A few years ago I wrote a paper on "How To Give Great Presentations". Most of the information in this document is relatively timeless and so it needs little updating. I have uploaded an updated copy now which contains a few updates for more recent technologies referenced in the document as well as a few additional sections. The majority of the document is unchanged (it increased from 25 pages to 28 pages) but if you use it as a reference then you should download the updated copy.

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.

I have updated the PublicResourceCodeGenerator (and all of the other code generators) so that it installs and works with Visual Studio 2010 (as well as Visual Studio 2008). The PublicResourceCodeGenerator is used to create Strongly Typed Resource Classes with a public class and a public constructor so that resx files can be used with Silverlight (you can read all about these code generators here). You can download an MSI/EXE and/or the source code (for Visual Studio 2010, 2008 and 2005) here.

The source code for my .NET Internationalization book is now available for Visual Studio 2010. Versions are still available for Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2003 but the version for Visual Studio 2010 is the only one that I will be updating from here on (until the next release of Visual Studio).

I will be presenting a Silverlight 4 version of my Internationalizing Silverlight presentation twice in the coming months. The first is at the Silverlight User Group in London on Wednesday 15th September 2010 and the second is at the 34th Internationalization and Unicode Conference (where it is entitled "How To Achieve World(-Ready) Domination In Silverlight 4") in Santa Clara, California from Monday 18th October to Wednesday 20th October 2010. Typically I present internationalization subjects to developers and the consequence is that there is sometimes some groundwork that needs to be covered for the subject to make sense. Each of these upcoming events approaches this subject from a different viewpoint: the Silverlight User Group members know Silverlight very well and therefore will be solely focused on internationalization and the Internationalization and Unicode Conference attendees know internationalization very well and will be focused solely on Silverlight. I'm looking forward to the different perspectives. Here's the abstract:-

So you've written your Silverlight application and you want it to work in another language ? Then this session is for you. World-Readiness is all of the work that a developer needs to do to globalize an application and make it localizable (i.e. capable of being localized). Whereas these concepts are well established in Windows Forms and ASP.NET, Silverlight is not only a cut-down version of the .NET Framework but also cross platform and client-side. In this session you will learn how to localize Silverlight applications using .resx files, download culture-specific resources on demand so that users only download resources for the culture they need, understand what System.Globalization types and properties Silverlight does not support and why, what globalization and font support you can expect on Windows and the Mac, what the Silverlight installation user experience is for non-English users and what language support you can expect from the Silverlight framework.

When Windows 7 was first shown at PDC 2008 the feature that captivated me was the touch support. Truly this was a step towards multi-touch becoming mainstream and a significant step forwards in our industry. And now I get to share the joy that is multi-touch on Windows 7 using WPF in a presentation with the same name as this post's title. The first outing will be at VBUG Bristol on Wednesday 11th August 2010. The second outing will be at The Next Generation User Group in Cambridge on Tuesday 21st September 2010. Here's the abstract:-

Arguably the most innovative and forward thinking feature of Windows 7 is its multi-touch support. And it should be no surprise to see that WPF 4 boasts the same multi-touch support that utilizes this Windows 7 multi-touch support where available. In this session we will explore this new feature in WPF 4 and see what we get for free (i.e. without having to do any work), what you can get with only minimal additional work and what takes a bit more time and effort. Along the way we'll discover the basic touch support together with support for rotation, scaling and inertia as well as how to handle low level touch events using the raw API. Please note: the presentation shows true multi-touch - this is not a trick with two mice simulating multi-touch.

If you're around Bristol or Cambridge then come along and say hello.

I very rarely talk about personal stuff on this blog. Today is a very rare day.

Today my son's first book was published. He is 11. If I could be any more proud I would burst.

His book is "Invasion in the Quadrant of Doom" and it is the first book in the "Eric and the Defenders of the Universe" series.

