MVP Summit Opens

Toby Richards gets us all fired up.

The MVP summits happen every year or so. Microsoft invites all of the 4,000 or “Most Valuable Professionals” they have recognised for efforts in their field to come to their headquarters and meet with the teams that actually make the products.

It still amazes me that Microsoft organise things like this. It must cost them a fortune, and in these cash-strapped times they might be looking at other things to spend their money on. Quite often, when things get tough the on of the first things to go is events like this, where the benefits are very hard to put directly onto the bottom line.

Each MVP is awarded in a particular specialism. I began in the area of Mobile Devices (search for “Smartphone Cheese”) to find out how I got started. More recently I’ve done work with XNA and the .NET Micro Framework, but I’m still very interested in device development, and so that is what I was here to find out more about.

The summit began with some welcome presentations, starting with Toby Richards who manages the MVP programme. It was rather nice to have someone stand at the front and tell us all how important we are (although I always feel a bit guilty at this point as I’m never quite sure what it is I have done to merit the attention). Then we had a talk from another Microsoft bigwig, as Rich Kaplan told us lots of interesting things about the future that a Non Disclosure Agreement that I’ve signed prevents me from writing much about. Suffice it to say that things are going to be interesting.

Then it was outside for food and mingling. I’m not a great mingler. I tend to stand there like a lampost with a drink, whilst everyone mills around me. But I did meet up with a few people that I hadn’t seen for a while, and I even remembered some names, which is nice.

Then it was back to the hotel and a meal in the lounge right at the top. This has some amazing views. I’ll take the camera next time.

The summit starts proper tomorrow, with meetings with the product teams. Can’t wait.

Seattle Space Needle

This morning it wasn’t raining, which for Seattle is supposed to be surprising. So we went for a walk up to the Space Needle. I took my camera…

Cool Sign

View from the top

Genuine Bonafide Monorail

And So to Seattle

The MVP Summit is next week in Seattle, and lucky old me is going, which is nice. Set off today from Humberside, my favourite airport.

We had a very smooth journey, and I took a few quick pictures on the way.

Obligatory Taxi Shot

Night Traffic. (I just wish the hotel windows were a bit cleaner)

Doncaster Meeting and Programming Puzzle

Went to Doncaster for an exam board today.

The meeting room had this very impressive chandelier, which lent a lot to the proceedings.

Spent some time chatting with Colin, the external examiner, about programming matters. We were talking about good practices, properties and get/set methods and the like, and a question occurred.

“Why do some types in C# have a Length property (for example String and Array) whereas others have a Count method (for example List)? Both of them do the same thing, so it seems to be silly to have different names for them.”

Colin and I think we know the answer. But do you?

Mended

I love a happy ending. The leak has gone. I tracked it down to the pipe in the wall near the inside stop tap. Dave from next door came round and pulled out the offending item.

Now that is what I call a hole. The water was really spurting out once we got the plaster off it. Turns out that sometimes the flux used to solder the pipe connections tends to corrode the pipe itself. Which is not good.

This is what it looks like now. Much better. Thanks Dave.

The only thing that worries me is that I have a house full of this pipe, so I suppose I’m going get this every now and them. Ah well, at least I have one less now.

Must have Thumb Drive Apps

If you carry a memory stick around with you all the time (and who doesn’t - I’ve got one on my keyring) here are some great ideas for applications you can put on it.

http://crazeegeekchick.com/blog/25-must-have-thumb-drive-apps-for-geeks/

Stealthy Leakage

Somewhere in our house, water is escaping. I can hear it. At three in the morning I can detect the tiny whoosh from the pipes when nothing should be moving.

I’ve checked all the obvious places. Replaced a few likely suspects. But the noise remains. Now, normally I don’t have a problem finding out where water is coming from. Ceilings change shape, objects underneath the flow become unexpectedly glossy, or suddenly go mouldy. But this leak is stealthy. There is no evidence at all. Anywhere. Everything is just as it should be, apart from the sound.

