Danger and Excitement

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I was doing a tutorial this morning and I had just run the program when all the power in the building went off. The students present were most impressed, they had never seen a program that could turn off all the lights.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) it turned out that it wasn’t my code. The power came back on after five minutes or so, and later on we got an email saying that owing to problems at the local sub-station we would have to shut down the university and leave early as “any delay could cause catastrophic problems”.

I had this vision of people standing around a pair of glowing wires and someone playing the Scotty role and saying things like “I dinnae think she’ll take much more captain..”

Unfortunately it meant postponing my 4:15 VB lecture. Sorry about that folks, we were going to learn all kinds of interesting things about file paths too….

F#, State Diagrams and Racing Cars

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I went to a session today about F#, which is a functional language. This is a very interesting way to write programs and is now entering the mainstream as part of Visual Studio 2010. Well worth a look.

I also had a wander round the exhibition hall, which is huge.

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These folks are doing really interesting stuff. They have developed a way to take state diagrams (a nice graphical way of showing the behaviour of a system) and use these to produce code. They can even animate the state diagram and allow you to set breakpoints in the application controlled by it. Great for embedded control, and just about anything controlled by a state machine. Which is just about anything really. Great Stuff.

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I didn’t have a go, but I really wanted to…

Flushed With Success

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After my TechEd session I thought we’d go out and celebrate in style. The style I imagined was a bit strange, in that we’d found out that there was a very strange bar near the hotel which had a rather strong toilet theme.  This theme extended to food served in potties and drink in sample glasses….

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This is us toasting another good day in Berlin. thanks to Adam for the snap

We were going to have the food too, but our nerve failed and so we went out and got a burger instead.

Student Session Fun

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Did my first TechEd 2009 session today. Students and XNA. What could go wrong? Well, fortunately, nothing much as it turned out – except for one of my demos getting a tiny bit stuck.  The audience was great, and I took a picture of them all:

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On the left….

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..in the middle..

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…and on the right

Thanks for being a great audience folks. I hope you enjoyed it.

After my bit we were joined by some other TechEd speakers and we had a really good question and answer session.

If you want to find the links to my stuff, you can find silly games content at www.verysillygames.com

You can find my Yellow Book on C#, and my Orange Book on Java to C# at www.csharpcourse.com

I will be posting the slides for the session, along with all the sample code, on this blog after my session on Wed.

TechEd and Mauerfall 2009

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TechEd started today. I went to  a very good session on Windows Azure first thing. Then I had to go off and sort out some presentation related bits and bobs, which was a bit of a pain as there were a couple of other sessions I wanted to see. However, once the day’s work was done we headed off the the Brandenburg gate to see the Mauerfall event.

This was a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall by the toppling of an enormous row of domino-like blocks that stretched for over a kilometre. They had all kinds of heads of state there, a full orchestra and a live appearance by Bon Jovi.

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The inside of the station

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The outside of the station

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A nice view across the river

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On the way to the gate

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Waiting by the wall

We found a good spot near the food and drink stands and began to wait. And it started to rain. And rain. After two hours in the rain I found that most of the things I had with me that I thought were waterproof, like my coat and shoes, were not. After three hours in the rain everything was wet. After four hours everything was wet and very cold.  And then it started, We had speeches from the great and the good, music, and the blocks duly fell on cue. It was a great evening, even though I have never been so cold and wet.

Out and About in Berlin

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Today we wandered over to the TechEd Conference centre to register.4092686828

This is the front of the centre. Very big. However, the most surprising thing was the sheer scale of everything around this part of Berlin. It must be the conference centre of Europe. All around there are enormous halls set out for these kind of sessions.

Next we ventured into uptown Berlin again. Peter wanted to climb to the top of the Bundestag. So we did.

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On the way we took in the Sony Centre, which is absolutely huge.

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On top of the Bundestag they have this amazing glass dome with mirrors inside that reflect down onto the parliament below.  Very impressive.

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This is the view from the top of the Bundestag at the blocks they are assembling as part of the 20th anniversary celebrations of the end of the Berlin wall.

Tomorrow the conference itself starts properly.

Heading for Berlin

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Today I was up at 3:00 am. Not that I’m complaining that much, after all we are going to Berlin for TechEd 2009. We had a nice shiny hire care to drive to Liverpool airport where we would board one of the few direct flights to Berlin. Once we had arrived and unpacked it was time for a stroll. Of course I took the camera.

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The Russian Embassy

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Brandenburg Gate

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I love the colours of the stone in this light.

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Nice buildings at night.

I’ve put some more pictures on Flickr. I think we are going to like it here..