DesignAndCode software development thoughts..

Codestock 2009 wrapped up last night.The event was oversold by 1 - 376 attendees. I enjoyed the selection of talks that were available, and the sessions I attended were good. Of course I had a favorite.

My Favorite session was delivered Rik Robinson of Wintellect. His talk was on PRISM, from the Microsoft Patterns and Practice group (PNP), this is a Guidance that can be used in WPF and Silverlight - and incorporates the Unity IOC framework (but that can be swapped out if you prefer). He kept it simple, he introduced one thing built on another, and he got the main concepts of how PRISM can be used to develop applications that decouple View and ViewModel in a very clean fasion. The session was very interactive and it must have been a bit of pressure to have the Wintellect CEO sitting in the session.

Through another acquaintance I got to have dinner with Rik that night(day of his presentation), and hooked up with him for yet another dinner after the last Codestock session before driving back (we did not attend the giveaways).

Wintellect is local to Knoxville, and is one of the supporters of Codestock. They arranged to have to other presentations besides Rik Robinson's. John Robbins and Jeffrey Richter gave presentations via live meeting - and took questions via cell phone (which you would hear in the room as an echo - but it worked). I attended the John Robbins debugging presentation and it too was excellent (he can make technology humourous) - I picked another session instead of the Jeffrey Richter session - if they recorded it I am going to go watch it.

I feel a bit responsible for a comment from another attendee about one session I attended. The session just seemed like there were more examples that were ready - but not shown - and the session ended earlier than the time slot. I overheard someone else make that comment about it - and it seemed to fit. I had been fine with how it was -and only when I heard the comment did it occur to me that not all of the examples had been touched on. I had sat down to lunch with this speaker before his presentation. It occurred to me that I may have impacted his preparation, and even the thought that I did impact his presentation makes me feel sorry for having disturbed his preparation. I felt it was still a good presentation. I heard how much Rik Robinson prepared and saw the result - it is a lot of work - and it makes me wonder if my trying to be social - was just at the wrong time (My apologies to the speaker)

There were several topic areas of interest for me during codestock. WPF,PRISM, MEF, Debugging, WCF, ORM usage, and TDD. There were sessions that touched on, or spoke to these - and much more.

Another acquaintance suggested I attend Kevin Hazzard's session on "How I learned to love Metaprogramming" - which was a very good look into the way that the compiler creates a dynamic data type in .Net 4.0. The data type of dynamic - is static. That statement seems at first to be an oxymoron - but the element is treated as static and how it resolves at runtime is dynamic. The presentation showed how C# and Python could interact - and gave some examples of dynamically wrapping elements of XML using C# using the Dynamic elements. His XML Example reminded me of something that Powershell can do today - and Kevin said that the powershell team did not go down the Dynamic Language path - which he was not pleased with. Kevin Hazzard is a very good speaker and he gets into the topic very deeply - and explains it well. I would like to hear more about his perceptions on Powershell, and how he thinks it might have been done.

There was one connection that I did not expect to occur. At the CodeStock social event, I was sitting at a table, and a fellow walked over and looked at me and said - I think I know you. After a moment or two - I recogognized him from a twitter photo. When I went to Devlink 2008 - I was trying to use Twitter to find out where people were meeting up, and I had been on twitter for maybe a month at that time. This fellow was not able to attend the DevLink event - but was trying to follow what was going on - and he responded to help me figure out where people would be. Between this fellow and "TheCodeCampJunkie" - I was able to hook up with people at DevLink. So here was my first time meeting a person face to face - based on using twitter. We talked about .Net and his getting certified and how it was not helping him get work.

The main focus of these event is the dissemenation of knowledge of what is new and how to use the technology we deal with. The other part of this is that you are meeting and speaking with other developers, whom you may have not ever met otherwise.

Several people have posted pictures from CodeStock - Alan Barber got one picture of me at the Dinner on the night before the event.

Photo collections from Code Stock Attendees
• Alan Barber
• Michael Neel
• David Giard

The two code camps that I attended in August, CodeStock and Devlink, were certainly enlightning.  The contacts that I made have been kept alive via the twitter traffic that I receive. I work for a company that does not allow for twitter connections from a company computer. So I connect when I am on my personal laptop. I check the blog sites for the contacts that I made there, as it gives me an insight into their thinking too.

I have also used LinkedIn to connect with some of the developers who attended this. I have learned how networking can be a vital aspect of finding opportunities for technical events, social events, technology information, and professional opportunities.

The CodeCamps have a good set of attendee's who are developers who are trying to improve their skills and knowledge, and these are the types I enjoy working with in both my professional and personal relationships.