At one point I started to doubt myself. However, Dave came round last night and he heard it too. And (and this is the clincher) he heard it stop when I turned the water off.  The prevailing wisdom is that a pipe underneath the floorboards somewhere downstairs is leaking straight down into the ground. In the fullness of time this probably means that we will have our own indoor swimming pool, followed shortly by a moat.

I hate having a problem I don’t know how to solve. If this was a programming fault I’d be bunging breakpoints in, adding debugging code and generally getting to the bottom of things. If it was a piece of hardware I’d be working out where best to hit it. But when a pipe just disappears into a wall it is kind of hard to discover what is going on. I think I might need to engage stronger powers than mine on this one, in other words it might be time to find a plumber…

Hull in 360 Magazine

If you can track down a copy of this months “360” magazine it is worth the effort. They have a lovely article about XNA in it, with some quotes from me and from Tom as well.

You can even win a free copy of my book by entering a contest they are running. There are some other good stories in there too, and the price is very nice at only 2.79.

Windows 7 on the Advent 4211 Netbook

I’ve been using Windows 7 for a while now. I put the beta version on my little tiny Netbook PC, the Advent 4211 which has a little Atom processor and only 1G of ram.

By gum, it works well. I’m getting a better than Vista experience on a machine that just about runs Windows XP. I even took the machine to Portugal last week and used it to run PowerPoint and Visual Studio (at the same time bless it) during the presentation. It worked really well, the only problem was when I accidentally engaged screen magnification at the end and wasn’t able to turn it off. However, that got the biggest laugh of the session, so perhaps it was OK after all.

One thing that is very impressive is the handling of external monitors for presentations. When you plug a display in you get the four options of netbook only, clone, extend onto external display or external only, and you can manage them very easily by using the new Windows+P hotkey. But, better than that, it works in a very clever way. It actually picks sensible resolutions for each device, even if you are cloning the screen. My little netbook is widescreen, unlike most external displays. Windows 7 took this in its stride, giving me a stretched display on the netbook but a good looking display on the projector, which is exactly what it should do.

In fact, there is a whole lot of “exactly what it should do” in this version of Windows. Stuff seems to work the way you would expect and with a minimum of fuss. The operating system has been rock solid for me and I’ve not had any blue screens of badness. Good stuff, roll on release day.

Wheely Funny

The car needed new tyres. The man in the garage was trying to find out what kind to get. He asked me how far I drive each year. “Around 10,000 miles or so” I said. “Oh” he replied. “In that case I’ll get you a set of ‘Middle of the Road’ ones”.

I really liked that.

Open Day

We had our first Saturday Open Day of the season today. Had a great bunch of people to see us (I always say they are great if they laugh at one of my jokes).

Here they are, looking quite happy – although I hadn’t told the joke yet…

As usual, we gave away a PSP to one lucky winner.

Mike did the honours this time.

Portugal DevDays 09 Demo Code and Presentation on SkyDrive

I’m using the fancy new Windows Live SkyDrive to share out my presentation and the demo programs from yesterday:

• You can find the presentation here.
• You can find the demo programs here.

SkyDrive is actually rather neat. You can attach it to your Windows Live account and it gives you 5GBytes of storage which you can use for public or private data storage.

Having Fun By Degrees

Did my one and only degree warmup of this round of ceremonies today. It was for the students from our faculty, which meant that there were people in the audience who I had actually taught something. Perhaps. Everyone played their parts very well and it was a terrific ceremony. I took the camera along, of course.

Artistic shot of one of the maces

Hon. Grad Sir Andrew Clark, Master of the Rolls, giving his speech (very good one by the way).

Looking Left

Looking Right

I took the pictures at the end of the ceremony when everyone is relaxed, including me. My little camera did quite a good job with the shots.If you want to see a much bigger versions (where you can pretty much recognise everyone) click on the images above and follow the links to the versions on my Flickr account. Then click on the (+ All Sizes) button at the top so you can play “Where’s Wally (or Waldo)” properly.

