Last week I learned that I would be speaking at VSLive in New York this fall. I will be presenting two talks on Wednesday, September 10. One talk is entitled "Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices – More Than Just Good Advice" and the other is "Fall in Love with Visual Basic All Over Again - Visual Basic 9". In the patterns talk my goal is to not only educate attendees about the functionality present in Microsoft's patterns and practices libraries but also to try to convince the listeners that it isn't worth spending time rebuilding these same tools - use your developers' time to build products that add business value. My talk about VB9 will cover many of the new features added in the latest release of VB, along with some features that come as part of Visual Studio 2008. I don't plan to cover the LINQ features in VB9 as I am sure you will see more LINQ presentations than you care to think about.