Just found out that I won an Xbox 360 - pretty cool.

I'd like to thank the academy...

Seriously though, it's pretty nice that Microsoft recognise the efforts of the .NET community. Around the country there are a lot of hours volunteered each month preparing sessions, speaking, catering and hosting events - all run at no charge by the community for the community.

Without the support of Microsoft and Darryl Burling in particular, it would be a lot harder for us to provide pizza every few weeks to hungry punters.

Last year I calculated I'd ordered 800 pizza since starting the Wellington .NET user group, and it must have been another 200 since then! I recently put together list of all the pizza we buy in a month nationwide, and it's about 200 pizza across all the user groups. That much fat don't come cheap!

So, thanks to Darryl and Microsoft, and thanks to all the great speakers and attendees that come along to meetings every few weeks and make the user group what it is!

Kirk

P.S. Two user group events in Wellington coming up -- one tomorrow and one next Wednesday -- check out http://www.dot.net.nz/wellington

My blog server didn't come up after the power was cut to our house yesterday. I didn't notice till the wee hours of the morning, and then found out that the graphics card was fried (they don't make 10 year old graphics cards like they used to!)

My mission is to provide an uninterrupted level of service, complying with my personal ISO 9002 committments.

Of course, running your blog on a 10 year old PC in your basement hooked up to a UPS with 5 minutes charge isn't exactly complying with ISO standards :)

This Wednesday in Wellington, Ivan will be presenting at the Wellington .NET Users Group.

Ivan is one of my all-time favourite contributors to the .NET mailing list, and I am always impressed at the amount of thought he puts into his mailing list posts, blog posts on his personal and the Mindscape blog, and into his presentations.

Ivan has recently been awarded a Microsoft MVP award for his contributions to the .NET community, well deserved too!

Anyway, enough of my geek idol lust...

His talk on Wednesday is titled "Build Your Own Designer: an introduction to Visual Studio DSL Tools". In the session he will be talking about when and how you would make a design surface within Visual Studio, and the designer he has recently been building.

Please RSVP and coming along this Wednesday 18 June.

Kirk

Joe White has done a great job posting session notes from TechEd US.

One post that I found interesting was his notes from Roy Osherove's talk "How not to write a unit test".

There was quite a few suggestions in here that resonated with me, such as removing 'new' calls from within your tests into helper methods that create or initialise objects, and some of his thoughts on stubs vs mocks.

An interesting read, easy to skim through. Thanks Joe, and thanks Roy!

(Wish I was there!)

Trade Me making value judgements, or just representing the facts? :)

I was surprised to see that the price of TelstraClear bundled plans are rising at the end of the month.

Looking at the old and new pricing pages, the main price rises seem to be in plans with broadband. Some of them increasing by $120/year:

Phone, TV and cable modem	Old	New
2Mbps & 1GB/mth	$98.02	$103.01
4Mbps & 5GB/mth	$108.02	$113.01
4Mbps & 10GB/mth	$118.02	$123.01
10Mbps & 20GB/mth	$138.02	$148.01
10Mbps & 40GB/mth	$168.02	$178.01
10Mbps & 80GB/mth	$208.02	$218.01
25Mbps & 120GB/mth	$298.02	$298.01*

_{* Curiously, this plan dropped by 1 cent!}

How can this be? Surely internet prices should be steadily dropping, not increasing? Especially as more households and businesses in New Zealand get broadband.

Perhaps it's because TelstraClear got voted Best ISP, they can put their prices up?

Maybe it's to support infrastructure upgrades and top-end plans?

Maybe they are matching Telecoms prices?

Whatever the reason, I'm surprised at the increase -- broadband should be getting cheaper and faster (pretty darn quick?) rather than slower!

Kirk

One persons vision of the Google OS:

http://goosh.org/

Coming from a unix background, there's just something so natural about a shell that has commands directly hooked to google :)