So much to do, so little time...

Well, all I seem to talk about these days is that I am going away on holiday for a granduoso 3 weeks to Australia (maybe I should meet up with other DPE folks like Frank or Dave). The countdown is on now with under 2 weeks til we fly off - can't wait. But, that ain't what is interesting to blog readers out there is what is happening while I am gone or after I get back in January..loads of events and important things! Here's a little run down:

Saturday 2nd December - Developer Developer Developer Day (www.developerday.co.uk)

I think I heard today that it is 'sold' (it's free!) out with over 450 developers signed up to hear about the latest and greatest in developer technologies by the real people who use them - not pretend ones like me. There is a load of cool sessions and I will be in attendance (with camera doing some Channel9 bits and bobs) but not speaking. Instead, I'll be chatting to the speakers, attendees and community organisers and maybe getting a couple of sessions in as well. My hot picks:

Ruby on Rails for .NET developers
Developing objects in Javascript
Getting started with Enterprise Library in ASP.NET
...feel the web dev love!

4/5/6 December - Flash on the Beach (www.flashonthebeach.com)

Jon Harris, the User Experience Evangelist in our team, and John Allwright, designer tools PM, are heading to Brighton for 3 days to mix it up with design professionals, developers and Flash people. This is the one thing I'm gutted at missing as I love getting out to conferences and talking to new people, especially those that don't tend to use MS stuff in their jobs.

Jon has the detail here

19/20 January - Vista and Office Launch event for developers

I don't know if you've heard but we've shipped Vista and Office 2007 and we kind of think it's great news. So we will be telling developers all about it on the 19th with a series of presentations split into 2 tracks...you guessed it Office and Vista. I will be delivering 2 sessions:

Presentation Advances in .NET Framework 3.0: aka "why we can kiss goodbye to crappy looking WinForm apps thanks to WPF"

Data and Fileformats in Office 2007: aka "i'm not sure what this ones about yet but will do after me hols

Ian Moulster has some detail on this and a couple of very nicee (Borat style) reasons to attend.

22 - 25 January - Vista and Office events ???

We maybe doing something very cool and getting the launch material and spreading it to other cities around the country. Very early days but if we can pull it off, it will make the launch of Vista/Office to developers a big UK wide series of events

February + March - MSDN Roadshow 2007 and Devweek 2007

Windows Live, WPF and Expression for me but I think there is plenty to keep me busy above until then! :-)