The 2007 roadshow sign up should be working again, so you should be able to sign up now. Mike Taulty's page has the details but you can sign up for London here.

Microsoft has announced the dates for their MSDN roadshow. Secure your place while you still can.

London is the key one for me and it will be on 21 March.

For DDD4 we are organising Grok Talk and Park Bench lunch time activities. These are your chance to participate in the day. And for the best grok talk on the day we are offering a MSDN subscription.

The Grok Talks are open to anyone who is already registered for the day (we are full on registrations) and a wiki has been setup where people can put down their name and the talk http://www.thehughpage.com/DDD4LunchTime. A Grok Talk is a 10 minute deep dive on a single feature of an API or Tool. There are great examples here. As such it is much less of a challenge than a full presentation. All you need is a USB stick with your presentation on it (though let us know via the wiki if you expect any software to be installed, and provide some contact details).

If you are one of the lucky people who managed to sign up for DDD4 then
we would like to invite you to submit a grok talk or park bench topic for the day.

It's you chance to show your peers what you know, instead of listening to everyone else. It's also a lot of fun.

If you get this error one possible source is signed assemblies. If you are signing your assemblies and using code coverage then you need to remember to resign them. To do this edit your local test run configuration. Look for the Re-Signing Key file field:

Some people only report that this affects them only on release and not on debug. This is because code coverage is disabled on release...

From the notes to self department on Wilson ORM:

If you want to embed your mapping file resource in an assembly and then retrieve it to pass to an ObjectSpace you need to use code similar to the following:

ObjectSpace meetingsSpace = null;
Assembly assembly = Assembly.GetAssembly(typeof(Meeting));
using (Stream mappingStream = assembly.GetManifestResourceStream("Meetings.Mappings.config"))
{
    string connectionString = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["Meetings"].ConnectionString;

    meetingsSpace = new ObjectSpace(mappingStream, connectionString, Provider.MsSql);
}

• The presentation is a series of 6 talks. That is something we can't usually get from a user group meeting or a single day conference and gives the chance for a more detailed explanation and a longer story.
• The talks are broken into theory then example. The style is great for a 'teach the idea' then show the example approach that reinforces what you learned in the first half
• The nuggets of information are digestable. Presentations find it hard to be good teaching environments, but they are great informing environments. So the patterns that Clemens and Steve discuss like My Shared Database or Access: Remote are easy to understand in this kind of format.
• I like Clemens's graphics. Really. They are better than bullet points. A picture is worth a thousand words.
• The pacing is good, with the banter between the two speakers making sure we don't lose concentration.

I'm really hoping that we can see more of this kind of series of sessions at Tech Ed. It makes for a great differentiator for Tech Ed from other events. I could really think about doing a series on solution design in a space like that.

If you are going to Tech Ed and want to catch up with me I will be on the ATE stand  (#26 Visual Studio) on Tuesday from 13:30 to 16:15 and 18:45 to 21:00.

Feel free to drop by, especially if you have any C#, agile, or patterns and practices questions you wanted to run by me.

Session submission is done.

Voting is done.

We have an agenda!

DDD will take place for the 4th time on December 2nd. You can register here. Registration fills up fast, and we do have a numbers limit. So sign up as soon as you can.

Once people are registered we will start advertising some activities like grok talks and geek dinners that are open to delegates.

Good luck!

Mike Ormond has discovered a cruise control plug-in for the Nabaztag. Now while our team is fond of WAV files of HAL 9000 and Homer as the indicators of successful and failing builds the idea of a electronic rabbit has something going for it. I wonder if we could expense it. I wonder how long before a member of the team would smash it in a fit of computer rage. Should beat the Ambient Orb for sheer annoyance factor when somone breaks the build.