Thomas Williams

Code Camp Oz 2005 Diaries - Saturday, Part 1

This article follows on from Code Camp Oz 2005 Diaries - Friday.

Saturday morning: I had set my alarm for 7:15AM, to be at Charles Sturt University by the unkind hour of 8:00AM, but I ended up waking earlier in excitement so I got up and jumped straight in the shower. As I was getting dried I heard what I thought was the shower in an adjoining room (quite loudly). I thought nothing of this sound until I later realised it was my alarm radio producing very noisy static. Doh.

My beautiful wife was so well organised that she'd packed in my favorite cereal - Nutri-Grain - and some milk, but to my dismay my room had no bowl and only teaspoons. No matter; I poured all the water out of the water jug into my water bottle, and used the jug for my breakfast bowl. I left the jug out on the bench so it would get cleaned and refilled, and I was on my way.

I arrived at the Uni right on 8:00AM in time to catch Greg Low and Mitch Denny welcoming everyone. All attendees were handed a DVD of Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2, and most of the presentations would focus on this technology (I only saw one session that was done in VS.NET 2003). Nirav, a guy who I'd met before at the Security Summit and who knew I was coming, spotted me and I sat with him (we ended up hanging together for the weekend which was really great...thanks Nirav!)

Mitch took the first session on the Base Class Library, mainly from a C# perspective. The things that stood out for me were his review of generics and XmlTrace, and the NetworkChangedEvent which fired when he plugged in his wireless card and it found the wireless network that was set up for Code Camp. Looking around the hall, there were about 30 laptops (about 300 people were in attendance) and more than a few times I had intense geek envy and had to look away.

Greg Low followed Mitch and spoke about CLR programming in SQL Server 2005. I had seen some of this stuff before but it was interesting anyway - Greg is a great speaker and can mix concepts and code really well. It was during this session that I noticed someone taking photos, not of Greg but of his slides...an industrial spy? I reckon they were probably just saving time by not writing down the slides' content (possibly a bit of a waste, as the slides are promised to be up on the Code Camp site later this week).

Adam Cogan was next and did an amazing demo with ASP.NET 2.0, showing off the new databinding features and GridView, all with hardly any code. I enjoy Adam's presentations as he is the closest thing to a “geek rock star” that I have ever seen! He also showed photos of his recent trip to Brazil and talked about his new Dell laptop (which was one of the things I'd had envy about...watching Adam while he was in the audience also revealed one of his security secrets - really, really, really ridiculously small fonts, so no-one can read over your shoulder).

One of the sessions I was looking forward to was next - Andrew Coates and an overview of ClickOnce. At the start of the presentation Andrew informed us that he was going to do his whole presentation with a pen and tablet PC only - “no keyboard, no mouse, no net, no safety harness“. I was a little perturbed by the “no code“ bit as I thought he meant “more PowerPoint“, but it turned out that he could demonstrate the ClickOnce user experience and the Visual Studio settings without his mouse or keyboard, and he would show the more code-intensive options at his next session. Phew!

The sessions were all kept to 45 minutes with a 5-minute gap in between, so it had been an intense morning. After Andrew's session the pizzas arrived for lunch and everyone took a brief break. At this time there was also a panel discussion going on, but I skipped it in favor of getting some fresh air.

The organisers could not have picked a better location. Charles Sturt Uni is quite beautiful, set in bushland about 10 kilometres out of town with a dam (and ducks) and a winery on the campus. I didn't bring my camera so I can't post any pics. You'll just have to take my word for it.

In Saturday Part 2, I cover the afternoon sessions and dinner.