Code Camp Oz 2005 Diaries - Sunday
This article continues from Code Camp Oz 2005 Diaries - Saturday Part 2...
Sunday: Officially, Code Camp Oz was scheduled to end at 3:30PM on Sunday afternoon. With that in mind, I had booked my hotel room for Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights, but late Saturday night I decided I'd leave on the Sunday so I could at least spend some of the long weekend with my family. So I showered, packed everything, didn't have any breakfast (my makeshift bowl hadn't been washed), checked out by 7:45AM, and headed over to the Uni.
Unfortunately a side effect of my plan to leave early was that I wouldn't be able to attend the closing ceremony - oh well, I thought, I'll read about it in other's blogs.
Chuck Sterling opened the day with a session on the upcoming Team System. He really knew his stuff. I admit that I paid less than full attention as we're unlikely to ever get Team System where I work (although Chuck demo'd some cool stuff, especially the web tests).
Next up Joseph Cooney talked about Web Services. He had a nice demo that was a form with a button for each concept he tested. After clicking a button on his demo form and showing us what it produced, he'd walk through the code required to get the results. Very nice.
After Joseph's session I stopped for 4 or 5 quick Monte Carlo biscuits (sorry all those who missed out because I had more, much more, than my fair share!) and got talking to two tutors from the Uni. I was mentioning that I wished I'd done more programming during my time at Monash last century, and lamenting the fact that we'd only learnt very basic C++ (my first job was in Visual Basic, which I learnt all by myself). An interesting perspective that the tutors put across was that it was possibly better to teach in Java (for instance) and cover good programming principles (e.g. inheritance, re-use, encapsulation, etc.) than be language-specific. I could see their point, and I reckon I became a bit more grateful for my Uni education right there and then. One of them also pointed me to Python for .NET (which his classes were in), something to remember for a rainy day.
In conjunction with the main lecture hall, there were smaller, informal peer sessions being run in another room throughout the weekend. There was one peer session that I was keen to attend, titled “Best practice for deployment”, that was due to start at 10:00AM. I headed up there with Fai who I'd recently met (sorry if I spelt the name wrong). He was a student and was lapping up all the different content as he had a good philosophy of “you never know where you might be working”.
We arrived in the smaller room to find 6 or 7 people chatting, being informally led by Darren Niemke. The conversation was running hot on SOA, XSD's, contract-first, web services and XML Spy. This stuff is way above my head but it was great to hear the debate between more experienced devs. When Darren politely asked what we thought, I asked about deployment best practices and we had a very short chat on the topic.
Later that day was one of the highlights of the weekend for me, being interviewed by Geoff Appleby. Geoff recorded the interview for Microsoft's Frank Arrigo but I'm not sure if it's going to be used or not. I started the interview with what might be called “shameless self-promotion” (but, I'm a little ashamed afterwards, so now it's just self-promotion) in talking about my blog here. I also talked about how much I enjoyed Code Camp and that i'd be at the next one for sure (if my work supports me by paying for some of the expenses, like they did this time, all the better!)
Next was Greg Low's talk on ADO.NET 2.0. I'm willing to say, with no reservations, that Greg is always informative to listen to (I think in this session he took a cue from Adam Cogan and had a short, funny video before his presentation as well). He talked about the new SQL Dependency for data caching, and that it was broken in the latest Visual Studio 2005 Beta, which seemed to me to be a bit of a common problem that other presenters also mentioned. Greg explained that the teams and sub-teams working on Visual Studio 2005/SQL Server 2005 were sometimes out of sync with each other and some teams might miss the beta deadline. Fair enough.
James McCutcheon spoke next on “Compact Framework Tips and Tricks”. He had a Pocket PC device next to his laptop and showed as his code actually running on the device, connected via a Remote Desktop-thingy (which was pretty cool). That got me thinking about all the cool stuff that's yet to be written for smart phones/pocket PC's/blackberry type devices. I wonder how many developers write code for those platforms?
After a delicious Subway Turkey, Ham and Dijon (and maybe chicken as well? 3 meats in the one bite...mmm...) sandwich for lunch, Nirav and I headed back to catch Andrew Coates' “Advanced Click Once Deployment”. Andrew had presented a session the day before that had used no code, and this was his chance to delve into the programmable aspect of Click Once. Well, he didn't disappoint. Click Once looked great and seemed to work well. It also looks like a natural transition from the App Updater block that I started using recently (what a stroke of luck).
Andrew finished and it was time for me to hit the road and end a great weekend. I really enjoyed the Code Camp atmosphere. Next time I'll try and speak a bit more to other people, as I stayed pretty much to myself this time (I tried to do a good job keeping Nirav company), and I'd like to spend more time in the informal sessions listening to what's happening with other developers.
Well done to the Code Camp organisers and speakers. I'm looking forward to next time!