I'm off to DDD - are you?

Well, they opened up registration this morning, and I had to jump on it fast to ensure I get a place… That’s done, so now I can safely blog about it!

Developer! Developer! Developer! is a UK development community event that’s hosted by Microsoft at their Reading campus. The next event – DDD7, is on Saturday 22^nd November.

The agenda looks really good – especially Phil & Dave’s “ASP.Net 4.0 – Top Secret” session, but it looks like there’s something for everyone there. Other potential highlights (for me, at least), include Mike Hadlow’s “Using an Inversion of Control Container in a real world application” and “Toby Henderson’s “How to develop .Net on Linux using Ubuntu”.

They just need to set up the twitter feed, the facebook event and the backnetwork now!

Get in quick! http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032393874&Culture=en-GB

You can't stop the light (redux).

Loads more Silverlight goodness today too.

Robin Mestré has posted no less than four three-part series on why Developers, Designers , Marketing types and Application Architects should look at Silverlight. The posts are very much brochure-style, but they do give an excellent overview of the capabilities of the Silverlight platform – plenty of pictures to help you sell the technology to your managers.

Shawn Burke notes the release of Silverlight 2, but more interestingly give a teaser as to the state of play with the Silverlight Toolkit – due for a first preview release at PDC. The screenshot shows just how cool these controls are going to be.

On the WPF SDK Blog, Jim Galasyn points to the revised Silverlight 2 documentation now available on MSDN.

Finally, Scott Morrison has posted about what I think is one of the most exciting controls released as part of Silverlight 2 RTW – the DataGrid. This control will be making a number of 3^rd party control manufacturers sweat – it’s already VERY fully featured, as Scott#’s post shows. In a follow-up, he also shows how to use the Frozen Columns feature – damn handy.

Silverlight Toolkit: http://blogs.msdn.com/sburke/archive/2008/10/14/silverlight-2-released-silverlight-toolkit-on-the-way.aspx

Documentation: http://blogs.msdn.com/wpfsdk/archive/2008/10/14/silverlight-2-docs-are-posted.aspx

DataGrid Features: http://blogs.msdn.com/scmorris/archive/2008/10/14/silverlight-2-datagrid-is-released.aspx

Frozen Columns: http://blogs.msdn.com/scmorris/archive/2008/10/15/freezing-columns-in-the-silverlight-datagrid.aspx

You can't stop the light

(was "Busy day at Silverlight Central" - don't ask!)

Yep – today the Microsoft Blogosphere has been buzzing with the news that Silverlight 2.0 has Released to the Web (RTW). Congrats to the Silverlight team on that – I was expecting the release to be closer (if not DURING) the PDC.

Of course ScottGu is the authoritative source as always, but I lost count of the MSDN blog posts today that reposted the news - now all I’ve got to do is un-install the RC0 bits and install the RTW bits before I can compile up code that will be shippable. Well, it will probably be shippable as soon as the CUI and Controls teams update their control libraries!

Interestingly, Ronan Geraghty went in a slightly different direction – pointing to a set of Silverlight tooling for Eclipse. This is good, because it gives an alternative tooling for Silverlight, and one that’s in use by a load of Java developers out there. Whilst it’s Windows only at the moment, it’s roadmap does include support for “Other OS” – so it probably won’t be long before that same tooling will allow for Silverlight / Moonlight development on Linux. Good times!

Scott shows us the light: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/10/14/silverlight-2-released.aspx

Eclipsing the light: http://www.eclipse4sl.org/download/

New! Atomic Memory will wash your concurrency grime away!

I’ve kind of being expecting this to rear its head, so it’s gratifying to spot that the Transactional Memory team at Microsoft are starting a blog.

This follows on from the presentation that Simon Peyton Jones made in the final Sneak Peeks session at Mix UK ’07 – and whilst they “are not working on a product release at this time” it can only be a matter of time. It’s also nice to see another part of DevDiv opening up and gathering opinion as part of their development process.

Read about it (atomically): http://blogs.msdn.com/stmteam/archive/2008/10/08/welcome-to-the-transactional-memory-team-s-blog.aspx

REMIX UK Sessions on the Web

Well, it took a while, but at last all the sessions from ReMix UK '08 are online – time to catch up on all the sessions you couldn't get to (and maybe see if you can spot yourself in the audience for those you were at).

"Get 'em while they're luke!": http://www.microsoft.com/uk/remix08/agenda.aspx

(thanks to Mike Taulty for pointing this out in this posting)