Next month the first ever Microsoft Dynamics user group kicks off with its first session.

The goal of the group is to:

Raise awareness of the Microsoft Dynamics Business Solutions suite of products in Wellington and beyond.

Share knowledge and experience in using and developing with the Microsoft Dynamics Business Solutions suite of products. We’ll cover best practices in using, customising and developing solutions, lessons learnt, preview forthcoming features or releases, and more.

Foster a network of contacts with particular Microsoft Dynamics product skills who can be called upon for resolving issues and raising awareness in the local Dynamics space.

Full details on the formation of the group can be found on the groups site at http://dynamicsug.wordpress.com/.

The groups first meeting will be on July 17 at 6pm here at Microsoft in Wellington (Level 12, Vodafone on the Park, 157 Lambton Quay). Microsofts own Stephen Isaacs will be presenting an introduction to Microsoft Dynamics Business solutions.

If you are in Wellington tonight and want to catch Paul Andrew presenting at a combined .Net/SharePoint user group, then I suggest you head along.

If you don't know Paul, he was my predecessor in DPE here in Wellington (although he focused on ISV's which is Mikes job now).  Paul is now Senior Technical Product Manager on the SharePoint team in Redmond.

The abstract, which is very concise is:

Paul Andrew from Microsoft in Redmond will be visiting us to talk about how .NET developers can leverage the Sharepoint platform from within Visual Studio.

You can register at here.  The event will be held at Xero - full details here.

The last week has been spent away in Australia on holiday.  This is the first holiday we took with the kids in a different country, so they were excited about the plane trip and being in a different country.

I'm in the process of uploading photos, but I've already put up a set of photos from Movieworld.

We had a great time.  We visited Seaworld, Movieworld, Dreamworld and visited the Currumbin Wildlife sanctuary.  The kids loved Movieworld the most, but enjoyed all the parks.

My tips for travelling there (and at least one person could be interested) are:

1. Buy a freedom pass (bus tickets) at the airport - that way you get the return transfer as well as all bus travel for the period you purchase (we purchased a 7 day pass).
2. Getting a hotel on Main Beach means that you are a walk from Seaworld - pretty much the only park you can walk to.  We stayed at the Deville apartments, although our apartment was just a little tired it worked out economically and had good views.
3. If I was doing it again, I'd probably do them in order of Dreamworld, Seaworld and Movieworld.   This would probably build a good momentum and allows you to get something like an escape pass to do a two day stint at Seaworld and Movieworld.
4. Realise that you either won't be able to do everything OR buy two day tickets (particularly for Movieworld/Dreamworld) and do everything on a two day pass.
5. Factor in a couple of days with no plans and no parks to recover

The favourite ride for the kids was the Scooby Doo Spooky castle at Movie world - which they did five times followed by either the corkscrew at Seaworld or the Roadrunner roller coaster in the Loony Tunes section of Movieworld.

You can view the slide show from our Movieworld visit now and I'll have more up here later.

Coming back to work is so hard after a great holiday...

This morning I had the great honour of letting the user group leaders know the outcome of the Community Leader of the year award.  The award is intended to recognise the hard work community leaders do in New Zealand.

These community leaders are the backbone behind every community event around Microsoft Technology in New Zealand and work hard so that developers and IT professionals can stay up to date and keep growing their skills so that they stay relevant and maintain their expert status.

The results are:

3^rd Place- Matt Smith – SharePoint User Group in Christchurch

Matt Smith runs the SharePoint user group in Christchurch and in his first year has done very well.

Attendance of the Christchurch SharePoint User group at time of judging was within a meeting or two of the more established Wellington SharePoint User group and given the group didn’t start until several months into the year, it is obvious that Matt has done a spectacular job of getting the group up and running.

Matt wins a Microsoft Desktop 8000 valued at over $400.

2^nd Place – Kirk Jackson - .Net User Group in Wellington

Kirk Jackson has been a consistent user group leader for a number of years and has done a phenomenal job of driving the group forward.

The group has been meeting monthly on a consistent basis for some time, and this year has become the most consistent leader in the community – leading the only group that met in both December and January.  In addition, Kirk has added a second meeting each month.  These second meetings have been equally well attended. 

Kirks exploration of new group ideas and his consistency resulted in 138% growth from last year. 

