Saturday (29th January 2011) saw the ninth (official) incarnation of the Developer Developer Developer .NET community phenomenon started by Old Father Murphy way back in 2005 (when Liam Westley really did have hair). This one had 280 registrations within 6 minutes of registration opening and was sold out (360 registrations) in a total of 12 minutes (the waitlist had hundreds of people on it). A new record for the conference that continues to break its own records with each new event.

The day itself was excellent as always (there is no such thing as a bad DDD). The highlight of the day for me was John Price's excellent "Computer, earl grey tea, hot" session on home automation. I think presenters are always giving their best presentations when they are talking about something they are passionate about. Boy, was this ever true for John's presentation. John really knows his subject and packed it full of loads of information. If you get a chance to see this one I really recommend it.

My own presentation was on "Enforcing Code 'Beauty' Using StyleCop" (you can download the slides here). I was really pleased with this one - I delivered the content I wanted to and I had a great time with the audience. A real pleasure for me. One point worth making to anyone who attended who is getting started in giving presentations: did you notice how full the room was ? Did you also notice how both myself and the audience were having a great time ? This is an example of the dynamics of using humour - it is much easier to make a full room laugh than a partially full room. Put the same people with the same presenter and the same presentation in a bigger room and it wouldn't have been so much fun.

The other big player in DDD 9 was Twitter. As some of you know I don't have any particular opinions on Twitter (video: here, full slides and audio: here) but it played its part during the advertising, registration, build up, during the event and post event and it played its part admirably. It also played its part during the pre- and post- conference meals. The lowlight for me was sitting at a table with 10 people where only 3 of us didn't have our phones out tweeting away. The saddest part of it was that some of the 7 people on our table were tweeting to other people on our table. Guys! Just open your mouths and speak! If you don't start using them they're going to heal up.

But the takeaway thought is that it was yet another major success and huge congratulations go to Craig Murphy, Phil Winstanley, Dave Sussman and Zi Makki (Ian Cooper is taking a DDD break for a bit). If you enjoyed DDD 9 and want some more, or you missed out and need some DDD love or you want to know why this is such a major event try out DDD Scotland in Glasgow on 7th May 2011, DDD South West in Bristol on 11th June 2011 or DDD North East in September/October 2011.

On Saturday at Modern .NET I gave my second micro-presentation. This time it was on Twitter. Micro-presentations are also called Pecha Kucha (Japanese for "chit-chat") and 20/20 so called because these presentations are always 20 slides where each slide is 20 seconds (because PowerPoint is set to auto-advance after 20 seconds). I recorded a sound track for the micro-presentation and recorded the slides and have put together a video (6 minutes 52 seconds) that you can download here. Phil Winstanley has a real video filmed on a camcorder that you can watch here (the first 10 seconds or so are missing but there's a better atmosphere).

Thanks to everyone who attended and endured my particular stance on this. Also thanks to @Plip for being such a good sport. And thanks to Phil Winstanley, Dave Sussman and all of the speakers for a great day.

One final thought to leave you with: DDD 9 is on Saturday 29th January 2011. They will probably be looking for micro-presentations there as well. Give it a go - it's loads of pain and stress fun.

DDD Dublin (the free community driven, one day conference) will be held on Saturday 9th October 2010. The Call For Speakers is now open and closes on 13th September 2010 followed by session voting and then the agenda being announced on Tuesday 21st September 2010. 'Reasonable' T&E for speakers are being covered. If you are part of the UK community and are keen to start speaking at bigger events this is a great opportunity.

Following on the success of DDD South West 1 last year we can announce that the imaginatively titled DDD South West 2 (Twitter tag #dddsw) will be held on Saturday 5th June 2010 at UWE in Bristol. The format will be similar to last year except that this time the Call For Speakers is open to everyone - not just new speakers. Here's the full list of dates:-

• Call For Speakers opens: Tuesday 2nd March 2010
• Call For Speakers closes: Monday 22nd March 2010
• Voting Opens: Monday 29th March 2010
• Voting Closes: Friday 9th April 2010
• Registration Opens: Tuesday 20th April 2010
• DDD South West 2: Saturday 5th June 2010

Another DDD and another major success. Saturday saw the eighth in the ever popular DDD event at TVP in Reading. This one broke new records that must be getting increasingly difficult to break. DDD 7 in November 2009 'sold' out in 4 hours. DDD 8 'sold' out in 12 minutes and 47 seconds (that's 320 places). The wait list of 200 filled up later that day. It is difficult to tell whether this actually means an increased demand (although I suspect it does) because for DDD 7 the organisers upheld the tradition of not telling anyone what day and what time registration would open but for DDD 8 the date and time was well known in advance. The Twitter tag #ddd8 was also the third most used tag on Twitter on Saturday 30th January 2010. And even better we got to say goodbye to Barry Dorrans (off to Redmond to work on WPL etc.).

