|Absolute Value|

One word: Great! 

Hosted at the new Microsoft building in Victoria, London, Vista Squad had an amazing meeting with a great turnout.  Stephen Lamb kicked us off with a discussion on security in Windows Vista which sparked some interesting discussion. 

Following some food and some interviews by the Vista TV guys (yes, I know I’m one of them) we headed back in for a great display of what WPF and Silverlight can do by Richard Godfrey and Paul Class from iPrinciples.  Pretty amazing use of the technology stack.

I really do think the user group hit a turning point at that meeting.  We had a good and enthusiastic turnout and everyone really was engaged during the meeting.  Lets hope the rest of our meetings are of this quality!

Thanks again to the presenters for their time, Microsoft for providing the venue and refreshments and to our fantastic members who made for a memorable evening.

I have a copy of Half Life II Episode I to give away.  I just bought the Orange Box over Steam and having already bought Episode I, its available as a gift.  If you’re interested in the copy, drop me a comment and I’ll send it over.

The next Vista Squad meeting is confirmed All your favourite superheroes will be in attendance. Watch out for VS.TV launch!!!!

Date: 24th October 2007 Time: 6pm onwards
Location: Microsoft London (Cardinal Place) 100 Victoria Street London SW1E 5JL

Agenda:

• 6pm:
  • Arrive
• 6.25pm:
  • Introduction
• 6:30pm – 7:30pm
  • Stephen Lamb: IT Pro Session
• 7:30pm – 8:00pm
  • Break
• 8:00 – 9:00pm
  • Richard Godfrey: WPF and Silverlight Demos (British Library, London Underground and BBC Showcase & more)

There will be a copy of Vista Ultimate up for grabs!

See you there!

Please add a comment here to say that you are looking to hone and develop your own superpowers by attending

I’ve just got off the phone with Virgin Media.  After an entire weekend of nothing more that 100KB/s downloads on my supposed 20Mbit connection I’d had enough.  Yes, this is a rant.

Calling the "free" support number I’m told to redial a premium rate number for Internet support.  In Virgin’s favour someone answered within a few seconds and started to diagnose my problem.  Initially no problems were found but my rate was still way under the service I’ve been promised. 

As a bit of background, Virgin does do traffic management during peak times.  On my specific package if I go over 3GB during these peak times, my 20Mbit speed drops to 5Mbit which I consider completely acceptable.  In this specific instance, I’ve done 2GB the entire day.

After much argument by the most rude support person ever, I was told I was being traffic managed.  After explaining to her how my traffic management was supposed to work, she then backtracked and said traffic management was not being applied to my account.  Followed up by the fact that Virgin was testing other traffic management procedures and this could possibly be the reason.  This could have been the tipping point for me as I CANNOT believe that an ISP can test traffic management on accounts that are expecting certain levels of service.  Absolutely unacceptable in my books.

After another level of argument where the technician would constantly interrupt me trying to explain that I thought something was wrong, out came the information that if I wanted a ticket lodged against a problem, I would probably have to pay for the engineer’s time.  Umm, excuse me?  I’m paying Virgin Media every month for an expected level of service.  This should INCLUDE fixing any problems that may occur on my line or anywhere along the wire.

I’m starting to wonder if Virgin can actually supply the 20Mbit that they promise.  Do they have the capacity during peak times to supply the bandwidth that I and many other people pay to receive.  Virgin, wake up.  Get your customer support to sport a professional face, even if it is a facade and get my Internet working.  Tomorrow will come a phone call to customer service which will probably end up in nothing being done as per Virgin’s normal activity.

(If you can’t see this video, click through here)

This is HUGE! Having access to the source code without going to Reflector AND being able to debug, this really makes developing in the .NET framework world a great help.

I’m extremely excited to see this coming and cannot wait. Well done the .Net guys!