I'm just back from holiday (my way of explaining the lack of blog postings recently) and I'd like to make sure that people are aware of a whole host of technical developer events that are coming up. Some things to bear in mind:

1. These events are free to attend. Does that mean they're actually just thinly-disguised marketing? See below
2. They are delivered by technical people who have no marketing or sales targets. These are people who get paid to impart technical knowledge, not to sell things - which means the events are purely ways to learn about technology and you won't be sold to. In fact, no sales or marketing people are present at these events
3. Which means that they're actually a really good way to get some good technical knowledge for nothing....

We're running these in a number of locations across the UK, take a look at http://www.microsoft.com/uk/msdn/events/ for details.