I'll be delivering a session to NW-MTUG on what's new in C# 4.0 on Monday 17th May. You can get all the details on NW-MTUG's site and register here.

I'll cover the main new features with code examples for each:

• Dynamic
• Named & Option Parameters
• Generic Variance

There'll also be a few prizes to give out on the night

Having seen how good Winzip 14 can look from Scott Hanselman's blog I decided to try it out but the first thing that annoyed me with the installer is that fact that it attempts to install the Google toolbar, I don't really like any of these toolbars as I have installed other plug-ins that allow me to work how I like with my web browser. Anyway I'm perfectly capable of downloading and installing software from Google if I want it, I don't like software being forced upon me.

Despite this annoyance Winzip 14 does look good and has a useful jump menu when pinned to the Windows 7 taskbar.  

During the installation I also have been presented with the option to select zip or zipx as the default file format for Winzip. The advantage of zipx being that it provides better compression but with the disadvantage that it is not compatible with older editions of Winzip. To test this out I zipped a folder containing a set of my photos using both formats. The uncompressed folder was 127 MB, the zipx file was 96 MB and the zip file was 126 MB.

This screenshot shows the summary screen that is displayed when the compression is complete. One thing that I did notice was the zipx compression is significantly slower than the zip compression.  However there was a reasonable difference in size approximately 20 MB. Although the zipx provides space saving and should therefore allow users to download a smaller file from your web site I don't think I start immediately providing downloads in the format simply because at the time of writing Winzip seems to be the only option for anyone looking to extract the data. However 7-Zip an open source alternative to Winzip indicates in a forum that support for zipx will come in future releases, when this happens I'll then contemplate using zipx as my default format until then I'll stick with zip.

I'm organizing a session at NW-MTUG that will be made up entirely of local speakers. Here's the format.

6 speakers

5 mins each speaker

No questions

Topic of your choice

 

For now if you could let me know of sessions you would like to present just give me a  title and a short description feel free to send more than one, send these to me before July 31^st after that I'll create a poll on the groups Facebook fan page and let the group vote on the sessions they'd like to see. This will be based on session title and description so no one company should dominate the evening. Ideally I'd like to see this happen in October or November as this will give me time to sort sponsorship, the voting and will give those people selected to deliver a session time to prepare. Please feel free to forward this invite to anyone you think would be interested in delivering a session.

More details on Office 2010 & SharePoint 2010 Roadshow can be found here and you can register for the Belfast roadshow here. 


More details for Visual Studio 2010 are available here and you can register for the Belfast launch here.

NW-MTUG’s next session is on Monday 29th March on ASP.Net Dynamic User Controls presented by Niall Merrigan check out NW-MTUG’s site for all details.