Just a quick note to mention an event I’ll be speaking at in September. SkillsMatter will be hosting Progressive .NET, a 3-day event set of tutorials on September 5th-7th in London. I’ll be speaking about C# 5’s async feature on the last day (9.30am-1pm) but there’s a host of other speakers too. Should be good. For my own part, with four hours or so to cover async, I should be able to cover both the high level stuff and the implementation details, with plenty of time for the inevitable questions.

This one isn’t free though, I’m afraid – it’s normally £425. Hardly pocket money, but pretty good value for three full days of deep-dive sessions. However, there are two bits of good news:

• Readers of this blog can get £50 off using the promo code "PROGNET50" at the checkout.
• I have two free tickets to give away.

In an effort to make the ticket give-away fair, I’m thinking of a 32-bit number – mail me (skeet@pobox.com) an Int32, and the two readers with the closest value will get the tickets. Please include "Progressive .NET" in the subject line of the mail so I can filter them easily :)

Anyway, hope to see you there – please grab me to say hi.

Update (August 4th): and the winners are…

Congratulations to The Configurator and Haris Hasan who submitted the closest numbers to the one I was thinking of: -890978631.

In fact, The Configurator guessed the exact value – which is the result of calling "Progressive .NET".GetHashCode() on my 32-bit laptop running .NET 4. (I can’t remember which versions have different hash algorithms, but as it’s pretty arbitrary, it seemed good enough…) I’m impressed!

I’ll be emailing SkillsMatter to let them know about the winners – and thanks to everyone else who mailed me a guess. Hope I’ll see some of you there anyway!