Thomas Williams

Code Camp Oz 2005 Diaries - Saturday Part 2

This follows on from Code Camp Oz 2005 Diaries - Saturday Part 1.

Saturday: During lunch I realised that even though I'd had the best intentions to meet bloggers who I thought were going to be at the event, never having seen any of them physically meant that I couldn't pick people out of the crowd. Perhaps I should have done a bit of preparing and either (a) asked everyone at the event their names and match to a list of people I wanted to say "Hi!" to, or (b) e-mailed people I wanted to meet and organised a bit. Next time! I did go around and introduce myself to one or two people (I couldn't miss Geoff Appleby, he looks exactly like his blog photo) but I would have liked to meet more people.

In the afternoon I didn't go to all the sessions, so my coverage might look a little patchy. I did miss the session directly after lunch and my notes are a little jumbled (possibly a mental siesta straight after lunch?)

Early in the afternoon Joel Pobar presented some amazing low-level detail on compiling and JIT execution. I honestly could have listened to Joel for another couple of hours - prior to hearing Joel speak I had never stopped to consider that the .NET framework was written by programmers developers architects too (obviously very, very smart people).

Next up was Dominic Cooney discussing Managed Code Performance Fundamentals. Dominic had some useful stuff in his talk, and pointed to some essential tools in order to squeeze performance out of .NET code.

The next session was Joel and Dominic again. They had been given the broad brief to "come up with something interesting", and they certainly did: how to write a compiler in 45 minutes! The two worked really well together on stage to make their task understandable and by the end had covered how they could spec a language and implement a parser, and then, using reflection, emit an assembly (these guys fall into the class of the very, very smart people I talked about earlier).

Chris Hewitt presented on some of the quirks in using visual styles with Visual Studio 2005 and his workarounds, including using the new toolbar and menu controls. Personally, I hope that the Skybound VisualStyles component still works in Visual Studio 2005 as it means I don't have to think about manifest files/flatstyle properties in my apps.

Next up was Nick Randolph and Bill McCarthy with the much-anticipated topic (for me) of Visual Basic 2005. Bill was a laid-back presenter who bought lots of experience to his presentation and showed an obvious familiarity with the product. I think he used a slightly older build of Visual Studio which ran a bit slower (unfortunately), but it meant that he was able to show us stuff that wasn't working in the later builds, that is scheduled to make it to the final product. He also showed refactoring in VB.NET, which was amazing. Nick also had a good presenting style and had a good idea of what the people in attendance wanted to see.

This presentation also had a little competition attached: answer a few questions and write why you love (or hate) Visual Basic. Nick and Bill started at around 7:00PM (no dinner break), and I reckon they could have shortened their session as it was a long day, but it was worth sticking around to the very end because I won a prize in the competition (a book) and also got to see Mitch Denny cross over to the dark side, albeit briefly (to see a short, concise, enlightened poem which was his answer on why he loves VB, go to http://notgartner.com/posts/1531.aspx, but keep in mind, he's one of those C# guys). I almost got disqualified from my winnings because I told Bill that I didn't “love” VB, I just “liked“ it. I think he relented when I told him that I “loved“ my wife, and my affection for VB wasn't in the same league!

We got out of there at around 8:45PM and I headed back to the hotel for a shower, then by 9:20PM I had picked up Nirav (after getting a little lost) and we went out to dinner. The Indian restauraunt we had picked was already closed so we went on to La Porchetta's where we had some great cherry cheesecake. Mmmmm, I could go a piece of that cheesecake right now...

After a filling dinner, it was back to the hotel to have a look at my new book ("Building Applications and Components with Visual Basic .NET") and catch some sleep before Sunday's 8:00AM start.

Stay tuned for Sunday's sessions and my trip home.