Codeapalooza Impressions

In a nutshell, thumbs up all the way.

I almost missed it. With my new daughter and time spent on some open-source projects that I’ve left to lanquish over the past year or two I haven’t exactly been getting my requisite 11 hours of beauty sleep every night.  So I had totally blanked out on the Codeapalooza being held on the Illinois Institute of Technology Wheaton campus this past Saturday.  Good thing I had an email alert setup for the night before, so I just made it.  And I have to say, I am very glad I did as it was an interesting, informative and overall fun day for a .NET developer.

The format was setup so you could attend 5 sessions per day.  With 5 sessions running concurrently, so there was alot of information being shared.  I went towards a more Web Development oriented track.

9:30 Writing Better Code by Jason Bock (originally was going to attend Reflection in .NET: Hacking and Futzing with IL but it was rescheduled.)

I came in late and had to stand for the remainder of the session because the place was packed!  Definitely a good sign of the day to come.  There were at least 50 people in the room. (How did I know I wasn’t at a Linux User Group meeting? Because the air was still breathable.  I kid, I kid.  Actually I’ve been to a couple LUG meetings, so not really.) Mr. Bock put together a nice presentation on how to use the Visual Studio 2008 built in tools to apply coding standards, write unit tests, apply code coverage analysis and reformat your IDE for a more pleasant coding experience even in a vanilla install.  Honestly though, I was suprised at how few people knew that you could change the colors in the IDE.

10:30AM From Waterfall to Agile with a Capital A by James Coleman

This was the big surprise of the day.  This guy was knowledgeable, passionate and funny.  He had the entire audience laughing and engaged throughout his presentation.  There were over 50 people in the room and despite the fact he went long because because the organizers popped in and let us know there was a slight delay with lunch, nearly everybody stayed for almost an extra half-hour.  As far I was concerned if he continued presenting on his experiences with Agile for another hour I would have stayed.  It was that much fun.

LUNCH. free pizza and soda, nuff said.

1:00 Rendering Great Client-Side Controls with ASP.NET MVC by Chris Sutton

Another interesting session, but there was a last second change of venue.  I think the presenter assumed the audience had experience with the ASP.NET MVC framework or at least experience with the MVC pattern. Fortunately a few of us showed up early and while we were bantering with the presenter he realized a good portion of the audience hadn’t even installed the framework much less used it.  So he did a quick adjustment and the presentation became more focused on to get up and running withthe MVC framework than how to do more elaborate cool stuff with it.  This might seem like a bad thing, but look at it this way.  Over 50 people walked in knowing nothing about ASP.NET MVC and at least 50 people came out with enough information to get started.  Good deal! Maybe ASP.NET MVC will have enough popularity by next year for the presenter to cover the really fun stuff!

– Wow, allot of people use Twitter.

2:30 Silverlight by somebody from Magenic (sorry, can’t remember his name and the site lists the incorrect person)

This is the one session I walked into knowing almost nothing about the topic but walked out with enough knowledge to be dangerous.  It’s also the session where my lack of sleep and the long day were taking it’s toll. I felt bad because I kept yawning and had trouble keeping my eyes open. I don’t fault the presenter he was swapped in at the last minute when the scheduled speaker couldn’t make it. So with very little time to prepare for a relatively complex topic I felt like he did an admirable job.  I definitely feel more comfortable with understanding what Silverlight is, why it’s important and how I can use it to create interesting applications. He basically had to put his presentation together somewhat on the fly and ran into a couple snags that he had to work through during the session.  Overall though he did a good job and was very educational.

4:00 REST and JSON using WCF and ADO.NET Data Services By Larry Clarkin

A little more informal than the previous sessions and tended to stray from the topic on irrelevant topics.  The speaker spent more time talking about neat stuff from Microsoft that had nothing to do with the topic and a little bit of fratboy antics that were a little inappropriate for the session.  Basicially he kept playing off friends in the audience and name dropping, which did very little to engage or educate the larger audience. Don’t get me wrong, he was often funny and charismatic but didn’t get to the point of the session until the very end and due to a insider joke probably alienated a significant portion of the audience. VB is not a chick language. [Ahem.] One woman did get up and leave shortly after the joke. The only coverage of REST was the Astoria Web Services generator, which is very cool but was only covered for about 5 minutes.  Although, I do know how to use the Autocollage tool and Photosynth to make cool photos now.

After the day was over there was a raffle held with some *very* nice prizes including a 1 Year Subscription to MSDN Team Foundation System and a HD Television and a few X-Box 360s plus a few other nice prizes.

I headed over to the after-party at a local micro brewery and got to meet and discuss IT issues with a few other attendees and some of the presenters.  But familial responsibility called and I had to leave early.

Overall, great day I had a blast and am looking forward to next year.  I’d like to be involved as a volunteer for the next session and help out where possible.  Thanks to all the sponsors and organizers.  It was a really fun day.

Codeapalooza