, good mix, good ideas which can be used anywhere in general programming”

“As a dev and as a fan of retro games & Silverlight I enjoyed all aspects of the presentation. I also liked the tips about using the ASP.NET Providers”

“Well presented by both Richard and Peter. Great organisation of the event.”

“Very good demo, love to see new things in progress. Collision detection stuff was very useful for Silverlight. Would definitely come again!”

“I would like to see a more technical breakdown of how certain techniques were used to overcome problems encountered. Enjoyed the meeting – many thanks”

“Everything was great, can’t wait for the next one! Made gaming interesting to a non-gamer. Really interested in seeing Silverlight with mapping tools.” 

 The bonus is Ian Smith recorded the sessions in excellent quality for your enjoyment.

Woo Hoo..

Read Scott's Announcement here

NOTE: This release is for Developers to get their Silverlight Applications ready for the Release version, and is not something you can deploy. So load it on your machine, make sure it builds and runs... and then sit tight for the release...

There's even some more controls, including the PasswordBox

Looks like the Covenant are up to their tricks again on the latest teaser video from Bungie for an, as yet, unnamed title. In the image below, before mass destruction takes place you can see the front of a spaceship enter the picture from behind a skyscraper...

Looks amazing and leaves us none the wiser...

On the downside... I really hope the "Maddie, Where are you?" message is nothing more than a coincidence, surely Bungie would have done some research and typed it into a search engine before leaving such a weird clue, else it's just plain wrong.

So, we all refer to the good old postal service as 'Snail Mail' - it can take days to receive something in the post, Electronic Mail almost arrives before you've even sent it! - So it came as an initial surprise when today I received two emails..

Your message

  To:        XXXXX XXXXXXX

  Cc:     

  Subject:             Invoice as promised.

  Sent:   Sat, 5 Jun 2004 17:40:01 +0100

was deleted without being read on Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:28:03 +0100

Perhaps it's not the mail thats slow, it's just taking somebody over 4 years to 'not' answer their mail....

Following on from the great feedback we received for our Silverlight, XNA and Gaming session. I just wanted to give you a heads-up on where you can see it next.

1st October - Silverlight User Group [TBC] London
22nd October - Black Marble - Leeds http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=Silverlight,%20XNA%20and%20Gaming
22nd November - DDD7 - ??If you want it - vote for it ??? http://www.developerday.co.uk/ddd/default.asp
9th December - NxtGenUG Birmingham http://www.nxtgenug.net/ViewEvent.aspx?EventID=164

here's some feedback from the Coventry meeting

Having spent most of 1985 playing the Amstrad CPC version of Manic Miner to death, I couldn't have chosen another 8-bit classic I'd rather see. Even though Silverlight is still in beta, Rich has managed to do Matthew Smith proud ... just needs the Pythonesque boot death sequence to polish it off :)

Being one of the lucky ones who'd seen a sneak preview of Pete's pet XNA project, it was great to see it presented on the big screen. As if producing the code, 3D models, textures, music and sound effects wasn't enough, he adds "entertaining presenter" to his heavily-feathered cap! Top-notch work Pete, top-notch.

I have been looking forward to this event and so had high expectations - and am pleased to confirm they were fully met.

The XNA Gaming session was the best session I have yet to see - and I have seen most of them. Rich's silverlight brief was a great insight into how well it can be made to work, yet how painful it can be with such a small CLR coverage available to it.

Peter is probably one of the presenters I most admire...he is so modest and quiet yet so capable and knowledgeable. I thoroughly enjoyed his previous XNA session and was really looking forward to this one. It was a great session and am looking forward to seeing the Engine code and how XNA and Silverlight made use of it. I don't know the first thing about game writing - which is perhaps why I am so wowwed by Peter's abilities - but to no only develop but also create all the images etc - he is the full package. Please give us more XNA. Is it just me or is Peter a dead ringer for David Walliams?

It's clear that Pete really knows his stuff. His enthusiasm and passion for writing games really comes through whenever he speaks. He did lose me a little bit with talk of "orthogonal matrix" and so on, but otherwise very good. Would have been a 9 if we'd seen more of the game engine code.

It was obvious from Pete's presentation that he has a real passion for game development and I have no idea why he's currently spending time editing a database script when he can be developing games instead (the pay must really suck). My only criticism is that he never brought his porn laptop with him. Top game developer!

Great fun, brilliant content, superb pizza. Rock on
Excellent session from two great speakers. Rich dropped some great info on Silverlight, the gotchas alone were worth the price of admition

Great talk, with enough meat to get anyone cracking on building the next Halo .. bonus points for using the words Awesome, Gnarly and Dude more than once each

fantastic presentation, showing the cross-platform code and all the animations possible in silverlight was great and presented brilliantly as usual.
Very informative and obviously presented by a hard-core bedroom games writer. But more significantly one that can also present! :) I may have to dust down my copy of XNA and get coding games again!!

A sample Silverlight site where I work, is no longer working, as the Beta 1 of Silverlight has expired. I'm sure a few people will hit this over the next few dates, whilst visiting silverlight applications built under Beta 1 (which didn't have a go-live licence), so don't blame Microsoft.

The Beta 1 of Silverlight expired on the 1st of September. For more information, there's a great blog here.. http://blogs.msdn.com/dajung/archive/2008/06/16/please-use-on-or-before-date-on-label.aspx