The Call For Speakers for DDD Scotland on Saturday 8th May 2010 is now open. DDD Scotland is an excellent, well run event and I would recommend applying for this one.

Those beer drinking, .NET chatting chaps are at it again. This time it's on Tuesday 8th December 2009 starting at 6pm for 7pm at The Portcullis (where the beer is excellent) in Clifton, Bristol. You can sign up here.

I'm a long time fan of Fiddler, an excellent tool for spying on and interfering with HTTP requests. Analyzing the headers and packets sent across the wire has been an invaluable source of information to me many times. Sadly Fiddler suffers from a drawback where it is unable to view localhost traffic by default. There are workarounds but these are not always practical. So recently I was interested to see HttpWatch.

HttpWatch integrates straight into Internet Explorer or FireFox and provides an analysis of browser traffic. In particular because it is simply using the browser it clearly sees all localhost traffic without any workarounds. Now, whether HttpWatch has more features and functionality than Fiddler is still open for debate but in this one issue at least HttpWatch is solving a problem for me. The "Basic" version of HttpWatch is free and the other versions you have to pay for (whereas there is only one version of Fiddler and it does everything and it is all free).

Here we are at TechEd Europe 2009 and there's no surprise to see a rather tragic game show in progress. The big surprise, however, is that it's not the UK's own Ant and Dec (aka The Chuckle Brothers, aka Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee, aka Laurel and Hardy aka Richard Costall and Dave McMahon) who are doing it. Nope, it's Germany's answer to The Kings Of Crappy Game Shows, Hyper-D and Hyper-T. And on The Sad And Tragic Scale it's right up there. This one's about putting hats on and taking them off (I don't remember Terry Wogan doing this one). And not a "sometimes working, sometime not" WPF app in sight. The double act may be the same but on The Swagometer you'd have to say that Hyper-D and Hyper-T are in a new league: their prize is a brand new laptop. Kind of takes the shine off a t-shirt and a NxtGen mug a bit.