• 13 meetings
• 8 grok talks
• 1 C# training evening
• 1 day of WPF training
• 1 geek dinner
• 1 video
• 2 community nights
• 2 venues
• Over 1000 emails
• Thousands of pounds of swag
• 494 sign ups
• 431 attendances
• Highest attendance: 62
• Lowest attendance: 22
• 260 members

• Rock Band on the Xbox 360 played in an amphitheatre to get the immersion experience. Rock Band appears to be a whole lot of fun and it is sad that it isn't available in the UK yet
• Karaoke with a full backing band. The backing band were fabulous and many people had a go ranging from very good to truly awful. Lorna Williamson has a fantastic voice and really nailed her song (she used to sing in a band and it showed).
• Science Fiction museum that I found really interesting
• Music museum that was also interesting

The emergence of Web 2.0 technologies has brought new opportunities and caused us to solve old problems in new ways. AJAX and Silverlight applications need read/write access to data and business objects without performing full page refreshes and without dumbing down the data so much we are just left with primitives. Microsoft?s answer to this problem is ADO.NET Data Services. In short ADO.NET Data Services is a data access layer for client-side technologies such as AJAX and Silverlight. This session shows how it works, how you can write ADO.NET Data Services data servers and how you can customize ADO.NET Data Services to your applications requirements.

Whoever shows up is the right group. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have. Whenever it starts is the right time. When it's over, it's over. An Open Space conference's agenda is decided upon by the conference participants during the opening of the event.

• http://blog.benhall.me.uk/2007/12/altnetuk-conference-1st2nd-february.html
• http://laribee.com/blog/2007/04/10/altnet

• The preparation time for a micropresentation is completely disproportionate to the length of time of the presentation. The presentation is obviously 6 minutes and 40 seconds but I spent many hours preparing it.
• As you only have 20 seconds to show each point it really forces you to nail your demonstrations. I found it very interesting to take any demonstration that I wanted to give and reduce it to its constituent screen shots and add animations and graphics to highlight the essential pieces of information that I wanted to show. I am very grateful for having gone through this procedure because it really focuses the mind on being able to get to the point in the minimum amount of time, an approach which transfers to more traditional presentations very nicely.
• I used animations to simulate drawing on the screen. I like to use ZoomIt to draw on the screen to focus the audience's attention on a particular point but obviously not only would it be not Pecha Kucha to interfere with the slides whilst they are running but also it takes valuable seconds to annotate the slide. So I added the annotations to the slides and animated their arrival on the slides after a given number of seconds that I just guessed at. Seemed to work ok though.
• I found it difficult to find 20 separate pieces of information about my subject until I started spreading subjects over slides. Pecha Kucha purists will probably be annoyed at my abuse of the format (e.g. repeating slides only changing them by the animations to illustrate new points, revisiting slides that have already be shown in order to consolidate a point).
• In the previous micropresentations that I had watched it seemed to me that one of the difficult parts of this format was in timing your speech so that it ended exactly as the slide moved on to the next point. If you ended before then there was a few seconds where the speaker is clearly waiting for the slide to move on (you can see this on at least 2 of the slides in my presentation). I thought I had a cunning plan to solve this problem. First I started looking for a digital egg timer that would count down in seconds and would reset back to 20 seconds after it hit zero. I couldn't find one. Then Jesse Liberty suggested using a digital chess timer. I wasn't able to find a timer that would count down and reset back to 20 seconds without a player having to press the "done" button so I simply set my timer to 6 minutes and 40 seconds. I reasoned that if I needed to look at the timer then it didn't matter what the minutes digit showed or indeed what the tens of seconds digit showed because it would be very obvious to me whether I was in the first 10 seconds or a slide or the second 10 seconds of a slide. What I needed was the very last digit and seeing that it was, say, 3 or 4 seconds would tell me how close I was. I liked the theory. I practised using the digital chess timer and found it to be very helpful. Come the live presentation I set the timer on the desk and started it going as I started the presentation. I didn't look at it once. Apart from the fact that I didn't want the distraction the presence of the audience made me realise that I had to be looking at them and not at the timer. Tried it, didn't like it, moved on.
• Something that I desperately wanted to get right was the ending of the presentation. I wanted to end exactly on the 6 minutes and 40 seconds mark. I didn't. I ran over by 4 seconds. I was disappointed with myself for this. The presentation had ended and there was this black screen and I was still talking. Admittedly it was only 4 seconds in a presentation of 6 minutes and 40 seconds but I think ending your final word on the final second of the presentation is very impressive and I will strive to get this right next time.

• Automating your build process using FinalBuilder
  For non-trivial applications, having a managed build process is essential. However, if that build process is irksome to use and requires a series of fiddly steps in order to complete it, developers/build folks will not been too keen to run it frequently. This is a shame because a repeatable, fast and easy to use build process increases confidence and product quality.
  
  Thankfully there are tools available to help us automate the build process, FinalBuilder is one such tool. Automating the build involves scripting every action that you need in order to compile, test, deploy and re-test your application. Everything from pressing F5-Compile through to creating a setup.exe (MSI, installer, etc.), copying into a [clean] virtual machine, setting up database connections, sending e-mail, creating images, posting blog entries, burning CDs, starting/stopping IIS, version control integration...they are all part of the automation process.
  
  Over the course of this session Craig will explain the need for automating the build process and will demonstrate VSoft's FinalBuilder tool (and Automise if time permits). Craig does not have any formal connection with VSoft, he is just evangelical about their product!


• An Introduction to Test-Driven Development
  With Test-Driven Development (TDD) now entering the mainstream via such tools as NUnit and more recently xUnit.net, it is becoming an important tool to have in your developer tool chest. If you are wondering how to "get more" from TDD, code coverage could well be part of the answer. I believe that we can improve the quality of our application by using a combination of TDD and code coverage.
  
  Code coverage, whereby we "track" how much of our code is covered during testing, is not new. Indeed, we can practice code coverage and TDD in isolation. However, applying what we know about code coverage against our unit tests allows us to move our applications to the next "quality" level: no longer is it acceptable to have unit tests on their own, we must know how well written the unit tests are, how much of the classes under test are really being tested?
  
  Over the course of 60-75 minutes Craig will introduce the benefits of code coverage using both manual methods and automated tools. He will briefly introduce TDD and will go on to demonstrate the benefits of using code coverage tools against your unit tests, i.e. how well do your tests exercise your classes/application?
  
  Craig will be using Visual Studio 2005 and C# - his demonstrations are available for Visual Basic.NET and Borland compilers too.