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Ivan's back, and he's brought his top rating TechEd talk with him. This presentation is pure gold, looking at the new stuff in C# 4 from a multitude of angles, and using it to do things with C# that you wouldn't believe possible. In fact, this talk was the inspiration behind my own "Easier property validation with dynamic in C# 4" blog post.

I've got my ticket for WDCNZ - have you got yours?

The impressive schedule of talks is posing a bit of a challenge - which great talk do I go to? A nice problem to have, really.

Coming up this Wednesday 15 June, an interesting presentation by Ian Randall at SLAMD:

Recognised by complete strangers as "The XAML guy", Ian Randall is coming to the big smoke to talk all about Rob Eisenberg's Caliburn.Micro framework.

This time around, Kirk Jackson giving a talk on "I know what you did last summer: The latest from the world of web hacks"

2010 is getting off to a great start for the Wellington .NET User Group with a presentation on CLR Fundamentals:

Whether you program in C#, Visual Basic or any other .NET language, the Common Language Runtime is what makes your code go. It’s the common platform which provides all the features we take for granted – memory management, program loading, language independence, and so on. In this talk we’ll review the practical fundamentals of the CLR including:

• Reference and value types – what, when and why
• Properties, methods, fields and events

Many thanks to Colin and the Palmerston North .NET User Group for hosting my presentation last night. Based on the conversations after my talk, it seems you enjoyed my presentation and that most of you had something useful to take away.

This week's presentation at the Wellington .NET user group looks interesting:

XAML has become a powerful tool for building User Interfaces in WPF, Silverlight and now Windows Phone 7, but how can we leverage this XAML Processing capabilities for ourselves to improve productivity, readability and maintainability? I will show you a few lesser known/used features of the XAML Processor, and an Example of replacing plain old xml with fancy XAML Objects.

See you at Xero, at 6pm Wednesday.

The Wellington .NET User Group will be holding a PDC Breakfast to watch a stream of the keynote.

The stream will start at 7:30am and is expected to be finished by 9:30am.

Since 1991, the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference has been the centre of Microsoft’s biggest platform announcements. This year will be no exception and we invite you to join us at your local MS Communities to watch the keynote and highlights from the conference. So, make sure you join your local user group to watch the keynote and highlights from this year's PDC.

Coming up at the Wellington .NET user group:

Owen Evans presents 5 languages in 50 minutes

David Thomas (of The Pragmatic Programmer fame) promoted that as software developers we should be learning a language a year. They say French is the language of love and Italian is apparently the language of diving gratuitously during football matches.

Well, programming languages all try to serve a purpose and fill a need too (they aren’t all just created for academic curiosity).

Owen Evans, Senior Developer at Xero, takes on the challenge of introducing you to 5 unsung development languages (not .Net languages) in the hope of promoting the idea that we can each pick up something new and learn and evolve as software developers.
The aim is not to be masters but to understand better the ideas different language constructs present to us so we can fold them into the day to day development we undertake as professionals.
5 languages in 50 minutes? its a stretch goal but i think we can make it.

Every year, just before the Microsoft TechEd conference, a Code Camp is held in Auckland.

In past years I've always forgotten about this Code Camp until too late. This year, not only have I managed to arrange my flights and accommodation so I can come along, I've also volunteered to give a presentation.