A little late, I know, but I finally got some time to put my thoughts into place.  First I want to send out my congratulations to Jim Holmes, Brian Prince, Jason Gilmore, Jason Follas, Dianne Marsh, Jeff Blakenburg, Josh Holmes, and John Hopkins for putting on ANOTHER wonderful event.  I went into CodeMash ‘08 with very high expectations based on last years spectacular event, and the group did not disappoint.  A quick thank you to the CodeMash sponsors for helping those folks do that job!  Your loyalty to the development community will not be forgotten by this developer.

It was kicked off by a very insightful panel on how to "sell" yourself and your ideals to clients and/or colleagues.  Then were the two days of sessions which were again some of the most insightful and educational I’ve ever had the pleasure of attending.

The keynotes were five star once again, with Scott Hanselman, Neal Ford, and Brian Geotz all doing an outstanding job.

I strongly urge everyone to go listen to Chris Woodruff’s CodeMash Podcasts, as well as checkout the CodeMash site for slide decks and session audio.

Of course the other half the conference occurs after the sessions are long over and deep into the night.  I had great conversations with folks like Joe O’Brien (who is a way bigger twitter addict then me, Keith) , Jay Wren, and Steven Harman that I am still digesting over. 

Let the countdown to CodeMash 2009 begin!

Be sure to go and register now!  The sooner you do the cheaper it is.  I want to CodeMash 2007 and it was one of the most awesome experiences I had, be sure to check out my blog entries detailing last year if you want an idea of what it’s all about.  It’s inexpensive, it’s at a waterpark, it’s easy to get to, people are friendly, what more reason do you need?  Do you live to code? Why aren’t you already registered!?

Jim Holmes and James Avery’s book “Windows Developer Power Tools” now has a companion website. WinDevPowerTools is a simple, yet interesting website. Once you register you can create your own toolbox letting you share with others those utilities you find useful. You can then browse via the tag cloud and “love” those tools you think worthy.

Right now it appears that only Jim and James can add tools (they’re working on getting the ones from their book up). I think a tool submission page would really be useful. Letting users submit tools would add to the overhead of the site of course, and I’m not sure if the authors are willing or able to take the responsibility. Even though currently the only method of getting a tool added is to email James. So maybe it would actually free him up more. However, I think a user based submission method could really add to the usefulness of the site. There’s a definite feeling of community trying to be built (after all one of the authors helped organize CodeMash), freeing up the tool submission process would really increase that. Maybe that’s coming down the road.

The site opens up the possibility for some interesting statistical profiling. Adding the ability to add some user specific profile information (i.e. industry, location, etc) could lead to some interesting information beyond the current “Most Loved Tools”. I’d be interested to see what tools were in how many toolboxes broken down by industry, location, or even age group. Right now you just submit desired nick, email, and desired password. Which may be a big plus to some people, but limits any of the interesting reporting that would be possible. Of course any demographic information should be totally optional.

One of the hallmarks of the developer community is the sharing of information, a site like this could definitely help with disseminating information on tools. I could see sites created for Mac and Linux very easily (maybe with companion books?), with a unified toolbox between the sites. Especially with the number of open source cross platform tools.

WDPT is a site just starting out, but with the possibility of being very useful to the Windows developer community, sort of a FreshMeat for the rest of us with a bit of social networking for spice. Be sure to check it out!

Thanks to Christopher Grant for pointing out that CodeMash moved from #2 on Technorati’s search to #1:

Amazing! That kind of exposure can only be a good thing for this unique and wonderful conference.

And has been all day:

Only “Colbert Oreilly” is higher. A Midwestern developer conference beating out iPhone says something, I think.

Scott’s keynote on LINQ was very cool. The concept of using specific keywords for data access (the what not the how) is one of those things that when you see it, you ask why noone’s really done it before. I hope other languages and platforms really do pick it up and run with it.

After the keynote I headed to Lean Software Development presented by Mary Poppendieck, which was a great talk and very thought provoking. I look forward to reading some of the books she recommended and at least attempting to put some of the techniques described in practice.

Luckily Bill Wagner’s talk, an Introduction to Functional Programming, was in the same room so I got to just hang out while they set up for that. Bill’s talk was quite a compliment to Scott’s keynote. Bill really showed the power of the LINQ syntax when used against objects and while implementing lambdas. Very cool stuff, I really need to move away from .NET 1.1 as soon as possible.

After that was Lunch, where we got to see Drew Robbin’s first python program as they randomly selected the Blogging contest winner (twasn’t me). I’ve seen a couple people complain about the lunches, but for me it was more then good enough. If people really wanted a full blown meal there were restaurants in the resort. And if box lunches keep the price down, then I say change nothing!

Anywho, after lunch it was off to Neal Ford’s talk on The Productive Programmer. It was amusing to watch him drink coke out of a pepsi bottle, but the talk was very good. I was happy to see that I was already doing alot of the things he discussed (and can’t imagine people NOT doing), but there were alot of utilities and subtle tricks he brought up that I will be sure to use. I look forward to the book!

Then it was on to the last session of the conference (for me), Jim Holmes’ presentation on “Improving your testing with Open Source Testing Tools”. Lot’s of good stuff, and since I hadn’t really been introduced to unit testing and what not before, this talk was very interesting. Fortunately I was able to trade in the book I received at the end of mash giveaway for a book on C# and NUnit. Which should be useful.

Speaking of the end of CodeMash meeting, I ended up coming in second place in Pillar’s CodeOff challenge. I’m sure I’ll put the gift card to full use. The object was to move a company of 100 employees from a building of four floors to a building of six floors while minimizing costs and keeping product teams together. My entry is here, if you’re interested.