I am still amazed at the level of expertise that I encounterd in these codecamps - and I would reccomend anyone to attend them when they can.

I have been based in Atlanta for the last ten years. I attended one of my first Microsoft events about 5 years ago in Atlanta, and started attending more of the Microsoft office events in Atlanta this year.

It was in July of this year, that Alan Stevens, and Chris Rauber, did a presentation on Inversion of Control frameworks. Which is one of the best I have attended here in Atlanta. During the talk, Alan Stevens mentioned both the Codestock and Devlink conferences during August in Tenessee. The cost of these conferences was at a pricepoint I could afford, and get my company to foot the bill. (for 2008 - Codestock was $25 and Devlinks - where I registered later, was $75). With travel of a meal, and hotel, this was so much less than a PDC conference, this was a great opportunity.

Alan Stevens, mentioned he was going to be working the "OpenSpaces" at both conferences. My prior conference experiences had always been, pick the best presentations and go to those first as that is what these conferences are for.

So, I went to  Codestock in Knoxvile TN, and I attended the standard sessions, as my thoughts were that this is what a conference was for. That was my previous Conference experience.

I was curious about the openspace at CodeStock because of Alan Stevens being in charge of this. During lunch at CodeStock, I walked by the openspaces room, the door was always open during the event, and I stopped in to listen to the discussion. I was immediatlely impressed with the level of conversation. Here it seemed were some of the main people of the developer user groups from Birmingham, Philadelphia, St Louis, North Carolina, Nashville,Atlanta, Lansing Michigan, Jacksonville FL  and others  discussing the issues of how to run the sessions in their regions with regard to the Alt.Net influences (which I have to admit I am still learning what that is all about). It was a great discussion that had everyone totally engaged.  I liked what I was hearing. There is a 30 min video posted (in multiple formats) from a discussion on ORM's that comes from Codestock openspace. 

It was the Codestock OpenSpaces discussion at lunch that  opened my mind, that here were some of the best and brightest developer types I had interacted with, some of whom were presenting,  and we were in a direct discussion, where I could ask real questions. The value that room had at lunch, where multiple speakers were engaged in the converation was incredible. That was what created my double take for OpenSessions - there are developers who do not do presentations but had a significant contributions to the developer community. That got my attention. Here were the people who want to continually improve their skills.

For my experience at Devlinks, I misunderstood a schedule/room change for the first session after the keynote - and I needed to select a different session. The curiosity about the open spaces brought me to the "Opening Circle" where the OpenSpaces were about to start. This "Opening Circle" session was to have people propose topics they wanted to talk about. It was the self directed conference within a conference where real questions and people who might be passionate about a topic - were asking for a time to discuss an idea. 

For me, and it is entirely a personal position,  OpenSpaces had more of the developer types that I NEED to intereract with, who have real world experiences and knowledge.  That brought me to undertand that I can gain more from connecting personally, and directly with other developers, who do real work, daily, in the OpenSpaces, than I can in listening to a standard session. I was not being talked at, but interacting with other developers in a very real and personal way.

Both Conferences setup twitter accounts and conference participants could follow other participants via twitter. That enables the possibility of maintaining a connection to these other developers over a much longer period of time than the conference alone - twitter is an enabler of a better network of developers to reach out to. That has changed my earlier skeptical impression of twitter.

Both of these conferences were good, and if they do not price future events too high, I can probably attend them again in the future. I certainly found these both to be very enriching in terms of professional knowledge and connections.

A while back, I was on Scott Hanslemanns blog, and was seeing some URL's that looked odd - and realized that these short URL's were special types of redirectors - to longer URL's. Scott was using shrinkster.com - however when I went back to his site to get that URL, the podcast that I had found it on, had been rewritten to have the URL's in the source. I searched the http://Hanselminutes.com site for refrences to Shrinkster and saw a mention that shrinkster had "been taken down due to spam" temporarily. If you are relying on links to be up - going directly might be the best way to go.

An older site that does the URL shrinking is http://tinyURL.com which has been used in some newspaper articles.

Twitter (http://twitter.com)  users, at least one I know of, use another similar site http://is.gd which can shrink a url small enough to fit in a "tweet" -140 chars. So this idea for phone users of twitter or one of the other "microblog" sites could be handy.

Hansleman's purpose in using shrinkster was that he could reference a URL with a very short code that could be stated in his audio podcast. Which is still a valid concept but he seems to have used the codes to his own page to contain the links now.

I am still not convinced of the value of a "tweet" site, and am working for a company that blocks such sites from any access within the company.

I still prefer human interaction over keyboard interactions - old fashioned, but batteries are not required ;)

Update 8/16/08: Another site for this : www.snurl.com

Update 9/19/08: Another: http://bit.ly