I had a great time doing a talk at Ignite Sydney this year. My title was “Statistics - Learn it or Lose” Andrew Coates: Statistics–learn it or lose. Some other great talks from the night (not all safe for work): Andrew Walker’s quirky The Binary Taxi Driver Ben Grill’s strangely compelling Secrets of...

Thinking about writing a game for Windows Phone? Come along and learn from some of the best in the business. Featuring three strands from casual games you can write and publish in a couple of hours up to hard-core 3D games with the unity framework, this DevCamp has something for everyone. Get your game...

DDD Melbourne 2012 has been announced and the call for speakers has opened . If you’re a developer in Melbourne (or are happy to travel for an excellent event), check it out.

The Lifehacker folk are running another series of their meetups, this time focusing on Windows Azure. I'm going to skip around the country with them as well. The dates are the evenings of Tuesday June 5 in Brisbane Wednesday June 6 in Sydney Tuesday June 12 in Melbourne and Wednesday June 13 in Perth...

Richard Banks is presenting a Readify Dev Day in Sydney early next month on a topic that I suspect most of us could do with a bit of brushing up on. From their event site: At the conclusion of this Dev Day, attendees should not only understand the theory of estimating and prioritising a product backlog...

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...

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...

While we were at TechEd ( talking , by the way, about Visual Studio LightSwitch , twice ), the LightSwitch team released a GDR (General Distribution Release, aka update) to "resolve an issue encountered when publishing to SQL Azure" "This is due to a recent SQL Azure server upgrade which...

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...

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...

Update 2 - 21 Sep 2010 I've removed the lo-res wmv links because so few of them (<5) actually had videos behind them. Use the MP4 links for lo-res and WMV-High for hi-res. Update 21 Sep 2010 There are now also MP4 files available. These are lower resolution than the HQ-WMV files, and therefore...

This year at TechEd Australia (aka #auteched ) the locknote was delivered by Miha Kralj, Director in the office of the CTO. The session was entitled "How IT is changing us and our future" and was delivered using a very cool style called PechaKucha – 20 slides, each on the screen for 20 seconds...

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...

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...

As I said in my update , we've had an overwhelming response to our Call for Content for TechEd Australia and New Zealand. Submissions are now closed and the Track Owners are beavering away making final decisions about which of the huge selection of content they have to choose from they can actually fit...