With 135 sessions held by more than 50 speakers across 7 tracks in 3 days, the conference to attend this year kicks off June 16th in Oslo, Norway. Not convinced? Check out the agenda.

Alongside stalwarts like Robert Martin and Scott Bellware, this years conference features a few underdogs on the agenda, including myself! I’ve been lucky enough to be given a slot on day three to do a session on Aspect Oriented Programming – I haven’t planned out my presentation completely yet, but I can reveal already that I have some pretty ambitious plans to make it worth your while should you choose to attend it ;-)

So. NDC 2010. Oslo Spektrum. June 16th-19th. Get your ticket now.

Things have been unfortunately quiet on this blog lately, as I’ve been too busy with other engagements this fall to spend much time blogging. Hopefully I’ll be able to make amends for that this Christmas as things quiet down for the holiday season – so please don’t unsubscribe from my feed quite yet :-)

Until then, if you’re in Bergen this week be sure to drop by the local NNUG meeting on Wednesday where I’ll be giving a presentation about ASP.NET MVC 2. Details are here (in Norwegian).

So it seems summer has already left us – not that it made big of an impression this year, at least not here on the east coast of Norway. But fear not – autumn is not such a bad time to be alive either. Microsoft announced the MSDN Live events in September a few weeks back – since then more than 1000 people have signed up. Read my previous post for more information on when and where if you haven’t signed up already - this is going to rock!

Geek? Beer!

Each of the cities visited by MSDN Live will also be host to an informal social gathering where you can meet the speakers, chat with fellow developers and enjoy a pint (or three).

Here are the details:

Stavanger, September 15th at Timbuktu from 7pm.
Bergen, September 21st at Biskopen from 7pm.
Trondheim, September 23rd at Den Gode Nabo from 7pm.
Oslo, September 29th at Internasjonalen from 4.30pm.

Notice that all of these are the night before the MSDN Live event in that city – except in Oslo, where we’re going to the pub straight after the event to celebrate a (hopefully) successfully finished tour. Be sure to join us in your city if you can! No registration is neccessary, just show up and BYOB :)

Microsoft is bringing MSDN Live on tour again in September, visiting Stavanger (16th), Bergen (22nd), Trondheim (24th) and Oslo (29th). Speakers this round are Einar Ingebrigtsen, Børge Hansen and myself (yay!).

Børge Hansen

Børge did the rounds last year as well, when he was an architect advisor at Microsoft. He’s struck out on his own since then, which means that this autumns MSDN Live actually features no “Microsoft speakers”, which is quite interesting.

Børge’s talks this spring were well received, so its not surprising that he’s been invited back again this time around. He’ll be opening the conferences, talking about Visual Studio 2010 and C# 4.0.

Einar Ingebrigtsen

Einar is an old colleague of mine, and have been steadily gaining a solid reputation within the Silverlight circles - most notably for his Balder project, a Silverlight 3D engine. With a fun and quirky charisma, his talks should prove both entertaining and educative.

Einar will be talking about WPF 4 and Silverlight 3.

Myself

As for myself, I’ll be giving a talk on ASP.NET 4.0, as well as a loosely titled ‘Agile .NET Development’ talk. I don’t want to give away too much about that one – but my goal is to really drive home the point about agile by giving you a peek at what working in a real-life agile project looks like. No (few) slides – pure demo.

Join the Conversation

You can follow Børge, Einar and myself on Twitter. Follow Rune Grothaug for the latest updates and news on the conference (and everything else related to the Norwegian Microsoft dev community for that matter).

Are you a-LIVE?

For more information and to sign up, visit the MSDN Live website. If you’re a student, you get in for free! But hurry up, places are limited.

Winter hasn’t quite let go yet here in Norway, so summer seems a distant, unlikely thing yet. But the Norwegian Developer Conference 2009 is less than three months away (17th to the 19th of June), and with luck Oslo will be sunny side up by then.

Speakers Galore

A lot more information about the conference has been published since it was announced last year, and what sounded promising back then has now been realized through an absolutely stunning lineup of speakers. What was initially supposed to be a two day conference has been extended to three full days where the final day is dedicated to a choice of workshops, and the list of speakers include names such as Robert C. Martin, Michael Feathers, Ayende Rahien, Jeremy D. Miller, Udi Dahan, Jonas Follesø, Ted Neward, Jimmy Nilsson, Craig Larman and Scott Bellware alongside some prominent Microsofties like Phil Haak, Glenn Block and Scott Hanselman. And that’s just some of them – you can check out the entire agenda over at the NDC site - it looks, for lack of a better word, awesome. They’re offering 1- and 2 day passes, but honestly you’d be crazy not to go for the full monty.

Entertainment

Any respectable conference needs a proper party. And (apart from plenty of beer of course) any proper party needs good music! The Norwegian band aptly named Datarock will be performing at the NDC2009 party, so don’t miss that.

.NET Rocks!

.NET Rocks podcast celebrities Richard Campell and Carl Franklin will also be making an appearance at NDC 09, though exactly what fun they’ll be cooking up hasn’t been leaked yet…

User Group Discount

If you’re a member of a European .NET user group, then check with your group to claim a 15% discount on the tickets. Your group can contact Rune Grothaug at Microsoft Norway to sort this out for you if they haven’t already.

#ndc09

If you’re on Twitter, join the conversation under the hashtag #ndc09. If you’re not, it’s about time you got out from under that rock and got connected ;)

Come March, Microsoft is taking the MSDN Live tour on the road again. As usual they'll be visiting Stavanger (5th), Bergen (10th), Trondheim (12th) and Oslo (19th). This round marks the comeback of everybody's favorite Norwegian speaker Jonas Follesø, who has returned to Norway from his year down under to share his expertise on building enterprise applications with Silverlight. The agenda also covers WPF, Windows 7 and Windows Azure, so there's a lot of cool stuff  that you don't want to miss out on this time around :)

Microsoft Geek Squad

New at MSDN Live this year is the Geek Squad. At each event you'll find easily identifiable technology experts (look for people wearing Geek Squad sweaters!) walking around, whom you can grab a hold of to talk to. In Stavanger I'll be on the Squad, so if you want to have a chat with me about TDD, design patterns, Scrum, ASP.NET or anything else (or just want to say hi), then don't be shy!

GeekBeer!

The evening before MSDN Live in Stavanger (so that'll be Wednesday March 4th), a bunch of us are getting together to socialize and share a few pints. Anyone is welcome to join! If you would like to come, then please RSVP on the Facebook event (or if you're not on Facebook, just leave a comment over on Glenn Henriksens blog). A location hasn't been chosen yet, but will be announced on the event page (and Glenn's blog) soon.

I believe GeekBeer events are being planned in Bergen, Trondheim and Oslo as well, but I've not got any info on those, sorry. If you know something, leave a comment :)