It also proved an excellent opportunity for me to test out my new 50mm f/1.4 prime lens without blinding people with a flash. Unfortunately though I didn’t check my auto-focus setting and as a result quite a few of my shots are a tad blurry. But that’s what being an hobbyist photographer is all about, learning.

Mike can haz pizza

Heidi is huge on Twitter…

Vincent is the the man

Normally there is only on person, but Don and Craig both have cheesy grins

You can find the rest of the photo album over here. I welcome your comments.

He will be in Johannesburg on the evening of Monday the 8th of December at the Microsoft offices and in Cape Town midday on the 17th of December. The topic of the events was open to community vote and ASP.NET MVC was the winner, although Silverlight managed to sneak in during the final few hours of the poll.

   8th December 2008 @ 18h30 – Johannesburg – Please RSVP online over here.

   17th December 2008 @ 13h00 – Cape Town

See you there!

I had a great evening and it was awesome to see some new faces in the crowd. We all got name badges switched and had to find the owner of the name badge which meant for lots of introductions and networking. Great idea guys, but with Super Nana please come forward and claim your name badge. :p

PS. I’ve decided not to post the 27 boobs photos due to the lack of participation, maybe there wasn’t enough liquor flowing, but there is always next time. You can click the collage for the gallery.

The event started off as per usual with a bit of a show by some talented dancers and some sexy ladies in bikinis. Unfortunately I had to rely on a steady hand to get the opening keynote photos as I was way back in the auditorium.

And to get the ball rolling Manoj Boohla was rikshawed to the stage, body board under his arm and wearing a Sharks supporter shirt.

This year BB&D sponsored the MVP Cave where South African Most Valuable Professionals were invited to stay together at The Sandringham B&B in Umhlanga.

I took way too many photos to blog about, so you can browse the rest of the photos over here.

Here are a couple of photos:

You can find the rest of the photos over here for your viewing pleasure. Be sure to book your place for the next 27dinner in Jozi on the 27th of September.

Before you ask how I can speak so highly of the man, take a look at his bio and you’ll realise that he isn’t some newbie developer at Microsoft Corp, he is one of the geeks that make us geeks happy with new technology:

Brad Abrams was a founding member of both the Common Language Runtime, and .NET Framework teams at Microsoft Corporation where he is currently the Group Program Manager for the UI Framework and Services team which is responsible for delivering the developer platform that spans both clients and web based applications as well as the common services that are available to all applications. Specific technologies owned by this team include ASP.NET, parts of Silverlight, and Windows Forms.

Brad has been designing parts of the .NET Framework since 1998 when he started his framework design career building the BCL (Base Class Library). Brad was also the lead editor on the Common Language Specification (CLS), the .NET Framework Design Guidelines and the libraries in the ECMA\ISO CLI Standard.

Brad co-authored Programming in the .NET Environment, and was editor on .NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference Vol1 and Vol2 and the Framework Design Guidelines.

Brad graduated from North Carolina State University in 1997 with a BS in Computer Science. Find recent musings from Brad on his blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/BradA/

So take a moment and register for an event:

• Johannesburg – 23rd June – Silverlight 2 with Brad Abrams (evening)
• Johannesburg – 24th June – MIX Essentials ’08 (all day)
• Cape Town – 25th June – MVC (With Brad Abrams!) (evening)
• Cape Town – 26th June – MIX Essentials ’08 (all day)

So what are you waiting for? Remember, the events are FREE to attend so tell your friends about it, register and we’ll see you there.

[tags]SA Developer .NET,Brad Abrams,event,Silverlight,Silverlight 2[/tags]

Join us for a jam-packed morning of developer technical sessions.  We’ve invited community developer presenters to come present on their favourite topics.  It’s going to be to the point, concise, each presentation limited to 20 minutes.  It will be a great learning experience for all of us!

Some of the topics we’ll have presentations on, include “Introduction to Microsoft Sync Framework”, “Liberating Synchronous Processes from the Tyranny of Timeouts”, “WPF Data Binding Explained!” and more.  View an updated list of presenters and topics – http://dotnet.org.za/eben/archive/2008/05/19/devs4devs-saturday-7-june-2008.aspx.

Space is going to be limited so make sure you book your seat early to avoid disappointment.

[tags]Microsoft,event,community[/tags]

Thanks to Hilton, Nicholas and Willie for helping get the word out there and putting South Africa on the international map.

Now does anyone know how to download a copy of the video for storage purposes?

[tags]Tech-Ed 2007,video[/tags]