AppFabric Goes South(ampton)

(Very!) Belated thanks to the good developers of the NxtGen user group in Southampton for having me down last week to give my Developers Guide to Distributed Caching with Windows Server AppFabric talk. Despite a horrible journey round the M25, I had a really good time - I felt the session went well, the technology didn't let me down, and there were some really good and interesting discussions during the session and afterwards in the pub. It was also good to put a few faces to Twitter names!

A Developer's Guide To Velocity on tour!

Following on from Liam's recent tour dates blog,I thought I should do something similar...

First of all I need to offer belated thanks to NxtGen Manchester for having me up to speak in January. I had a good time even though something went wonky in my VMs while I was running my demos that morning which meant I couldn't run the demos in the evening. I hope everyone still got an appreciation of the capabilities of Velocity.

I'm running this session again at Edge UG at Microsoft in London on 17th March - visit http://edgeug.net to sign up. I may be running it at DDD Scotland if I've been voted in. Subject to agreement on dates it'll be at NxtGen Southampton in June. I've also been talking to NxtGen Cambridge and NEBytes about doing it for them over the summer.

UPDATE: Well I didn't get voted in for DDD Scotland, but there'll be another opportunity to vote for me at DDD Southwest.And I now have a confirmed date for NxtGen Southampton - 24th June.

@philpursglove is in Demo Hell

Last Tuesday I took my new session on Velocity to the NxtGen User Group at Oxford, having responded to Barry's plea for a speaker. And I had a bit of a 'mare. In fact, a lot of a 'mare.

I knew I was in trouble when I fired up my laptop and the Velocity Powershell console showed an error immediately. So I tried to fix it by uninstalling and reinstalling only to discover that if you have no network connection Velocity will not install. At all. It makes no difference whether you're using a network share on the local machine to store the cluster config, or trying to store it in a SQL database on the local machine - no network, no cache.

So I'd like to thank everyone for listening and offering suggestions as to how I might have got things working faster. I've put my slides up at http://philippursglove.com/velocity , but I'm doing a bit more work on the demos, I'll put them up later this week.

Thanks to NxtGen Oxford

Thanks to everyone at NxtGen Oxford who came to see my ASP.NET scalability presentation last night. The code and slides are available for you to download at http://www.philippursglove.com/ScalableASPNET. I haven't had chance yet to work out why the SqlCacheDependency demo didn't behave, I'll look at this later on today and update this blog entry when I've worked it out! Feel free to email me at phil@philippursglove.com or comment here if there are things that need more explanation or you just want to discuss something.

Update: I just figured out why the aspnet_regsql command-line was failing when I tried to enable my Northwind database for caching. I hibernated my laptop when I left the office on Tuesday afternoon, on Tuesday evening when I switched it back on it couldn't contact our domain. So when I tried to run aspnet_regsql with the '-E' switch for integrated authentication, I couldn't be authenticated against our domain and consequently SQL Server's security (correctly) wouldn't let me do anything. If I'd instead used the '-U' and '-P' switches with an administrator username and password it would have worked.