I was involved in the recent Bletchley Park Architects Council, where I also took a whole load of photos and several videos to capture the essence of the event. Matt Deacon, as the event organiser, has done an excellent job of pulling all the material together for your delight and delectation:

The blog entry is slip over two parts - Part 1 and Part 2.

We’ve been remixed – which I assume in the on-line world is most sincere form of flattery :-)

The Intelligent City Project I did a video I shot a while back

. . .  the intro for which has inspired such comments as:

Fantastically, it’s like the start of a poor horror film.

I find the start a bit creepy

. . .  has been remixed on www.birminghamitsnotshit.co.uk with their article The horror of an integrated wayfinding system

I *think* its a complement.

The DPE team at Microsoft here in the UK where I work get involved in some cool projects, and more recently, I have been involved in filming them (and occasionally starring in), as well as meeting the folk involved, which is great fun.

Here is one of the most recent, which I have just posted:

Lest you think its all glamorous on-location shooting and globe trotting, let me show you some of the shots I took during our filming:

We all have to suffer for our art :-)

A couple of months ago I was out and about wit my fellow Microsoft colleagues at Weston Manor, in Oxford, for a ‘Cloud’ related conference. The content for the event, along with the videos I made, are now up on the architects portal.

Click here  to visit the site and see the videos

I’ve put a little over 1,000 miles on my car with a drive up to Edinburgh and Leeds to deliver a session on Azure as part of the fowa tour 2009. The tour is going really well, lots of interesting folk at the events, lots of discussion around cloud computing, web design, and some really great speakers. I was pleasantly surprised to find out how many people were already using .NET, and there is a lot of interest in Azure, ASP.NET and more recently, BizSpark.

One of the fun things about these events is the way you can get real time feedback on the event and sessions, and a handle on what people are thinking about, through Twitter, as most attendees seemed to Tweet the entire time :-) Its always nice to get good feedback on what we are doing (I’m @ScroffTheBad):

Edinburgh and Leeds are still lovely cities to hold these events:

I’ve posted my tour photos on Flickr, but my favourite has to be this:

Don’t miss out on the final two tour dates in Cambridge and Bristol next week.

I have been asked by the powers that be to update my biography, and supply some new photos. As I always loose this sort of thing, I thought I’d post it here, where I can find it again, and point people to it:

Ever since David programmed his first ‘10 ? “hello world” : goto 10‘ program on a PET computer in the late 70s he has been hooked, and has worked with computers ever since. During his career, David has secured a Distinction in Computing Science, worked as a freelance computer journalist, visiting lecturer, director of a software company, as well has having designed and developed a wide range of software, from warehouse to finance systems.

For the last 15 years David has worked at Microsoft, firstly in its fledgling consultant service section, then in EMEA as a technical evangelist (yes that was the official job title). Since Microsoft’s launch of .NET, he has been focused on the .NET platform, helping design and build a wide range of systems, from smart clients to web applications, and more recently, cloud computing with the Windows Azure platform. He also runs and delivers regular technical briefings around the Microsoft platform, and has been involved with Teched Europe for the last 11 years.

I was one of a number of folks from Microsoft at Carsonified’s Future of Web Design event in London last week.  Microsoft were one of the events sponsors, and I have to say we had a really cool stand:

The Microsoft Surface device was one of the most popular items on the stand and I spent some time doing demos

	Mark Quirk did a demo of “Watchmen”  . . . .
. .  . using a Microsoft Surface

. . .  and my official Microsoft outfit for the event:

	The retro MS-DOS T-shirt design
	and my Twitter handle

On Friday night I attended my first ever London MiniBar meeting. It was great fun, I met lots of interesting folk, and had some very great pro and anti Microsoft conversations after my presentation about Windows Azure.

The website sums up the event nicely:

Your Monthly Face To Face. You think about creating the next Last.fm, flickr, or Web 2.0 start up? You think London lacks opportunities to meet up and discuss those ideas? Then come to MiniBar. MiniBar is a social evening in Shoreditch, which offers people a chance to snaffle some free beer while discussing p2p, web applications, start ups, social networking and general Web 2.0 mayhem & fandango.

I urge you join and come along to a future meeting . . .

Although I think Family Guy is great, I don’t get this little dig they had the Zune – I love my Zune!

I had great fun last night at the TechCrunchTalk and ChristmasCrunch Party in London. It’s always interesting to spend time with start ups, and the line up of speakers and panel discussions and beer was a winning combination. I’m now trying out Qype, and have a revised view of PR and lawyers :-)

And of course, I should mention that Microsoft sponsored the event through BizSpark - if you are a technology start up, and not building on Microsoft software, then check out BizSpark - we could change your view our platform:

BizSpark is uniquely designed to accelerate your success by providing fast, affordable access to current, full-featured Microsoft tools and technologies, plus production licensing for hosted solutions. For support, BizSpark unites a global community of technology and entrepreneurial experts who can guide you through the hurdles of growing a new business.

Whilst reading Steve Krug’s excellent “Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability” I came across a wonderfully simple and evocative web site – CSS Zen Garden.

I’m a developer and engineer, not a designer, so elegant, well designed web sites always impress me, because I know I could never achieve such beauty. This site has a selection of superb CSS style sheets that you can click on to dramatically change the look and fee of the site, but one only using CSS – the HTML stays the same. If you doubt (or just plain don’t understand, like me) the power of CSS, spend a few minutes on the site.

I had a chat with Tara Hellier about the work we are doing with Fasttrack – if you want to know more about our fastrack reviews, check it out.

Jason Zander gives a great keynote and shows off Visual Studio 2010, and what looks like a very large touch screen demo with Windows 7 :-)

He also give my PDC track a plug - thanks Jason!

I’m one of  the UK DE ISV team involved in delivering a new series of technology briefings entitled “Fasttrack – The Magic of Software”, targeted at ISVs, to let them see some of the latest and most exciting software coming out of Microsoft, and explore how that software could be used in their own applications.

These briefings will run monthly, and the content will change and evolve over the year to reflect both emerging software and technology trends, and input from both ISVs and the ISV team. The briefings will include some or more of the following technologies :

• Business Intelligence and data mining and how to get the most out of your data with SQL Server
• Examining the trade-offs for WPF and Silverlight and ASP.NET in designing UIs
• How cloud and utility computing changes the on/off premise options
• Office 2007 and SharePoint 2007 integration opportunities
• How mobile solutions can extend the reach of your solutions
• What the next version of the .NET framework and Visual Studio have in store
• and more . . . .

The day will consist of lots of demos and lively discussion, with the aim of exploring how these technologies can be used within ISVs own applications. The sessions audience size will be small, typically less than 30, to keep the flow of conversation going. These sessions are suitable for Technical Decision Makers, Application Architects, and Senior Developers.

The two events are now live – click below for the appropriate event – and be sure to book early.

24th November 2008 – London

11th December 2008 – Reading

I did the quiz at BBC NEWS | Magazine | Midweek quiz: Old computers and got 7 out of 10 (with no cheating or looking up anything) – what score did you get??