Jacksonville Code Camp 2007

Organized by the Jacksonville .NET Users Group, Code Camp was a rather large gathering of geeks from all around the east coast. Most were from the area, several from other parts of Florida, some from out of state even as far as Virgina.

The day long camp started at 7:30 am with a dissapointing breakfast provided by Panera Bread. Dissapointing because it never showed up. However, there was plety of free coffee, soda & snacks available all day.

I attended the following sessions during my day at camp:

9:am - 10:10am - Building data driven applications with Visual Studio 2008 and LINQ by Jim Wooley who is currently helping write Link in Action. This was a great intro to LINQ and Jim definately knew how to use it.

10:20am - 11:30am - The Art of Design using Design Patterns in .NET by Vinay Ahuja. This was a good refresher on GoF Design Patters which I’m still trying to wrap my head around and use when and where it applies.

11:30am - 12:30pm - LUNCH! There must have been 100 boxes of Little Ceasers pizza provided for everyone. It was enough to last until the very end of the day.

12:30pm - 1:40pm - Using Short Message Service imagine the possibilities - Jose Fuentes. Jose had a cool demo once he got all the necessary software installed, but it did work. He had his Windows Mobile cell phone plugged into his laptop running a .NET SMS Server Agent which would get notified of text messages the cell phone received and was able to send messages out through the phone programatically. Jose is also the vice-president of the Capital City .NET User Group.

1:50pm - 3:00pm - SuperSonic Development with SubSonic - Chris Chandler. The presentation didn’t start off too well with projecting his laptop. So he dove into examples of generating data access layers with SubSonic. I personally feel that SubSonic is best suited for a prototype application and not production, but maybe I don’t know enough about it yet.

3:20pm - 4:30pm - Introduction to Visual Studio 2008 - Joe Healy. Sounds like VS08 (formerly “Orcas”) will be released in the next couple of months before the big 2008 releases coming up February 08. A few things to be exited about are: built-in javascript debugging, css style manager (ripped from Expression Web), baked in AJAX support, LINQ, & extension methods. There is so much more, but there are better places to read about that.

Other new products on the horizon include SQL Server 2008 Entity Framework (ORM) as an out-of-band release. And “Rosario” the next version of Visual Studio Team System (VSTS). Both are to be released after VS08.

4:40pm - 5:40pm - Agile Development in the Real World - Jaremie Woodruff. From Dilbert cartoons, chickens & pigs to stand-up meetings, Jaremie has quite a personality and understanding of agile methods to help developers produce better software.

The camp finished off with thank yous, awards and of course the prize raffle. They cleverly developed ASP.NET random number generator to make it easier for picking prize winners, however it made the process much more difficult. To begin with, only a few people had the requisite forms including a unique number to get called. After that, it took longer to lookup the random numbers correspoding to the attendants registration number. There were nearly 300 people in attenance, most of which had left by the end of the day so these random numbers that were getting generated were just wasting a lot of time. Finally Dennis (the former JaxDUG president) just let everyone who hadn’t received anything take the rest of the books & misc. schwag.

I was able to get my hands on this book:

XAML in a Nutshell