We also got to see Brian Prince and Josh Holmes shave their heads! That was exciting, even though we didn’t quite get 500 blog posts in the time allotted, I think we did pretty good and Brian and Josh were awesome about it (I hope Brian’s wife forgives him!).

I must say this was a very awesome experience and I would have never met the people I met or learned the things I learned anywhere else. Thank you for all the organizers for putting on such a great conference, and for just being cool people and to all the speakers I heard and had the honor of hanging out with (even though I’m just an annoying newb). I look very forward to CodeMash 2.0.08 and plan on being there!

Well, since I had to check out I’m now lugging my laptop around. So you’ll get some live blogging from CodeMash today! Yesterday’s dinner and after dinner was very cool. I got to meet the pyOraGeek herself, Catherine Devlin. We were both looking for the OpenSpace meeting on Social Networking but couldn’t end up finding it (the location on the post-it looked like it read “laguorauer”), so I ended up at Joe Brinkman’s OpenSpace on Open Source on .NET.

Joe’s get together was very well attended with a couple dozen people talking about GPL and tools and all kinds of Open Source goodness. After that it was pretty much hanging around in the great hall mingling. There is an amazing amount of talent at this conference and it’s been quite a humbling experience. I thought I had learned a lot, I’ve barely scratched the surface. One thing I have learned here is that I know nothing.

I had a chance last night to listen in while Neal Ford, Joe O’Brien, and two other gentlemen were talking Ruby, Java, and Macs. I must say the level of talent was awe inspiring, I am now convinced that at some point in my life I must own a Mac. The opportunity to listen to people that were knowledgeable and passionate about some technology that I haven’t had a lot of exposure too was what I think CodeMash is all about. I had the pleasure of sitting in on that conversation until they turned the lights off in the hall around 11pm. We were the only group left there, and we took this as some sort of subtle hint.

After that I made my way to the bar, again, and not learning my lesson the other night I didn’t get back to my room until 1:30am. So at 1:30am, buzzing from the booze, I decided to work on my entry for Pillar’s CodeOff challenge. That kept my busy until 2:00am. I was able to get it done though, I did a little tweaking today at their booth and submitted my entry. Here’s hoping something good comes from it.

Anyway, I’m eating breakfast at the moment, waiting on Scott Guthrie’s keynote, and almost just choked to death on my minibagel. So I’m going to go and concentrate on eating before I kill myself.

Today’s been really interesting, a lot of good talks. I was out a bit late last night with some of the people from CodeMash, very cool group. I felt very inadequate being at the same table as some of those really smart guys and it was awesome of them to let me hang around. Luckily one of the guys there hadn’t eaten dinner yet either, and since organizing a conference endows the organizers with amazing powers, I was able to get dinner after the kitchen closed. So after stumbling to my room around 1:30am, I didn’t notice that the alarm clock was 12 hours off. Needless to say my alarm didn’t go off at 6:30 am like I expected. So I work up around 8:00am and had to rush to get down in time for breakfast.

Glad I did, Neal Ford’s keynote to kick off the day was awesome. Neal’s a great speaker and has a knack of making just about anything interesting. I then made my way to the fist session of the day, “Building and Deploying Smart Clients with Visual Studio 2005″, presented by Keith Elder. Very good stuff with a focus on Deployment, which is what I do. ClickOnce, and it’s automatic updating, should be quite useful.

Partially on the basis of Neal’s keynote, and partially because I’ve been curious for a while, the next session I decided to go to was “An Introduction to the Ruby language”, by Joe O’Brien. Joe pretty much convinced me that Ruby is the next language I will use. The flexibility is amazing, and as Neal mentioned in his keynote, the ability to create DSL’s is something that would help tremendously at my job where we do a lot of the same things over and over again and in ways where the base languages we use aren’t very good at expressing what we’re doing.

That brought us to Lunch, were we got to listen to Bruce Eckel’s keynote on the world being dynamic. Which was a very good, and very entertaining keynote. Though at times it seemed like an advertisement for Burning Man, mostly because at times there seemed to be a number of slides from Burning Man thrown in with no apparent relation to the subject. Bruce mentioned he had just reordered the deck, so that may have something to do with it. At times though, the effect of the Burning Man picture with the topic at hand was quite profound.

After lunch I got to go to “Beyond TDD”, presented by Ben Carey, all the Ruby guys were talking about test based development and talking down us compiler guys. Even though, as I told Joe, unit testing is just as important for compiled languages as interpreted. You can create a program that compiles that does nothing you expected. So anyway, Ben’s presentation was fairly good, and definitely worth seeing. His slide deck was awesomely put together and quite professional looking.

I didn’t get any pictures today because I wanted to really enjoy the sessions, I’ll probably have some from the dinner and attendee party though. So keep an eye out!

I’m taking a break from the last session before dinner to write this post and to relax. After dinner they’re having an Open Spaces meeting on Social Networking before the attendee party. I’m looking forward to that as I’ve just recently gotten involved in the social networking space. That’s all for now really, I’ll probably have another post up tonight (I don’t plan on staying out quite as late, unless someone offers to buy…..). Talk at y’all later!

Just got back from the expert panel on languages, it was most enjoyable. I think they did a pretty good job. I would say Bruce Eckle and Neal Ford pretty much stole the show, but everyone was very informative and entertaining. One of the interesting things I heard was the rise of Domain Specific Languages, something that’s been rattling around in the back of my head for work. The only real complaint so far is the wireless connection, it does to drop alot. For instance I’ve been fighting to upload pictures to flickr for almost a whole hour. Anyway, I’ve been taking pictures, here’s the flickr link. Feel free to tag ‘em up!

I’m here! I already had a chance to play the Nintendo Wii since I signed up to win one ;) I’ll be the guy taking pictures and posting them to flickr.