After Alt.net I had thought getting an ultra light notebook was a good idea. At most conference I need to browser, blog and read email; I don’t need to carry around a full development desktop replacement laptop. Whilst at ReMix I had enough of the old battery in my Acer laptop, so just before it ran out of juice again I ordered a Dell Mini 9, which was actually cheaper than my HTC phone! Today it arrived, a lot sooner than I was expecting, Dell has said it would be next month. ...

Brian Harry has published an interesting post on the platform decisions for ‘Rosario’. The most interesting item is it will only support SQL 2008; so get planning a migration for that central enterprise SQL server!

So how was ReMix? well a bit like last year not earth shattering, but what can you expect. We have PDC in a month so there is going to be no major announcements, also this is a rerun event from the US MIX conference, again reducing the chances of anything new. So if you are a developer and been to TechEd or just to local community events (and as Andy Westgarth said we are very lucky at the quality and number of community events and speakers in the UK) you will have heard nothing new about Silverlight etal. Though it is far to say that this may not be true for designers, and I felt the development track was pitched at this level. ...

I have eventually got round to rebuilding my GUITester on Codeplex for VS2008. I must get round to looking to see if a similar declarative test markup system has any mileage for XAML. Something was talking about at Alt.net in the spring - how time flies.

I have been asked a couple of times whist at the Alt.net and ReMix conferences about the local user groups around Leeds. Well these are the regular free community events I know about: Black Marble community events - my company runs free community events at a hotel between Leeds and Bradford roughly monthly from autumn to spring. We invite a variety of leading .NET community speakers. The Yorkshire Extreme Programming and Agile Methods Club (XPClub) - meets the 2nd Wednesday of the month in the centre of Leeds. This is a group of .NET and Java developers interested in agile development bast practice. ...

I have just found out that the session I was doing at Vbug in Coventry next week has been cancelled due to low numbers. Sorry if you were planning to come, but don’t worry I will be doing a similar sessions (the the bonus of post PDC Rosario updates) at the VBug conference in November.

It is all well and good Microsoft saying that a developers and designer can share the same project WPF/Silverlight files in Visual Studio and Expression Blend, but whilst Blend does not have the ability to use a source control repository (TFS, SVN or anything else for that matter) and actually strips out any source control binding it finds in a project file, this is for me unworkable experience. How has this product got to V2 without this feature? ...

Just seen the keynote for Remix in Brighton, I must say that Bill Buxton’s part was one of the best keynotes I have seen (watch out for the streamed webcast). For me the most important thing for a keynote is to set the tone, the meme, for the conference and his session certainly did. OK it is good to see the demos of products but you can’t beat a good bit of thought provoking public speaking. First time I have seen this done well by Microsoft since the last PDC a couple of years ago. Interestingly, setting the tone was something always done very well at the Sun JavaOne conferences I attended in the late 90s. ...

Do you feel alone, nobody nearby who you can talk to about TFS? Well try the new virtual user group meeting in Second Life. Only issue is the meeting will be 2am UK time by my reckoning.

Back home now after a excellent two days at Alt.Net in London. As with the spring conference this was a thought provoking event. I really like the whole open space format, though there were four ‘main sessions’ the event started the night before in the planning session and the bar and carried on without a pause, including the train trip home. The main sessions can be excellent; but it is usually the chat walking to get a coffee or over lunch was where you get a nugget of information that completes a picture for you. It is great to find out you are not alone in the problems you have and refreshing to hear people speak so openly over the challenges and successes they have had. ...