Just plugging the next Bay.Net Education Day (which I am organizing), where Mark Michaelis will

start with a blank slate, the Visual Studio Wizard, and proceed to create a series of assemblies that comprise .NET 3.0/.NET 3.5 sample application.  The result will be a whirl wind introduction to technologies such as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Ajax, SharePoint, Visual Studio Unit Testing, LINQ and much more.  Attend this all day session to catch up with where Microsoft .NET technology is today and gain insight into where it is going tomorrow.

Should be a great event - it will take place Saturday September 6, at Foothill College; you can register here.

First piece of good news this week, the website for Silicon Valley CodeCamp 08 is up (and beautiful!), and registrations are open. If you haven't been at CodeCamp yet, you should definitely check it out: it's free, it's by developers, for developers, and it's fun. It's a great place to go to meet fellow developers and learn; and if you are itching to try out your presentation skills and are passionate about a topic, it's a great place to get your feet wet with a friendly crowd! I plan on giving two talks this year, one on Test-Driven Development, and one on VSTO development.

Second piece of good news, after a bit of a hibernation period, the Silicon Valley / South Bay chapter of Bay.Net is resurfacing! Stay tuned on the Bay.Net website for updates - but as of now, the first session is expected to take place end July, with Scott Stanfield of Vertigo talking about DeepZoom, a spectacular illustration of what can be done with Silverlight.

If you have experienced any weirdness with this blog over the past few days, I apologize - and will have to ask you to please bear with me for a little more: I have just spent part of the week-end switching from DasBlog to BlogEngine.Net. The brunt of it is done now (I reached the mythical "it's 80% finished" point), but I still have to complete porting my old posts and review their formatting.

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The next Bay.Net education day is now officially announced! It will take place on February 16th, 2008, from 9am to 4pm, and will be hosted in the OakRoom at HP in Cupertino; for a tiny registration of $35, Lynn Langit, Microsoft Evangelist, will be telling you everything you need to know about SharePoint, and probably even a bit more. Judging by what I know from Lynn, it should be a top-notch, fun, and high-energy session. Hope to see you there! Did I mention that I was involved with the organization? :)

The schedule of Silicon Valley Code Camp 2007 is now official. Code Camp is a free conference by and for the developer community. Speakers volunteer their time and everyone attends for free. It's a place to learn, to network and to dig into some code. My session is scheduled on Saturday, October 27, at 5:15; I will be giving a talk on a subject dear to me, Test Driven Development, in C#, using NUnit. I will of course try to Test-Drive the session, which means writing some code live; this is always a perilous exercise - but that is also what is fun! I am also looking forward checking out the other sessions. The line-up this year is great; there are quite a few speakers I have seen and enjoyed through Bay.Net (Juwal Loewy, Chris Mullins, Deborah Kurata, Beth Massi... ), and some I have not seen yet, but with great session topics.