When Sam was 9 he said he wanted to write a book. Kids say many things so there is always a balance between taking things with a pinch of salt and trying not to crush dreams. So we waited to see what would happen. Sure enough many nights he would sit at his computer and write more on his book and occasionally he would say he had written a new chapter. We would read it and be delighted that he was totally serious about writing a book. He finished the book in November 2009 (over a year later) and we felt the achievement warranted some recognition so we agreed to get it printed. The cover artwork is by Gary Young and 30 copies of the book were printed by Choir Press. The print run was solely intended for friends and family so you can't buy it anywhere and there is no ISBN number. And as the last page of the book says:-

The adventure continues in book 2 of Eric and the Defenders of the Universe "The Dead One Walks Again".

As a proud father I have to say it really doesn't get any better than this.

Another May means another DDD Scotland. Saturday 8th May 2010 saw the third incarnation of the exceptionally well organised DDD Scotland. Colin Mackay, Andy Gibson and the Scottish Developers team did yet another bang up job on the free one day conference in Glasgow. DDD Scotland had 345 registrations (including speakers, staff and the wait list) with places for 280 attendees and capacity for 200 attendees (a drop out of 80 attendees was expected to bring the 280 down to 200). The event (including Speakers/Organisers Dinner on the Friday night and Geek Dinner on the Saturday night) ran smoothly throughout and hundreds of developers went away happy as ever. Unusually for me I got to see a couple of sessions including the dynamic and lively George Adamson doing the jQuery session I missed at our own DDD South West last year and the always excellent Mike Taulty doing A Guided Tour Of Silverlight 4. My own contribution was a presentation on Enforcing Code 'Beauty' Using StyleCop and you can find the slides here.

And of course don't forget DDD South West 2 is on Saturday 5th June 2010 in Bristol.

We've got some great meetings coming up this Spring at The .NET Developer Network so I thought I'd let everyone know about them:-

• Thursday 25th March 2010 6:30pm (Doors open 6:00pm)
  "Hyper-V For Developers" with Liam Westley
  Liam Westley returns to Bristol fresh from his DDD8 exploits to give us a second dose of virtualization, this time focussing on Hyper-V.
• Monday 12th April 2010 6:30pm (Doors open 6:00pm)
  "Silverlight 4, MVVM and TDD" with Jesse Liberty
  Jesse Liberty (yes, that Jesse Liberty), Silverlight Geek from Microsoft US, starts his first UK and Ireland Silverlight tour in Bristol with a session on Silverlight 4, MVVM and TDD. Meet the man himself and see what this prolific guru has to say.
• Tuesday 11th May 2010 6:30pm (Doors open 6:00pm)
  "Leading-edge Web Development with ASP.NET MVC" with Steven Sanderson
  It's not often you have a published author right here in your home town. This month sees Steven Sanderson, author of the best selling MVC book talk about, well, ASP.NET MVC of course. Steve was rated the best speaker (by knowledge of subject) at DDD South West so this should be a great night.
• Wednesday 2nd June 2010 6:30pm (Doors open 6:00pm)
  "A Guided Tour of the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) in Silverlight 4" with Mike Taulty
  The fabulous Mike Taulty, Microsoft Developer Evangelist, introduces us to the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) in Silverlight 4. MEF is a powerful and valuable way to de-couple your applications from specific implementations. Mike is showing MEF in Silverlight 4 but the technology itself is valuable regardless of your choice of UI platform.

As usual membership is free, the meetings are free, everything is free and there'll be loads of swag. See you there.

Bristol now has its own chapter of the worldwide IT community group Girl Geek Dinners. The launch event was in February 2010 and their next event is on Thursday 25th March 2010 at UWE with guest speaker Ana Kronschnabl, CEO of FluffyLogic (it's actually the same date and the same venue as the next DotNetDevNet meeting but GGD are in S block and DotNetDevNet are in Q block). Men are welcome but the rule is you have to be invited by a Girl Geek.