Now that we’ve closed on the first annual CodeStock conference of Knoxville, TN, I’ll share my experience as a speaker and attendee. I am absolutely thrilled that I was asked to present at CodeStock 2008, and just as thrilled to be able to participate in the excellent sessions and open spaces that were available.
Sessions:
I sat in Steve Andrews’ session titled “Automation with MSBuild 3.5”. Steve has a step by step layout and demonstrated the setup, configuration and use of MSBuild. Steve lives relatively close to me, and we tend to hang out in the same circles of geek friends, however I’ve never gotten around to see this talk particular talk of his until now (sorry Steve!). He did a great job overall, explaining the ins and outs of .csproj/.vbproj files, how to perform a build process and also some best practices around build scenarios.
The second session I was able to attend was Jim Wooley’s “Linq Migration Strategies”. Jim is an excellent presenter and his talk demonstrated many great strategies on dealing with Linq when you have to migrate from your existing data access or integrate Linq with existing technologies such as ADO.NET. Jim also covered topics like dealing with XML by using Linq, and migrating from the classic System.Xml.XmlDocument object, which is such a pain for so many developers. He also dealt with some optimizations and other tips and tricks that are sure to make a lot of developer’s lives easier. Great job Jim!
Open Spaces:
I found the open spaces, where I hung out the rest of the day, a very fun and informative venue for sharing information and really getting great insights on what the other folks in the industry are doing and thinking. There were so many topics that were flying around, data access, mac lovin’, dealing with incompetency in the workplace, planning & managing user groups and more. Many folks joined in and there were so many smart people sharing so many views, you had no choice but to learn something valuable. Special thanks goes to Alan Stevens as the facilitator of the open space sessions.
My Session:
I presented a talk I’ve been doing a lot recently titled “An Intro to ASP.NET Dynamic Data” where I give the nickel tour of Dynamic Data, what it is and how you can use it. Nathan Blevins did a write-up of my talk and CodeStock on his blog, and you can catch it here.
Summary:
Thanks to Michael Neel, Alan Stevens and Wally McClure (but especially Mike Neel) for doing the organizing of the conference and inviting me to participate. I was able to spend a weekend with friends like Mike, Alan and Wally that I already knew and was able to meet some people in person whom I only knew from online (read: twitter). A great time was had by everyone.
