Just a heads up to my faithful readership, I’ll be speaking about IronRuby at erubycon this August.  It’ll be my first  public speaking engagement at a technical conference, and my first real public speaking since High School (in-house presentations don’t count in my book).  I’m quite nervous but it’s a topic I’m passionate about so I’m really excited as well.  The title of the talk is "Because Iron is Battleship Gray: IronRuby In The Real World", and it won’t mention Silverlight or Rails.  Ruby is so much more than glitz and glam, and I think that tends to get lost in the hype.  She’s a sexy lady, but she’s got brains too!

Hope to see you there!

Earlier today the website went live and registrations started. What is a “Day of .NET”? And why is it happening in Cleveland? A “Day of .NET” is, as the Day of .NET website says, “a one-day conference on all things .NET organized by developers for developers.” And that last part is why it’s happening in Cleveland. A number of us have frankly been tired of nothing happening in the Cleveland/North East Ohio area, and decided to take the bull by the horns as it were.

One of the themes we’re trying to push is that Day of .NET is .NET centric, but not .NET exclusive. So we’re hoping to bring a few speakers from other worlds (Java, Ruby, Python, etc) and learn from them. As well as explore a number of the exciting new things coming out of Microsoft these days (like the DLR, Silverlight, et. al.).

Interested in speaking? Contact speakers@clevelanddodn.org. Want to sponsor or know someone who would want to sponsor? We got lot’s of logo space to fill up, just contact sponsors@clevelanddodn.org. Most of all, get to www.clevelanddodn.org and register!

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!?

Ah the first real blog post in a while, and even this is late, hoping to get back in the groove here with this one!

After leaving Cleveland at 6am I ended up arriving at Day Of DotNet a little late. Not too bad for a three hundred mile drive, I ended up walking into Josh Holmes’ talk on “Architecting the User Experience” (part of the ArcReady series, this was like a sneak-peek) about 10 minutes late. What I saw was awesome though , definitely some things to think about. Jason Follas, who I met at CodeMash and an organizer for DoDN, was kind enough to grab my name tag for me in exchange for me doing a head count of the session (76 people if you’re curious).

After having a few minutes to mull over what I had heard, it was time for the next session. “Hardcore Reflection” by Dustin Campbell. This was by far the most valuable session of the the day, for me. Dustin was a great speaker and really knew his stuff. I learned alot there that I’m looking forward to using in my day to day work.

I then had a chance to attend red-gate Software’s vendor session, mostly a bore-fest infomercial. Then Lunch, Domino’s pizza (if you could get it), I had a couple pizza’s and called the wife.

Off to “Next Generation UI” session by Mark Miller. Poor guy, his speaking skills are awesome, but the technology did not want to cooperate! I heard his second session went well, but I had opted to go to “Multithreading in Windows Forms Applications”. Patrick Steele gave a good talk on the basics of multi-threading a form application, I was hoping for something more in depth, but all in all a good refresher.

Then we had the Microsoft Vendor Session, which was also hosted by Josh Holmes, he didn’t have anything prepared so I threw out the DLR and IronRuby. Well, he didn’t have IronRuby, but we got to see some of the DLR in Silverlight 1.1 with IronPython, cool stuff! Someone asked about Silverlight on Linux (which Mono is working on). Josh said that if it made business sense Microsoft would do it (being that they’re a business and all), but he didn’t think that the Linux made much business sense right now. He’s probably right (though I did rib him a bit about Dell putting Ubuntu on consumer systems now), but sometimes developer and community good will pays more then a strict bean counter could see. Could you imagine if Microsoft announced Linux support for Silverlight? I think it would be a brilliant PR move myself. You keep saying your open and look at these cool standards and we’re cross platform, and blah blah blah. Just do it already! :)

Anyway, wrapped up the day with Brian Prince’s talk on “Agile Processes”, I didn’t get a chance to hear Brian speak at CodeMash, and I must say I came away impressed. He’s quite an awesome presenter! I hope to incorporate some of his company’s ideas into my own practices, and at least I’ll be more prepared if I ever get a job at an agile shop.

I was glad I went, I learned alot and had a great amount of fun and will be attending the next one! We need more events like this in the Northeast Ohio area!

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.

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!