Kirk wins an XBox 360 Elite Gaming Console valued at $899

1^st Place – Rodney Lake - .Net User Group in Tauranga

Rodney has done a great job of driving his group forward this year. Like Kirk, he has moved to meeting every fortnight and has been meeting every month (with the exception of January).  This is a huge step for any group to take, but particularly for a more remote town - you can understand it in the main centres.

In addition the Tauranga user group has made a significant contribution to the overall user group attendance this year being between second and third most attended user group in the country – which is amazing considering the catchments area available to him compared with the developer population of Auckland or Wellington.

Particular highlights for Rodney include a great turn out at the community road trip, catalysing the Tauranga SharePoint User group (which has been running since January) and achieving an amazing 594% growth.  This growth reflects both the increasing sized of each user group attendance and the increased regularity of meetings.

Rodney wins a $2500 travel voucher to spend as he desires.

Please join with me in congratulating the winners! 

Last week Tech Ed US (developer edition) kicked off and one of the key announcements of the keynote was the announcement regarding Silverlight 2.0 beta 2 which is now available.

Why consider Silverlight?

There are two key reasons to consider Silverlight in my opinion.

1) Platform independent. The Silverlight runtime is available for Windows and Mac and supported in Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox. Not only this but it is small too. When someone hits your silverlight page for the first time the download is only 4.6 Mb and installs in 10 seconds. There is no requirement for the .Net framework. The runtime includes everything you need to run silverlight applications – including a tiny version of the .Net CLR. There is also a community project to run Silverlight on Linux called Moonlight.

2) .Net based. Silverlight is .Net based, meaning that you can use the tools you are used to for developing Silverlight applications. Not only are the tools the same, but many of the class libraries are also the same, and of course you can develop in a variety of familiar languages and take advantage of new language features such as LINQ. In addition Silverlight is based on XAML – the same technology as WPF.

Going forward Silverlight will be a very important platform for Microsoft. The web is growing in its importance and applications using the internet need to be richer but not heavier, and of course cross platform compatibility is critical. Silverlight fits the bill perfectly allowing rich applications to be built with a very lightweight foot print on almost any device. Check out http://silverlight.net to see what has already been done with Silverlight.

Where to start

If you have been doing web development and want to get started looking at Silverlight you can get the tools from http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/. If you want a sample to look at you’ll want to take a look at the starter posts that Scott Guthrie has put together here and here.

I’m thinking of doing my next unplugged sessions on a Silverlight primer for developers. If you want me to come to your town with this topic, drop me a note here.

I've just finished working through the last bits of the web/ux track for Tech Ed ANZ.

If only we had more sessions in this track... Anyway, as you notice from the title the track is the Web and User Experience track.  This makes sessions particularly tricky as UX is a big topic in and of itself.

I'm pretty happy with the mix we have.  It's getting harder and harder to get the best speakers, and I think that the list below is a very solid representation.

The list below is the track as it stands now.  These speakers are locked in.  Note that anything with TBC next to it just means the title/abstract hasn't been finalized yet.

Speaker	Session Title
Scott Hanselman	Developing ASP.Net Applications using the Model View Controller pattern
Scott Hanselman	RESTful data services with the ADO.Net Data Services Framework
Harry Pierson	Microsoft Silverlight and Dynamic Languages
Hank Janssen	Managing IIS Infrastructure (TBC)
Hank Janssen	PHP, FastCGI and IIS7 (TBC)
Jonas Folleso	Silverlight 2 for Developers
Trent Mankelow(NZ)/Susan Wolfe (AU)	Self Service Usability
Jefferson Fletcher	IE8 for Developers (TBC)
Jefferson Fletcher	IE8 Compatibility (TBC)
Nigel Parker (NZ)/Shane Morris (AU)	Designing XAML applications using Expression Studio 2.x (TBC)
Scott Cate	ASP.Net AJAX Deep Dive (TBC)
ScottHa, Scott Cate, Harry, Jonas, Hank, Jefferson	Web futures panel - where is it all going and what challenges are ahead? (TBC)

I welcome your feedback - if you think the mix should be different or you want to see a talk tweaked, let me know.

I'm particularly interested in feedback around the panel.  Futures can be a bit fluffy, so if you could ask these folks any technical question at all, what would it be?  Maybe I'll start compiling a list now...

