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 .

The folks over at The Code Project have launched a cool contest so you can show off your LightSwitch skills and win prizes in the process. From their release: Do you have what it takes to be a LightSwitch Star? Show us your coolest, most productive, LightSwitch business application and you could win...

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...

As part of our developer readiness outreach, our Visual Studio Product Manager, Ibrahim Hamza, has organised what sounds like an excellent session on maximising your productivity with Visual Studio 2010. Learn how to become a Visual Studio coding guru! In this fast-paced session, learn to write code...

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...

One of the most effective ways to get a message, any message, across is to use stories. For some reason the human brain appears to be wired to be good at remembering and regurgitating stories. I like to begin presentations with a story that’s somehow relevant and am always on the lookout for a good story...

I’ve been raving about our great Training Kits for a while now (including last week’s post on the updated LightSwitch Training Kit ). Last week we also released the March 2011 version of the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit and Training Course . The Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework...

Hi, my name’s Andrew and I’m an AlphaJax Addict. It’s been 15 minutes since I last played and that’s only because I’m waiting for my 15 opponents to get of their lazy backsides and have their turn. On the upside, AlphaJax has led to this comment from my anti-smartphone wife: Wow, this isn’t nearly as...

I’ve been excited by LightSwitch since I first saw it more than 18 months ago and the recent release of the Beta 2 version and the updated Training Kit has just got me more excited. The Training Kit includes the following content: LightSwitch Overview Demo: Introducing Visual Studio LightSwitch Hands...

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...

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 ...

For some time now, I've coveted the Lego Mindstorms NXT 2.0 Robotics kit . It's a great teaching toy tool and not only can you program it with the excellent and intuitive Lego IDE (from LabView), but you can also use Microsoft Robotics Studio and .NET. With that justification, just before Christmas I...

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...

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...

Got a note in may inbox over the weekend announcing some developer training happening in Darwin. I see Dave's beaten me to it , but I'll repeat here because I reckon it's worthwhile encouraging these kinds of things especially in our more … regional … locations. There are four courses being run, some...