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Remember, remember the 28^th of March….  It’ll be the first user group meeting of Vista Squad.  If you haven’t signed up, you can do so here or just pop over to TVP tomorrow evening and we’ll definitely have space for you.  We have 2 talks lined up, one on Vista Hardware Assessment and a cracking talk on Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).  Vuescan will also be there to have a quick 10 minute talk around their scanning software and scanning in Vista with some free copies of the software to give away.

We have food and drinks available during the evening which is in Building 3 (Memphis) at the Microsoft campus at TVP (map available here).  Looking forward to seeing you there!

I was recently given a license to a BlogJet (legal of course, but not revealing from where). Its a pretty nifty desktop blogging application; much more so than Windows Live Writer in its stability and features.  I’ll be testing it out for my current blog and some of the others that I haven’t revealed.

On that note, any suggestions on cheap Windows hosting with a (very) small SQL Server?  I’m looking to move over to Subtext as my blogging engine and am requiring some space.

I am very proud to be part of the team that is launching a Vista and .Net 3.0 usergroup for the UK today. We’ve been planning this for a few months and I’m very happy to say its finally coming to fruition. Based in Berkshire, we’re going to be running it out of Reading as Microsoft have kindly allowed us use of one of their rooms to hold the meetups. They have been very helpful and have stepped away from the running of the usergroup (a very good thing in my opinion) which allows us to run the user group as we see fit.

Our first meeting will be at Thames Valley Park on the Microsoft Campus with two talks arranged. We’re going to start off with a presentation on the Vista hardware assessment tools by Scott Belton, followed by a great talk on Windows Communication Foundation by Michael Luke. It all kicks off at 18:15 on the 28th of March and should end around 21:25. We will have some time to chat to the various members and we’re lucky enough to have food and drinks supplied.

If you’re interested in coming along, please visit the official site of the user group, Vistasquad.co.uk (what a cool name!) and drop a comment on the blog post to sign up for the event. We only have 50 seats available for the first meetup so sign up quick!

I look forward to seeing everyone there. Its going to be a great evening out.

Now that the usual ooohs and aaahs from the latest Google release of Traffic information has died down, I wanted to bring some useful information to the fore. The traffic information is pretty much useless.

Lets have a look at what the colours from the traffic information means (from the Google Help Topic):

* Green: more than 50 miles per hour
* Yellow: 25 - 50 miles per hour
* Red: less than 25 miles per hour
* Gray: no data currently available

The reason the system falls apart is that there is no context for the traffic information. You have a fixed legend with no differing traffic information for differing road speeds. You get the same colours if you’re on a 70 mph road as you would on a 30 mph road. This makes the usefulness of the system a little fuzzy. Compared to the Live.com offering (US only), Google for once is definitely in second place. Well done Microsoft, you’ve done well here.