The Australian and New Zealand SharePoint Conferences are JUST around the corner. These events are organised by a dedicated group of NZ and AUS Community Leaders and MVP’s - Debbie Ireland, Mark Rhodes, Nick Hadlee, Mark Orange, James Milne and Kathy Hughes.  Once again, the team are organising...

Via Catherine Eibner On December 2nd- 4th we are holding an Azure Bizspark Start-up Camp in our Brisbane office in the lead up to the launch of our Innovation Centre. This unique opportunity will showcase the potential when Government, Incubators, Universities and Microsoft come together to help Startups...

The good folk at Readify are running a free breakfast briefing on 1 December in the Sydney CBD to give you a lap around the next version of SQL Server, code-named "Denali". Register on their Eventbrite site .

While I was at TechEd last month, I sat down (twice) with Richard Banks and recorded an episode of Talking Shop Down Under about LightSwitch . Richard's been hoarding his TechEd recordings and releasing them slowly. This one came out today. Check it out .

I thought I was 33% of the way into the SwitchedOn briefings for LightSwitch and Azure , but today I found out that I'm only 25% through. New cities, Wellington and Auckland have been added to the event, and I'm looking forward to seeing my Kiwi mates and having them commiserate with me about our Rugby...

I've just finished the first of the SwitchedOn briefings (Adelaide) - we built a LightSwitch application (u:Adelaide, p:Pass@word1) and deployed it on Azure. I've uploaded the slide decks: Session 1 - LightSwitch Morning (2.2Mb) Session 2 - both Azure decks (13.5Mb) Session 3 - LightSwitch Afternoon...

The Power of LightSwitch on Windows Azure Update 10/10 - Now with Adelaide Details Introducing Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch , a simple self-service tool that allows developers and business professionals to build business applications quickly and easily for the desktop and the cloud- without the...

Aussie developer Yann Duran has just published his second Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 extension. The Luminous Controls extension is currently a TextBlock and a GroupLayout control. This is the second LightSwitch extension Yann's published, the first being Luminous Themes. He's in the process of writing...

Update (12 Sep) All of the session videos are now up and the high-quality video files are linked to the thession pages - Step 11 is COMPLETE The encoding process is proceeding apace and last I looked, there are 10 sessions to complete encoding - Step 12 is 93% I now need to a final pass through...

A long time ago, I wrote Part 1 of this post , based on the presentation I did at the 2010 SharePoint Conference in Sydney. If you're following along with the code, you may want to review that post so you can set up your development environment to match mine. To quickly recap, the last post showed how...

Hot on the heels of my post on the Readify DevDay in Sydney , I got a note about even more VSS to TFS workshops (this time presented by Richard Angus from Enhance ALM). Topics include: The benefits of migrating to TFS A demonstration of the key features of TFS Pre-migration planning Hands-on walk through...

I got this note from Sarah Webb at Readify today - looks like a good way to spend half a day if you’re looking to move from Visual Source Safe to a more modern source control system (and get a heap of additional goodness thrown in) Readify Dev Day: TFS for VSS Users… Since 2005, Team Foundation Server...

I’ve been on the NSW.NET committee for a little while now and have been to (and presented at) a few of the breakfast sessions. They’re generally a great mix of useful technical and business information and this month’s is no exception. Business opportunities in the cloud; journeys of Microsoft and its...

Community stalwart, MVP and Regional Director Adam Cogan is running SharePoint 2010 developer training around the country at the end of this month (and the beginning of next). From their newsletter: In this FREE 3 hour session, you will learn why Team Foundation Server 2010 (TFS) is the fully integrated...

I am the guest editor of the (Australian version of the) MSDN Flash for next week. I expound on a view I’ve held for a while - namely that two of the most important attributes of a good developer are boastfulness and laziness. Boastful, in that a good developer wants to share learnings with...

Can't believe I haven't blogged about this. For just over nine months now, Michael Kordahi and I have been producing a Podcast called Frankly Speaking . It's hard to believe we've recorded just over a session per week for 41 weeks. We've had a bunch of great guests and we generally just chat about current...

Update 2011-04-06 I Finally got around to writing Part 2 of this post . I had the pleasure this week of presenting at the Australian SharePoint Conference – much kudos to NZ SharePoint MVPs Debbie Ireland and Mark Orange , and local SharePoint MVPs/community folk James Milne , Brendan Law and...

Once again I've been "blessed" with the content owner role for TechEd Australia 2010 which is on the Gold Coast from August 24-27. Our Call for Topics is now open (and will probably close around June 12). If you're interested in speaking at TechEd Australia (and possibly New Zealand ), please...

The one and only Dave Lemphers is coming back to Australia for a week at the end of February for a whirlwind tour of the country to coincide with the launch in Australia of Windows Azure . He'll be doing public technical briefings hosted by the user groups in 5 capital cities. Date/Time ...

SharePoint Saturday has reached Australia recently with the efforts of Brian Farnhill and Ben Walters in both Melbourne and Sydney . Jeremy Thake from Perth SharePoint User Group thought it was about time it happened in Perth with the help of other volunteers. The event is provisionally announced for...

Craig Bailey ’s Sydney Business and Technology User Group has a great line up this week, especially given all the goodness that was revealed at the SharePoint Conference last week. SharePoint 2010 at SBTUG Where : Microsoft, North Ryde When : 6pm, this Wed 28 October What : 2+ hours of SharePoint 2010...

Don and Dave have been running Windows Mobile development jumpstart training via Live Meeting along with James McCutcheon. Live Meeting 3 is coming up – Don has more details . In parallel to this, we’ve started the Code Mason’s Guild for mobile developers. Check it out for local initiatives, competitions...

Jake Ginnivan ’s been hassling me on and off with difficult VSTO questions for the last year or so. It looks like Jeremy Thake’s finally persuaded him to start blogging. He’s kicked off with the first post in a 2-part series Writing a Facebook event synchroniser for Outlook 2007+ Part 1 Looks good so...

Sessions Posted The first pass of the sessions at have been posted and if you're a delegate you can login and vote for your favourite sessions (to help us with timetabling and room allocation). Your votes will be automatically migrated to your agenda when we finalise the time and room stuff. If you're...

We’re looking for a new Audience Lead at work. You will be managing many of the evangelists (including me) and marketers in DPE. This is a great  job, with great responsibility and frankly we want to ensure we get the right person for the gig. The formal job description can be found here. However...