Today was the .Net User Group Code Camp that Kirk, Jacqualine and Andre have been working hard on for the last couple of months.

There was a host of great speakers at this years code camps a number of whom are speakers at Tech Ed.

The day has been pretty busy, over 200 people have been at the day of code reasonably consistency and often there have been around 220 in the room.  As far as I know that makes this Code Camp the biggest code camp ever in New Zealand.

One of the highlights for many of the attendees was seeing Scott Hanselman present.  Scott is well known in New Zealand, and well respected as a developer geek.  Scott is a very relaxed, and natural speaker, although there were times when those in the audience weren't quite sure if he was joking or not.

During the Lightening talks, the building caught fire - at least that is what the fire brigade thought as they came running to respond to the fire alarm that went off in the hotel.  Everyone had an impromptu break at that point, but it was only a short interruption and the proceedings weren't delayed too badly.

During the day Kirk also recognized the contributions of Peter Bamberger and Ivan Towlson.  Their contributions to the mailing list ensures that people who ask questions there get timely answers and also make the .Net Mailing list one of the most valuable developer resources in New Zealand.  If you don't already subscribe to the .Net mailing list, you should sign up.

Given I manage content for Tech Ed this year (for the last time), I thought I'd post my picks of the (mostly web) developer sessions for you to peruse.  I've picked these sessions for a variety of reasons, but for whatever reason these are the sessions that developers should not miss.  Naturally, if you are not a developer there are other sessions that you will want to go to (the SQL Content is pretty good this year for example).

Like I said, these are somewhat web developer oriented, but given this is where many developers spend lots of their time hopefully this will be useful.  Note that there are lots of other fantastic sessions, but these are the developer sessions I think you should catch if you are interested in building your developer knowledge at Tech Ed 2008.

See you there!

Experience Tech.Ed 2008 NZ in the comfort of your own desktop. Catch all the action, watch interviews with top speakers, popular breakout sessions, behind the scenes footage, download technical PowerPoints and much more at Tech Ed Live.

We are going social- so if you are taking photos, blogging or tweeting, please tag your content with #tenz8. We’ll be rolling up the best of the content that you create into Tech Ed Live. If you are using twitter you can also follow @tenz8 to see the results of tweets tagged #tenz8 rolled up and you can stay up to date with developments at Tech Ed by following @techedlive.

If you are struggling with sessions clashing - or if you won't be at Tech Ed - we are going to record video content for six of the sessions and put them up on www.techedlive.co.nz.  The six sessions that will be recorded will be:

DAT302 – Overview of SQL Server 2008 – Jeremy Boyd
SEC305 – Virtualization and security – Steve Riley
SVR315 – Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Architecture, Scenarios and Networking Deep Dive – Ben Armstrong
WEB304 – Web futures panel
WEB309 – Silverlight for developers – Jonas Folleso
SVR319 – Active Directory Deep Dive – Tony Murray

These sessions will start becoming available on www.techedlive.co.nz from Tuesday morning (Sept 2), so stay tuned.

We are also going to be doing a series of interviews with several speakers which will also be posted on to Tech Ed Live. There will be a bunch of us doing the interviews, and we’ll be interviewing Scott Hanselman, Amit Mital, Steve Riley and Reed Schaffner as well as some of those from Australia and New Zealand including Neil Roodyn, Jeremy Boyd, Pat Martin and Johann Kruse.

If you are going to be at Tech Ed, make sure you say hello (especially since it will be my last Tech Ed in DPE). If you are not going to be there, make sure you keep a browser tab on Tech Ed Live and keep up with what is going on.

See you there (either way)!

If you are in Auckland this weekend and not going to be at Tech Ed and you want to get some good Tech Ed speaker content in person, you'll want to get along to Code Camp on Sunday.

There are some great Tech Ed speakers who will be there including Jonas Follesoe, Scott Hanselman, our own Ivan Towlson and Owen Evans.  There will also be lightening talks - these are always great to see and lots of fun to present (I think there may be some spots available).

