The Irish Microsoft Technology Conference will be held in Dublin on June 7th and will host a wide range of speakers including Tim Sneath from Microsoft. The sessions will cover topics such as:

• Building Silverlight Applications using .NET
• Visual Studio “Orcas” and AJAX
• Microsoft Expression Studio
• SDLC the Team System way

and lots more. Here is the full agenda.

The conference is organised by MTUG (Microsoft Technology User Groups of Ireland) and IrishDev.com in association with Microsoft Ireland.

The price of the conference is only EUR50 including lunch. You can’t really beat that!

I attended the Agile with Team System and DB Pro event hosted by MTUG Cork on Monday night. The evening was broken into two sessions, Brendan Lawlor firstly presented “Can Microsoft Development be Agile?” which was an excellent presentation. Brendan began by describing what he meant by Agile by drawing an unexpected but excellent analogy to Zara (an agile company in the clothing industry). He then proceeded to show how his company (Decare) has implemented the agile methodology using Microsoft Team System taking advantage of continuous integration, unit testing and refactoring capabilities built in. I really enjoyed the talk especially since I am an ethusiastic CruiseControl.Net /Nant / NUnit user for the past two years.

The second session was entitled “Introducing your Database Objects to the Agile Process Using Microsoft Visual Team System” presented by Alan Crowley. Alan explained how with the emergence of Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals that the database has really been integrated into the software development process. Database scripts and schemas are now treated as a standard artifact and can be subject to the same processes as regular code, including source control, refactoring and unit testing. It really showed that Microsoft have put some thought into how to bring in the work of the DBA or SQL Developer into the software development process.

Overall time well spent with two very interesting sessions. Looking forward to more MTUG Cork sessions in the near future. Thanks to Joe Gill as ever for organising everything.

Techcrunch is reporting that Feedburner is to be bought out by Google. I use Feedburner on this blog to track usage and stats on my rss feed. It is a very popular service amongst bloggers so I’m not surprised that Google has decided to purchase them. It will be interesting to see how the service changes over the next months, will it be rebranded, will the service offering expand ? We’ll have to wait and see.

$100 Million Payday For Feedburner - This Deal Is Confirmed

Feedburner is in the closing stages of being acquired by Google for around $100 million. The deal is all cash and mostly upfront, according to our source, although the founders will be locked in for a couple of years.