The final day at Codemash was one to remember. The day started off with a keynote from Scott Guthrie on LINQ. A great intro on the power of LINQ, and how it can be used as an OR mapper. Next was a session on letting NHibernate be your data layer, which, after the keynote on LINQ, I wonder if it is necessary to use NHibernate, seems to me that they do similar jobs, but I could be way off base also. The following session I sat in on was about a product called Selenium. It was a really cool and very powerful website testing tool. You can record your inputs while moving through a website (with a firefox plug in) then edit and save it as a test. It looks easy to install and will run on any web server and most browsers because it is written in javascript. A product that must be checked out. After that I was invited to sit in on a small group private lunch with Scott Guthrie, that was awesome, we got to ask him questions and tell him about the pain points we are having with the all the new technologies from Microsoft that are coming fast and furious. After lunch I listened to a session on continuous integration, it's not something the company I work for is looking to implement, but we could definitely could use some of the tools presented. The last session I attended at Codemash was a more in depth look at LINQ, it had peaked my interest at the keynote, so I had to learn more about it. Extremely powerful, unfortunately it doesn't work on any project below 2.0, so it's great for the future, but as for now I will have to access data the way I have been doing it. At the Codemash closing, they had a ton of swag, everyone got a book, I got the Java 6 sdk book, I'm don't see how I'm going to use it, but I'll at least peruse it. They gave away 2 xbox 360's a WII, some iPods, and some USB sticks, I, unfortunately, didn't win any of them, but I'm still happy with the book. At the end, Josh Holmes and Brian Prince shaved their heads in response to the 500+ blog posts about Codemash!
All in all, I had a great time at the conference, I met a ton of people that I wouldn't have got a chance to meet at a .Net conference. The biases between the languages seemed to take a back seat while developers took the time to embrace the differences in the languages and admit that there are simply tasks that a specific language is better at accomplishing. I can't wait for Codemash 2008! Thank you to all the sponsors and the volunteers that made this possible.
Scott
Ann Arbor .Net Developers Member
