John Price, treasurer and all round nice guy (he sends us money to pay for the venue and pizza!) visited the Hereford nxtgenug group last night and gave a fantastic walkthrough on integrating Windows Media Centre into your home and home network. I'm really motivated into getting the whole Media Centre set up now, just got to wait until I can build up my hobby fund.

I did a ten minute nugget on how to plug in ELMAH to ASP.Net, a great way to add error logging and mailing without any code changes.

You can find more details on the event at the nxtgenug site as usual.

Andy Wrigley will be stopping by our developer group tomorrow to give us a presentation on developing with Windows Mobile. Important stuff, like keeping power usage down, only turning on the attached hardware (GPS etc) when needed and rigging the code for testing via dependency injection. If you need help with anything mobile based, I'd suggest calling Andy (let me know if you need a direct contact).

Richard Wilde will be losing his nugget virginity and doing a turn on PLINQO. Does he mean PINGU? What childrens TV and penguins have to do with a tech group I've no idea. Maybe it has a USB interface.

Pizza and swag too! Overview of the event on the nxtgenug site.

JetBrains have said we can give a licence for ReSharper away each month at our Hereford software developer group. ReSharper is one of those tools that you can't do without once you start using it and this edition is worth just shy of £150, not to be sniffed at.

ReSharper adds a ton of functionality to Visual Studio that aids refactoring, unit testing and generally navigating around your code. Yes I know you can do all those things yourself, but you'll make mistakes occasionally, take a LOT longer (ReSharper works almost immediately, you can't type as fast that) and fumble around while someone with ReSharper will have finished their work and be off to lunch (probably eating your lunch).

Thanks to JetBrains we'll be bundling this generous donation into the swag fest at the end of each meeting. If you've already won a licence before then we'll give you a decent bit of alternative swag instead so that someone else can benefit.

Brilliant! Telerik have agreed to sponsor us by giving away a copy of the Telerik Premium Collection for .Net (developer license with subscription and source code) EACH MONTH! If you check the product pages out you'll see that it amounts to $1,300 of software, which is extremely generous of them. So for turning up and learning how to code better, you stand a good chance of winning valuable software that'll make your app shine and save you time.

If you've been in a cave with Osama you might not know that Telerik develops excellent components for WinForms, Asp.Net, Ajax and WPF. The kind of stuff that is genuinely useful, looks good and you wished Microsoft shipped in the box. Check out Telerik TV and the demonstration area to see what you could do with them.

We'll put the licence in the swag mix at the end of each meeting which will add some variety to the normal t-shirt, socks and MSDN oriented loot.

Keep coming to the nxtgenug Hereford group and the odds get better of winning each time because previous Telerik winners won't get a second copy (just some nice swag from other sponsors).

Balsamiq is the modern equivalent of fag packet scribbling (for non Brits, fag is a cigarette, not a slur!), somewhere you can quickly draw your software user interfaces without worrying about how they look. The best designs come from the back of fag packets apparently (perhaps they should have called it fag packet mockups).

If I had this at the height of the dot com boom I’d definitely have been saner and possibly would have made some cash. I ran a software development, web design and nerd creche at the time and we used to design the visuals in full for any sales leads we were going to see. It worked well apart from a few flaws;

1. It would take days to get the designers to come up with good looking visuals.
2. The customer would become fixated on the design (which was the point really, but it got too nitpicky). They would start asking to move this text over there and change the colour of that and could they have their logo animated in 3D. At this point we were still trying to get our foot in the door.
3. If they saw a nice looking visual they would often wonder why we wanted to charge them £40,000+ for the system. After all, it looked finished.
4. The nice imagery was just to get their attention, it had not been thought through by anyone so buttons would exist that did not make sense and the whole workflow thing had not happened yet.

As you can see, mockups looks a bit sketchy and this is intentional, I’ll explain why in a minute.

Along the top you can see the different groupings of UI controls. Selecting one of these will show the toolboxes with the UI elements in them, think of them like Visual Studio toolboxes with the controls in groups.

Hopefully you won’t end up with a design like below (from thedailywtf).

Mockups is not just a designer tool, in fact it is more targeted at developers who can’t do design (I include myself in that) as it takes away any fiddly decisions. For example, you can’t change the typeface from Comic Sans on anything, there is a good reason for this though. It appears that Comic Sans is the only typeface that is properly cross platform. Saying that, they do provide a way of changing the single font in use if it really irks you. By the way, because it is written in Flash and deployed using Adobe AIR it is cross platform and runs on anything that runs Flash (Windows, Mac and Linux, possibly ‘phones).

The documents are saved as XML which means you can write your own code to manage them (possibly translating to Winforms etc). There really is not that much to it, you drag and drop and set a few properties just like the VS designer.

The app is not free though and costs $79 (Monopoly money), real money is £52 which is a pittance really, you can find it at Balsamiq Studios.

Chris Seary from the Oxford nxtgen group will be coming to see us tomorrow at Shire Hall to scare us with tales of SQL injection, WCF abuse (something like meth ampthetamine, or so I hear) and general security woes.

I'll be attempting to demonstrate Balsamiq and interfacing new technology (my MacBook) with steam age stuff (our projector). If they don't work together then it's all on paper!

All will be revealed on the morrow along with copius amounts of pizza, soft drinks and swag.

Well, that was fun! Richard Costall and Geff Lombardi (both from nxtgenug Birmingham) came along and did a fine turn on WCF and the upcoming Silverlight 3.0 release.

Geoff's WCF nugget was for the first ten minutes and just shows how complex this seemingly innocent sounding anacronym can be.

Richard's Silverlight was a bit more in depth given that he is an MVP (look at that bio, lots of acronyms again) and he showed us as much as he dare without the Microsoft lawyers demanding his incarceration and a pound of flesh.

Basic details about the event can be found on the main nxtgen site, I must take more notes in future!

Herefordshire is quiet, very quiet. That's why I like living here, plenty of space and great for concentrating on software development. The only thing we haven't had until now is a developer's user group but that changed yesterday when Dave McMahon, John Price and Guy Smith-Ferrier rolled into Hereford to help us launch the Next Generation User Group (NxtGenUG).

NxtGenUg was formed by Richard Costall, Dave McMahon and John Price with groups initially in Coventry and Birmingham. The idea for the groups is to learn and develop Microsoft oriented skills in a fun way, with swag and free software.

Dave kicked off with an entertaining ten minutes on when we meet (7pm - 9pm, 3rd Monday of each month), where (Shire Hall, Hereford) and what we do (ten minute code nugget, main speaker, break for pizza and drinks, main speaker again and a final 10 minutes of swag giveaways). The first two meetings are free to non members but after that there is a £70 a year fee to help cover the costs of the venue, speakers travel costs, food and drink. We scrounge the swag from sponsors which normally includes t-shirts, software licences, mugs and generally all sorts.

Guy Smith-Ferrier then stepped up for the main talk which was an excellent and entertaining talk on 'Visual Studio 2008 IDE Tips and Tricks' and John Price played Father Christmas very well and threw out random swag.

Richard Wilde, another local developer and friend is running it on an ongoing basis with me and we'll be working at getting the numbers up, booking quality speakers and bringing in more swag.

We did toy with the idea of setting up in Ludlow but couldn't find the right venue and it's even sleepier (although better looking) than Hereford. With Worcester, Gloucester and Wales all pretty close to Hereford the group has a better reach.

Come along and say hello and get involved with the UK Developer Community at NxtGenUG Hereford!