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Whist at PDC and the VBug conference I have heard a a good deal of chat over the future of paying for conferences and user groups. This is in the light of all the PDC sessions being available on Channel9 in under 24 hours and that the content at the Vbug conference is also available at free events like DDD. The question boils down to can a person or company justify paying a good few thousand Pounds, Euro or Dollars to fly half way round the world when they could see the same content at home? In my previous post on the PDC I suggested it was worth it for the networking, and I still think this is so. However, I have heard an interesting slant on this from more than one person; this is go to the city were the conference is but not to the actual conference; just taking in the parties and maybe watching content via the Internet where available. ...

Since we added the new themes to our community server we have not been getting any updates on the Blogs control panel as to the number of times a post has been viewed (but the aggregate views via RSS are incremented OK) After a bit of digging it seems that we missing the IncrementViewCount flag on the in the post.aspx file. It should be as shown below. <CSBlog:WeblogPostData Property=“FormattedBody” runat=“server” IncrementViewCount=“true” /> ...

You can find the slides for my Vbug sessions on the [Black Marble web site](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/SectionDisplay.aspx?name=Publications&subsection=Conference Papers). I hope those you attended found it useful.

I am down in Reading for the VBug conference where I am speaking on TFS tomorrow. Whilst in the bar chatting to Roy Osherove from Typemock, the keynote speaker for the conference, he asked if I had looked at the Sharepoint patterns and practices document that details using Typemock Isolator for unit testing in Sharepoint. On a first look it seems very interesting; as usual at this point I just wonder how I missed the announcement of this document last month! Is is just me or does everyone struggle to keep up with the the blogs and site you should read? ...

Robert blogged about the new beta release of the patterns & practices Acceptance Test Engineering Guidance document. I have had a chance to do a quick read now and I have to say I am impressed. If nothing else it gives great comparative look at waterfall and agile methods for delivery, and a review of many types of acceptance testing. As with many of the p&p documents it is not exhaustive in what it covers, but what it does give is an excellent and detailed starting point for you to make the decisions that are right for your project. It does not give all the answers just most of the right questions. ...

So back home now after a reasonable journey back from LA all things considered; so I have had a bit of time to reflect, was the PDC good? Well I think I enjoyed my previous PDC in 2005 more, your first time always sticks in your memory. I think that this might be due to the fact that at the 2005 PDC LINQ was announced and it was a real left field thing, nobody seemed to see it coming. Due to the prior announcements (leaks) there was nothing that was not expected at this years PDC. ...

While I was at the PDC I missed the announcement that the release candidate for Database Edition was made, I was not following blogs too much. You can find all the download links for the RTM at Gert Drapers Blog, you can also see his PDC session where he made the announcement. Why did I miss the session you might ask? well I was in Agile development with Team System session – some big improvement in Office integration with TFS ...

The keynote today was all about MSR, interesting as ever. I particularly liked the demos of Second Light (Surface computing that reaches beyond the surface of the physical pc) and Boku (a system to help children program). The latter is close to our hearts at Black Marble due to the work we have done on FPL, another system to teach children to program (watch out for free downloads of this application soon) ...

Well it was all end user focused today; Windows 7 and experience in Live systems. All looks very nice, given the usually question you have to raise in a connected environment over personal data security. I am sure Microsoft have done a good job of physical and logical data security, but the whole concept of mesh networks opens up a huge potential for social attacks. No developer can protect against the user clicking on an ill advised email or now mesh link; I know I have fixed too many friends PCs with the XP Antivirus 2008 Trojan of late, where they click on a link because an email said their anti virus was out of date, they thought they were doing good. ...

It has been a while but I knew a conference would turn up some good buzzwords Meshify – to add Live mesh functions to a site