I spent the last three days gorging myself on software development goodness at Devscovery 2008 at the Microsoft Campus. I had an excellent time, got to hang out with friends and make new ones. And I ate far too much... but a few days of biking to work should bring me back into balance.
I'm still recovering but hope to post about some of my experiences in the next couple of days. I spent quality time with John Robbins, Paul Mehner, Walt Ritscher and Jeffrey Richter. I also got to reconnect with the fabulous Sara Faatz, who, along with Bethany Jones, are the queens of Devscovery. