Yesterday I attended the Tampa Code Camp 2006 with two local friends who rode down from Jacksonville with me Friday night: Vinay, and Greg Y. The Tampa crew did a fantastic job putting on the event and it was filled with some great regional speakers including Jim Zimmerman, Jay Kimble, Vinay Ahuja,Brian Knight, Bayer White, Stan Schultes, Tom Fuller, and David Silverlight. While many of the usual regional suspects were present, I was pleasantly surprised to see GotDotNet/CodePlex's very own Sandy Khaund! Why was it surprising? Well, I didn't expect someone from Redmond to come all the way for a Florida Code Camp... very good and great to see Sandy again.
The agenda included a full spread of topics from Workflow Foundation, SQL 2005 (including SSIS & RS), programming with Lego's Mindstorms, DNN, advanced .NET & Visual Studio talks, and... well go see for yourself!
While I planned to do a "choose-your-own-adventure" for my virtualization/dev tools talk after it went long at JAXDUG the previous week, mid-afternoon Friday I got word that one of the speakers wouldn't make it after having flight issues returning from a trip on the west coast. When I arrived in Tampa Friday night, I let the event organizers know I was prepared to take another session if it could be packed close to my current session so I could cover both virtualization & dev tools. So I started the day with a back-to-back virtualization/dev tools talk that felt great! Yet again, I ran out of time when I wanted to do a long demo of CodeRush & Refactor, as well as skipping CodeSmith completely, but those in attendance seemed to like it. During lunch, I had a bunch of people come up and say how much they enjoyed the dev tools talk and how much they wanted to see more of CodeSmith, CodeRush, and Refactor so I arranged to continue the talk in the auditorium for another hour just before the closing keynote. WOW... that made 200 minutes of virtualization & dev tools of presentations on Saturday... I hope everyone got their fill! Oh, I can't forget my WCM session immediately after lunch either! Arg... Saturday was a long day and the post-Code Camp pub club was much needed.
As always, after a talk I have a few housekeeping things I need to address for attendees who are looking for follow up material (slide decks are located on my speaking page), so here you are:
Don't be a Tool, Be a Better Developer Through Tools & Virtualization! (part 1 & 2)
This back-to-back session was the first of the day. The first portion covered Microsoft's virtualization (VirtualPC & Virtual Server), a demo of VirtualPC 2004 SP1, best practices for performance, and my $.02 on organization. In this talk I referred to two articles on my blog:
In addition, I also had references to a few utilities and Microsoft virtualization bloggers:
The second part of this session dealt with developer tools that help you be a better developer by making your job easier, faster, less error prone, more consistent, and more fun! The goal of this talk was to show you some tools I've found to be life savers in helping me become a much more productive developer. Here you'll find links to every utility/tool I demonstrated in the talk (as well as a few tools we skipped such as CodeSmith and ANTS Profiler):
If you're interested in seeing the dev tools demo'd again, I did a screencast last week of most of the demos from the JAXDUG meeting last week which you can download for offline viewing here (doesn't include CodeSmith, ANTS Profiler, CodeRush, or Refactor). Also, during the talk I mentioned another cool tool in development that I couldn't demo, only discuss. It's Script#, which I blogged about here, which will let you write C# code that compiles to an assembly AND a .JS file... compiled C# -> JavaScript!!!
Don't forget to fill out your Tampa Code Camp evals at CodeCampEvals.com to get entered for the raffle for additional prizes like a full license to the telerik UI controls!
At the end of every Code Camp (least those in Florida that I've attended over the last two years), there's a huge book give-away. Just about everyone walks away with at least one book (and with over 280 attendees, that's a lot of books!). I finally walked away with one that I've wanted for quite a while, WROX's Pro SQL Server 2005 Intergration Services by my friend Brian Knight... thankfully there wasn't a J# book available like I got stuck with back at the Tampa Code Camp last year. :)
That should cover it... if there's anything I forgot to mention, or if anyone has questions that weren't answered in my sessions, please feel free to ping me via the contact form linked on the menu at the top of this page, or by submitting a comment to the post. A final shout out to the best dev evangelist (DE), Joe Healy, who's the biggest champion the Florida developer community! Thanks Joe!
Technorati : coderush, devexpress, moss, sharepoint, tampacodecamp06, virtualization, virtualpc, wcm