Pictures from Portugal

I’ve noticed that one way to get really good photographs is to go to nice places and take pictures of them. I’ve lost count of the number of lovely shots I’ve seen in photo books with captions like “The Rice Fields on the mountains of Jokarta look lovely just after dawn”. In this respect, Portugal is a definite win. It has this fantastic light.

Cranes on the skyline

The way into the hotel. Pity the fountains were turned off, but you can’t have everything.

The venue this year was the Instituto Superior Tecnico at Taguspark, right opposite the Microsoft Portugal offices.  I like doing sessions in Portugal. I always get a great audience. The session was all about the .NET Micro Framework, and how you can take over the world using it.

I said I’d put a picture of you all up after the session. Here you all are.

Playing with the toys afterwards…

Now, that’s some kind of font…

Outside the building.

I got back last night and staggered into bed. I’d been away just about 24 hours or so and spent 8 of those in the air. But it was all great fun. Thanks to Microsoft Portugal for setting it up.

I’ll be putting the sample code and the presentation up on my blog tonight.

Sunny Portugal

It really is. Just went out for a walk and the weather is lovely. Blue skys and warm sun. T shirt weather.

I could get used to this, but unfortunately I´m heading straight back to the UK this afternoon. I think that I´ve probably spent more time travelling than I have in Portugal, but it is worth it.

My session is in a couple of hours, should be fun.

Moving at speed

Had a fast moving morning. Damian brought a bunch of excellent fellows from Doncaster for a look round and a sample lecture from yours truly. I also treated them to a preview of the session I'm doing tomorrow and it all went very well. Then it was time for my open day talk. Sorry if it went a bit quick folks, I try to pack a lot in there. Perhaps if I got rid of both of the jokes....

Anyhoo, i'm now waiting for my plane to Portugal. Last time I did this it allwent horribly wrong and I had to call off the trip. Here's hoping for better luck this time.

Universe 2 Rob 1

I thought I was doing OK this morning. I’d gone from broken to mended, with all my demo programs for the Portugal sessions working fine. I even sent a Tweet out to Twitter bragging about this.

Big mistake.

There was just one final link in the chain that I need to sort out, which is the tiny router I carry around with me to demos. There is nothing quite like having your own little network to hand, with an address range that you know and love. And I can even use the router to find out what addresses have been allocated so that they are easy to locate from Visual Studio. Unless, of course, I lose the admin password for the thing.

Which I have just done. Or the universe has engineered for my personal torment. Or whatever.  Either way up, I foresee a certain amount of frantic pinging before the session.

Oh well, if you don’t learn something from an experience you really should not be in the game. I’m never going to brag about making something work. Ever again.

Taking Up Twittering

I've started taking Twitter a bit more seriously, just to see what happens.

Twitter is a system for "micro-blogging", where you send tiny blog posts (around 140 characters) to document the minutiae of your daily life. Steven Fry does it, and has attracted loads of "followers" who hang on his every tweet. Although I've no idea if this counts as a recommendation.  You can sign up for an account at twitter.com

I've no idea why anyone would really want to get regular updates from the "Wonderful World of Rob Miles (tm)" but if you do you can find me on Twitter as RobMiles. 

New Dishwasher Time

Talking of burning, we noticed that the dishwasher was making a crackling noise and burning smell this afternoon which stopped when we sprinted up to it and ripped its plug out of the wall socket. I think it is proper broken.

All this was made especially exciting by the fact that I was talking to number one son on the notebook at the time using the webcam, and so we had to carry “him” downstairs so that he could share in the experience, but perhaps without the smell of smoke…

Burning Fingers with the .NET Micro Framework

Spent some of today soldering. I’m not as good at it as I used to be. Or perhaps things have got smaller. Either way, I was very pleased to see a red LED flashing at the end of my efforts. It meant that I hadn’t destroyed the power regulator chip.

I was soldering pins into one of these. They are a very neat connector that take Xbee radio devices and allow them to fit onto standard plugboards. We are using these as part of our Dare To Dream Different competition entry and we want to connect some sensors.

Having carefully soldered around 20 pins I then discovered that I only actually needed to connect to around four of them. Oh well, I suppose the practice was good for me.