I played my small part with another showing of "Automating Testing Using Windows Virtual PC" (slides, source code) which I thoroughly enjoyed as usual and went well despite Windows Updates.

DDD 8 has been announced and will be held on Saturday 30th January 2010 at Microsoft UK in TVP, Reading. The Call For Speakers is now open so get submitting your sessions now. In addition the complete set of dates is available including the all-important registration date of Friday 15th January 2010 (although no time is given other than midnight and this may or may not be the actual time).

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.

We've all been waiting with great anticipation for the release of the video of DDD South West and at last it is here. Chris King laboured night and day on this creation and I am delighted that it captures the feel of the event and the nature of all DDD events. Thanks, Chris, a fantastic result.

The first DDD event to be held in the South West of England was held on Saturday 23rd May 2009 just a couple of weeks ago. The dust has settled now and I thought I'd write a bit about how it went. DDD South West was held at Queens College in Taunton and was attended by 158 people. There are a bunch of statistics on the DDD South West Statistics page including a map of where everyone came from (predominantly the South West of England!) and a pie chart showing that for 66% of attendees DDD South West was their first experience of a DDD event. The stats page also shows comments from the attendees on the day and it tells us that it went really well and everyone had a good day and learnt lots. In particular this was a recurring theme amongst the comments ? the quality of the speakers and their depth of knowledge. And on this subject, congratulations to Steve Sanderson and Gary Short who came 1st and 2nd respectively in the speakers ranked By Knowledge Of Subject and congratulations equally to Gary Short (again!) and Richard Fennell who came 1st and 2nd respectively in the speakers ranked by Presentation Skills.

DDD South West experimented with a few new ideas with the Alternative Track being the most prominent. Loads of background work went into these 5 sessions hosted mostly by Adam Towler and the Bluewire Technologies team and with a guest appearance of Ross Scott for the Poker Planning and 4 more guys championing their cause in the Balloon Debate. The Balloon Debate was especially fun. The room was packed to the brim to watch Eric Nelson, Gary Short, Gareth Cokell and Marc Gravell slug out a fairly well reasoned debate on whether C#, IronRuby, Visual Basic.NET or F# is the one true development language of choice. There was some serious tactical voting going on at each round and to many people's amazement Gareth Cokell and Marc Gravell were voted off the balloon first (very unjust this). Eric Nelson desperately tried to sabotage his own arguments but it only seemed to draw people into his cause more. Perhaps just to see the look on his face the audience voted him the winner.

At lunch time we had a fantastic round of grok talks that all of our presenters should be really proud of especially when they had to compete with the beautiful day outside. One of my favourite moments of the day was when Ross Scott came to give his grok talk and I mentioned that he was in charge of catering for the day and I didn't get to finish the rest of my sentence thanks to the spontaneous applause - the food (Cornish pasties, cream teas et al) was really was received (we'll work on the coffee for next year).

We also used the event to allow 'new' speakers to speak at a larger event. Our 4 new speakers did a great job. There were some really excellent comments in their session evaluation forms and they faired well in the rankings against speakers who have had a lot more experience at this kind of thing.

And at the end of the day Richard Costall, John Price and Chris Hay of The Next Generation User Group gave another outing of their .NET game shows and chucked out carefully, gently and safely handed out buckets of swag to everyone who took part.

On behalf of the DDD South West Team (Martyn Fewtrell, Chris Myhill, Steve Sanderson, Ross Scott, Jose Simas, Adam Towler and myself) thanks to everyone who came, a big and huge thanks to the DDD South West sponsors, thanks to all of our speakers and lastly thanks to the many people who helped us make this happen on (and before) the day (registration, room monitoring, ferrying people around etc.). See you all again at DDD South West 2.

Photos are available on Flickr.

The agenda for DDD South West has been published. There are lots of great sessions covering subjects such as Silverlight 3, Azure, jQuery, MVC, Scrum, XNA, MEF and C# 4 as well as sessions in the Alternative Track including the Park Bench Discussion and the Balloon Debate that really show the power of the community. If you haven't registered yet it's free and there's still time (but it's only a couple of weeks away now ? Saturday 23rd May 2009).