It’s time to dock with the mothership

It seems that the many headed Hydra that is VS Live is coming round again in October, and it’s bigger and better than ever. If you thought it was good before, you haven’t seen anything yet.

While I can’t promise that attending it will make you more successful with members of whichever sex you prefer, I can tell you that some of my favourite speakers are going to be there. Rachel Appel will be delivering talks on creating data driven web sites with WebMatrix and Razor, a dive into how Orchard CMS works and will finish off with a high dive off Microsoft 1 into a thimble containing an inch of water.

If you think that’s impressive, Pete Brown will be delivering a whole host of XAMLicious goodness and rumour has it that he will do this tied up in chains, dangling upside down in a big box of water, wearing nothing other than a goose-fat thong. You owe it to yourself to get along to the Redmond mothership and catch these outstanding talks, and a whole lot more.

Disclaimer: Some of this shizzle is made up, but the bit about the great speakers and the topics they’ll be talking about is 100% straight up.

Well scupper me sideways and butter me with kippers.

Right, now that I got your attention with that rather bizarre title, I’d like to bring your attention to the forthcoming VS Live event in Las Vegas. The Early Bird registration ends on 23rd March, and if you register by then you should save $200 – good value in my book (available at all good retailers if I’d bothered to write it). Register here.

Visual Studio Live is the ideal opportunity for you to meet some of the Microsoft dev team and MVP rock stars. Press them hard enough and they should treat you to some amazing deep dive coding sessions, and if they don’t, don’t forget to tie their hair in a bun and call them Ethel.

Sample sessions include DotNetMaster’s Billy Hollis and the ever magnetic Rocky Lhotka (don’t take your harddrive too near to him), presenting a day workshop on April 18th. This session, “Making Effective Use Of Silverlight And WPF”, should be a good one and promotes two of my favourite topics – don’t forget to attend. Rocky also presents another subsession about another of my favourite topics, as if you can’t tell what that one is; it’s the exciting sounding “Leveraging the MVVM Pattern in Silverlight, WPF and Windows Phone”. Find out more about these and other wonderful sessions here.