A few people have contacted me asking about the Developer Dinners.  At the last dinner, I mentioned that we were going to try to move to a monthly cadence for the dinners.  I also mentioned that we were going to make recordings of the dinners available on demand so people outside of the Reston, Virginia area could watch the sessions. 

What’s up with the recordings?

I didn’t attempt to record the August dinner.  I hit some technical snags trying to record the October dinner live.  Therefore, I had to redeliver/record both sessions after the actual event.  I announced the availability of the recordings here.  Unfortunately, the only recording published so far is the August dinner on .NET Framework 3.5 SP1:

http://blogs.msdn.com/publicsector/archive/2008/11/09/devdinnerondemand-overview-of-the-net-framework-3-5-sp1.aspx

My schedule and some failed attempts to record have made it difficult to get the ASP.NET MVC dinner session published.  However, I am happy to say, I finally recorded and edited the session.  I just have to prep everything and publish it.  This may take a day or so. 

James, the User Experience Evangelist on our team, held a Designer Dinner on Expression Blend 2 this week.  We had every intention of recording the event, but once again hit some technical snags.  I never realized recording and making the sessions available on demand would be so challenging.

The good news is that we are working with the facilities folks at the Microsoft Reston office to make parts of the recording process less challenging.  We’ve also learned quite a bit from our recording issues so we’re not as green anymore:).  Moving forward, our plan is to record the dinners live (including all the great Q&A from attendees). 

I am also working on a solution to make ALL of the on demand content (webcasts, screencasts, in-person events, customer interviews, etc.) from our team much more discoverable.  More on that to come…

The last developer dinner was in October, so what gives?

We decided to have a full day developer conference in December highlighting technology announcements from PDC 2008.  Therefore, we skipped the November and December dinners.  The details about the conference are here.  The recorded sessions from the event will be published.  However, only 2 of the 4 sessions will be live recordings (more technical snags).  Stay tuned…

We will have a Developer Dinner in January titled Building Business-Focused Applications Using Silverlight 2 and Beyond.  The official announcement and abstract will be published soon.  Moving forward, we plan on moving to a monthly cadence for the dinners.  I can’t guarantee we will have one every month, but that’s the goal:).

Hopefully this clears things up.