Today was DDD8, the last DDD event I can do because the rules exclude MS employees from speak and in 10 days time I will be in that category. I presented “A Developer’s Guide to Encryption” (PowerPoint/Sample Code) running through the main options developers have in .NET for cryptography. (The powerpoint deck should have all the spelling checks fixed. I swear those weren’t there on Wednesday when I finished … but I can’t see how anyone could have knobbled it, so I must have just been very fat fingered!)

I’m rather sad to leave DDD behind, I’ve presented at every one of the main DDD events, plus all the DDD Scotland events, the two WebDD and started and organised two DDD events in Ireland. However this does mean I have enough DDD speaker shirts to wear them to work for 2 weeks without having to wash anything …

I should apologise to anyone who expected a sane presentation from me. 10 minutes into the talk the screen was hijacked to have a community member reading poems and eulogising my loss. Jon Skeet’s spotting of code errors were side amusements! These interruptions became more frequent as time wore on culminating in a border of my book courtesy of Phil Winstanley. Then there were the t-shirts with a screen shot from my Crystal Maze appearance on some community members. Poor Ben Hall in the next room had problems as each time my screen was hijacked, his speakers got hijacked too. Then there was my book cover appearing in everyone’s presentations, except Gary Short’s who commented the community would be better off without me … Gosh, maybe I won’t miss these lot. nxtgen also presented me with a “nxtgen lifetime achievement award” which I will place on my shelf in my office once it arrives with the rest of my stuff.

Tweets of the occasion included

On another #ddd8 related note, @blowdart got a sendoff he won't soon forget. Even with therapy. :)

Major embarass @blowdart session!

An amazing start to the security presentation with the projector being taken over and appropriate @blowdart abuse dished out

Watching @blowdart burn his bridges during his final DDD talk. Hard to take topic seriously at the moment :)

Peter Curd has a little of an audience reaction on his blog. Ian has also written up the day, as has Richard.

The photos I took are on flickr, some of the highlights are below