If you are keen (and its pretty much full so get in quick) you can register here.

One of the new things we are doing at Tech Ed this year is a blogger dinner.  Over the next 12 months I'd like to see the online exposure of kiwi bloggers increase somewhat, and to that end we are introducing a blogger dinner to Tech Ed.  This is a strictly invitation only event that is limited to a small number of kiwi bloggers. 

The dinner will be hosted by myself and keynoted by Scott Hanselman, who will explain "How to make your blog suck less" and will provide some Q&A after his talk.

There are quite a few already coming (I sent out invites a couple of weeks ago), but I'm still holding a few seats for a few more who I may have missed.

If you haven't already received an invitation and you'd like to come, I may have a place for you, so please contact me and let me know your name, email address and blog address and I'll send you a ticket.  Tickets are subject to availability - only a small number of invites left.

*UPDATE*: Gone!

This link came through twitter today and then Stuart tweeted a reply to it.

One thing that the blog author should try is using the suspend feature in Vista.  As Stuart mentioned, it is pretty good.

My little Fujitsu gets rebooted about once a month and the rest of the time it is just put into suspend mode.  This works great.  The laptop is ready to use in seconds (like less than five seconds), and is pretty stable.  I set my laptop to suspend when the screen is closed.

If you have a Vista based machine, try it, and live in the "instant on" future.

Today we released Service Pack one for both Visual Studio 2008 and .Net 3.5.  These two releases add some functionality, while improving on existing features.

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 delivers:

• Improved WPF designers
• SQL Server 2008 support
• ADO.NET Entity Designer
• Visual Basic and Visual C++ components and tools (including an MFC-based Office 2007 style ‘Ribbon’)
• Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server (TFS) addresses customer feedback on version control usability and performance, email integration with work item tracking and full support for hosting on SQL Server 2008
• Richer JavaScript support, enhanced AJAX and data tools, and Web site deployment improvements

The .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 delivers:

• Performance increases between 20-45% for WPF-based applications – without having to change any code
• WCF improvements that give developers more control over the way they access data and services
• Streamlined installation experience for client applications
• Improvements in the area of data platform, such as the ADO.NET Entity Framework, ADO.NET Data Services and support for SQL Server 2008’s new features

This release also includes support for working with SQL Server 2008 in TFS.  I haven't had a chance to pull this down yet, so if you do, blog your experience.

Full details including feature update detail available here.  Soma has more on the release.

As you know Tech Ed is less than a month away now - September 1-3, so I figure its time for an update.

We are 98% locked in terms of session content. There will be small changes as the last few holes get filled, but most of the sessions will remain as they are for the conference. One of the things we’ve worked hard on this year is a good mix of content from 400 level C# sessions down to 200 level introduction to building apps for Vista or Windows Mobile. You’ll also want to look out for a few sessions on products or technologies you may not have heard of before. There is lots of very cool technology on the horizon and we’ll be covering some of it at Tech Ed.

If you've registered for Tech Ed, you should have received an email with your username and password to ComNet.  This will allow you to log in to ComNet and take a look at the sessions we have planned for you.  Please take a few moments and build up your schedule (you can always change it later).  This will allow us to ensure that we get the right sized rooms allocated for each session.

Don't forget that at Tech Ed we will have the Ask the Experts evening.  This is your opportunity to talk to the experts that we'll have at Tech Ed - including all our great US speakers.

If you are interested in where the web is going, we will be hosting a Web Futures panel at Tech Ed this year. This panel will be comprised of Scott Hanselman, Nigel Parker, Jonas Follesø and Trent Mankelow. I’m interested in taking questions for the panel discussion, so if you have a question that you’d like to ask the panel, please drop me a line with your question.

Girls – don’t forget that we will be hosting a Girl Geek Dinner at Tech Ed this year. Full details of the agenda and speakers are available on my blog. Guys - if you want to come along, find a girl who will invite you as their guest – this is in line with the standard Girl Geek Dinner rules.

Happy coding!