Cincinnati Code Camp 2007

Original Plan:

1. Get Up at 4:00am
2. Meet James and Monish at 4:30am at the office
3. Pick up Alexi at 5:00am at the Stringtown exit
4. Arrive at Cincinnati at about 6:30am
5. Go to IHOP for breakfast.
6. Arrive at Code Camp before 7:30am to help out on the registration

Actual Plan:

1. Phone call at 4:45am from Monish.
2. [2-5] same workflow
3. Arrive at Code Camp at 7:45am.
   

Mental Note: when you are setting your alarm you should make sure it is setup for the correct day. I set my alarm for 4am on FRIDAY... :(

To make up for the lost 30 minutes, I was doing about 74.6 miles/hr down on I-71 South. We make it to Cinci at about 6:50am. However, finding the IHOP was a little bit more complicated than we expected. Google sent us driving through neighborhoods and dead end streets for a while. Finally we made it to the IHOP and the Code Camp.

1st Session: Missed it [front registration duty]

2nd Session: Getting to know Generics by Dustin Campbell
Dustin was showing some of the gotchas using generics. One of the main point he was try to make was that sometimes developers do not know what else is out there and use Generics for all return values. He explained about a couple of namespaces which will return Read-Only generic types, which are safer for public interfaces.

3rd Session: Real World Sharepoint by Jim Holmes
What can I say? He is good.! Jim was doing the Sharepoint 2007 presentation yesterday at DevCares, and today's presentation was not a repeat.! One thing that I learn, is that the BSOD is still available in Windows Vista.! Jim got a BSOD right at the beginning of the session.! :)

4th Session: Intro to XNA by William Steele
Bill's presentations are always amazing. I have a bigger interest in the XNA Development Toolkit, since I am volunteering some of my time to teach kids about programming. So this knowledge will compliment my presentations. I am using Kids Programming Language, and the way XNA works, it seems that this will be an awesome transitions for kids that are captivated by game development and want to move on to more advanced topics.

5th Session: Intro to Robotics by William Steele.
This was by far the most fun presentation I have attended in a long time. The concept with the Microsoft Robotic Studio is almost the same: Microsoft is providing most of the skeleton/framework code for you, so that you can concentrate on the actual code for your robot and not how the robot works.

6th Session: Real World Agile by James Avery
His session was in the same format as the Open Spaces at CodeMash. The only difference was that the topic was defined by James and not the audience. But the 2-way interaction was there and it was good. Good questions and good suggestions from the audience, kept the presentation going past the time. To the point that they were tearing down the wall for the closing session while James was still talking.! funny.

Overall, I think that the Code Camp was a very nice local event. There were plenty of drinks till the end of the day. Food as expected in a conference. It was nice being part of the developer community. I will definitely come back next year. Kudos to Mike Wood and all of the volunteers there, they did an awesome job.