RDN last night

Thanks to everyone that came to the RDN last night, and to Chris for doing the "In-Depth" session.

I defintely picked some good information up around Windows Workflow, and hopefully some of you got something out of my WCF Primer presentation. That was my 2nd presentation (I did one for the local .Net user group last year on the Composite Application Block).

I was pretty nervous before, and for the 1st 5 minutes or so, but once I settled into it I managed to put my nerves to the side and present! It's challenging presenting to so many people when everyone is at a different level.

One great thing from doing the presentation is that you learn things about the technologies that you might not have known about before. For example I understand the internals of WCF - its extensibility and messaging layer - much more than a week ago, and a lot of the terms I'd read about - behaviours for example - are a lot clearer in my mind!

As for the experience, it's a buzz and I'd recommend it to anyone. I think it's awesome for building up confidence. I'm hoping to improve my skills as-well as time goes by and will use last night as a personal bench-mark.

An interesting thing after last nights was looking through the feedback forms. I really appreciate the ones with the comments, and the lower scores as those are ones which are really useful for getting better. Not that I don't like the high scores - they are great too!!!

So more coming soon hopefully. Watch this space!

New job, new times, new challenges...

It's been a while since I last wrote so here's an update of what I've been upto.

I left the Bank I was working at. The politics were getting me down and it was wayyyy to stressful. I learnt tons of good stuff whilst there - .Net 3.0, WCF, WPF, CAB to name a few, and made some good friends as-well.

I had a holiday to Vietnam and Cambodia which was awesome. Plenty of pictures at www.flickr.com/photos/graemefoster.

And finally I started working for Readify, an MS Consultancy. For those in the UK who haven't heard of Readify they are a very well respected MS consultancy firm in Australia with a whole bunch of MVP's working for them.

The job is going to be really challenging and exciting. I'll be consulting on architectures, running training sessions, giving presentations to the local community, fixing bugs for customers, you name it I'll be doing it!!!

And along the way I hope to be writing more blog posts about, ummm, stuff!!!