Quick Guide - Register here and Vote for the Dyslexia Foundation of New Zealand.

Next week is Dyslexia Awareness week, so it seems fitting to post on the subject.  Particularly since we have a bit of experience with Dyslexia in my family.  My daughter has Dyslexia, as does my wife's family.

If you don't know, Dyslexia is a learning difficulty. Essentially the "wiring" in your brain is optimized for learning differently to the way most of us learn, and of course our schooling system is set up for the way most of us learn.

So - if you have Dyslexia, school can be a real chore.  Kids often have the intellect to do well, but they simply can't learn the same as other kids.  When this happens it can be a real struggle to keep kids interested in school.

To make it worse, the State education system has only formally recognized Dyslexia in the last 18 months and so there is next to no education of teachers of Dyslexia and absolutely no guidance available to teachers who have Dyslexic students.

In addition, Dyslexia awareness among parents is low and it is often caught later than is ideal.  And when it is diagnosed, parents generally have no idea of what to do or where to get help. If you can get it early enough and work hard on it, there is no reason why Dyslexic people can't live an ordinary life.  There are event the normal list of Dyslexic people who are successful out there (e.g. Richard Branson).

Sovereign sunshine has a charity system where they allow the public to vote for various charities and they will give a specified amount to that charity.  If you have the inclination, I ask that you'd take five minutes to register at their website and vote this month for them to give to the Dyslexia Foundation.

Here's what they intend to do with the money:

If we are lucky enough to win - and remember that depends on you! - we will add the Sovereign Sunshine prize money to our existing Cookie Munchers Charitable Trust prize pool that forms part of Dyslexia Awareness Week. Thanks to the generosity of other organisations such as Rotary, Altrusa, and The Warehouse the prize pool is currently sitting at $20,000, which gives schools that participate in Dyslexia Awareness Week 10 chances to win $2000 towards any dyslexia resource purchase or initiative. If we win the Sovereign prize we'd almost double the odds!
The Sovereign Sunshine donation allocated this way helps engage our schools and supports our campaign for specific Government funding for dyslexia-specific teacher professional development; classroom assessment tools; and interventions and strategies to address dyslexia early - something that young dyslexic New Zealanders deserve.

To vote, register and vote for Dyslexia Foundation of New Zealand!

If you are interested in a session about Microsoft's vision and strategy around virtualisation, you'll want to head along to one of the three sessions that are on next week.

Registration is free and I believe everyone will leave with something more than just the session knowledge.

Microsoft invites you to breakfast to hear how Revera – one of New Zealand’s up and coming technology leaders – is taking Virtualisation to greener pastures.

Following the successful launch of Windows Server 2008, Microsoft invites you to breakfast to share with you their vision and strategy for Virtualisation.  With a Virtualisation platform built into Windows Server 2008, coupled with a Virtualisation vision that is all-encompassing, Microsoft will share how to virtualise from the Desktop to the Datacentre without costing you the earth – or specifically – the environment.

You will also hear how Revera – a leader in datacentre innovation – is using Microsoft’s Hyper V virtualisation technology as both a competitive and affordable solution for their business. With datacentres across New Zealand and hundreds of thousands of processors at their disposal, this Virtualisation leader will explain why they chose to use Microsoft’s Hyper V and how virtualisation will benefit your business today.

Please join us for breakfast to hear about how this disruptive technology trend is turning IT departments and businesses into environmental {heroes}.

Auckland:        Tuesday 17^th June
                            8:00 a.m. – 10:30 a.m.
                            Private Room
                            Westin Hotel
                            21 Viaduct Harbour, Auckland

Wellington:   Wednesday 18^th June
                            8:00 a.m. – 10:30 a.m.
                            Ballroom
                            Duxton Hotel
                            170 Wakefield Street, Wellington

Christchurch: Thursday 19^th June
                            8:00 a.m. – 10:30 a.m.
                            Chancellor 5
                            Hotel Grand Chancellor
                            161 Cashel Street, Christchurch

Speakers:
Deannah Templeton
Microsoft New Zealand
&
Robin Cockayne
REVERA

If you are keen to get along, please register by sending an email to i-vicoom@microsoft.com.