CodeMash

Codemash Day 3

Scott Zischerk — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 07:59:00 GMT

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

CodeMash Day 2

Scott Zischerk — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 08:09:00 GMT

Another great day at CodeMash! The morning keynote was awesome, I really like Neal Ford's presenting style, I just get the feeling he's a real straight shooter and he always let's you know exactly what he's thinking. Listened to an interesting session on rapid web development in TurboGears, looks like I need to learn Python now so I can explore TurboGears a little further. The second session I sat in on was 'the end of n-tier' which was basically a parallel processing, grid computing, cache product to place the different tiers in. The lunch keynote was a little off the wall yet still intriging Bruce Eckel was attempting to expamd our minds and they way we think about programming. After lunch I sat in on a session called 'Beyond TDD' which I thought was going to be about taking TDD to the next level, but was actually just contemplating the side effects of TDD (Trust, Documentation, etc...) still good, just not what I was expecting. My last session of the day was on a source control product called Subversion, sounds like something I need to check into further, but I don't know if I can get my head around not checking out exclusively. Dinner was awesome, good food, good conversation, I ate with Dave Pease, Darrel Hawley, and I met two java programmers from Columbus, Jonathan and Bryan, Jonathan was trying to explain dependency injection to us, and when I say trying I mean I still don't get it. Looking forward to tomorrow, Scott Guthrie is going to be here talking about LINQ.

Scott

Ann Arbor .Net Developers Member

CodeMash Day 1

Scott Zischerk — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 07:44:00 GMT

Got here yesterday with my colleage Dave Pease checked in to the Kalahari Resort, this place is pretty great! A large indoor waterpark, gameroom, and putt-putt. But what was even better was the panel of speakers they had there. Some of the best and brightest in PHP, Ruby, C#, Python, Java and Flex. What was so great was how civil it was, no language zealots, no arguments, there were a few digs, but the entire panel was very informed and accepting of different languages and where each had it's good points and bad. Looking forward to tomorrow.

Scott

AADND Member