MVP in Virtual Machines Last week, on 1st April, I received an e-mail from Microsoft letting me know that I had been presented with a 2010 Microsoft® MVP Award for outstanding contributions in Virtual Machine technical communities during the past year. It was an honour to be nominated, and is a great reflection on the vibrancy of the UK user group community which made this possible. Virtualisation for developers, not just IT Pros I consider it a special honour as my expertise in virtualisation is ......

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Thanks to everyone who voted me onto the DDD8 agenda. It’s always an honour to have a topic voted into a conference by an audience of fellow developers, especially when it is a non technical topic such as this. I hope those who came enjoyed the session had a good time, and for them or those who were on one of the other tracks, or who couldn’t squeeze in; I’ve uploaded the presentation for you to download. I created a more simple, and smaller, PowerPoint without all the fancy animations and video ......

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History I have to admit that I’m a browser laggard, I haven’t installed Google Chrome, and I was a late comer to upgrading from Firefox 2.x to Firefox 3.0. I wasn’t always like this. I actually used to pay for Opera rather than deal with Internet Explorer back in the days of Windows NT4 days. Recently I’ve been lazy. Firefox 2.x had all the stuff that I used to pay for in Opera; tabbed browsing, opening entire folders of favourites etc. So the following may not come as news to some people in terms ......

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Following on from the highly regarded DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper days, some top guys from the UK developer community have organised a similar event for those dabbling with SQL Server. More details, and registration are now available at http://www.sqlbits.com. Just like DDD it will be held on a Saturday at Microsoft's UK headquarters in Reading. This is a welcome addition to the community calendar, given that database sessions at DDD can often become neglected as they aren't seen as dealing with ......

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The premier community .NET developer event is back on 30 June 2007. You can find out details here, and register for the event at the Microsoft events site here. And if you needed an incentive to sign up ... my session hasn't been voted in so it's a Liam free event. Technorati tags: ddd5, ddd ......

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CORRECTION - now one week earlier, on 17th May (was 24th May previously). A quick plug for the London .NET user group geek dinner on 17th May. Zi has setup a page on the .NET user group wiki here so sign up and vote for your favourite eatery. See you there. Technorati tags: geek dinner, community, london .Net User Group ......

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I decided to add some unit tests into my first CI Factory project. First I used a reference to MbUnit.Framework.dll in my test project, this is the unit test framework which ships with CI Factory, and all worked fine. No disrespect to MbUnit, but I decided I really wanted to use NUnit so I can utilise the larger amount of documentation and community knowledge that exists for NUnit (even though it might not be as flexible as MbUnit). So I added NUnit 2.2.8 (.NET 2.0 version) underneath my CI Factory ......

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Having spoken at the normal DDD community events in the UK I was looking forward to the combined nature of WebDD which was aimed at both developers and designers interested in web technologies. Similar to DDD Microsoft UK hosted the event in their UK headquarters in Reading, and provided a quality lunch and refreshments, and the excellent bonus of a fully licensed version of Expression Web for every attendee. The hope for a 50/50 split between developers and designers wasn't quite achieved, developers ......

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During Sarah Blow's talk at DDD2 on Windows Mobile Development, she kindly plugged the RapidDB libraries which I have developed which are being made available as an open source project. It this sparked your interest you may want to find out more ... Basically, RapidDB is a set of libraries to provide a combination of; agnostic database access (SQL Server 2000, SQL CE 2.0, MySql 4.x, IBM DB2, Access MDB, Oracle 9i 'nearly there') a thin object relational model wrapper for communicating with the database ......

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Well, I've finally joined the blogging community. I'll try to restrict comments to useful information but I'm relying on you guys to let me know if I ramble on too much. Starting this blog is aimed to coincide with the release into the open source community of a rapid database development system for .NET which I have worked on over the past year. The goal is to provide generic database access to SQL Server 2000, MySql, IBM DB2, Oracle, Access MDB and SQL Server CE, complete with code generation in ......

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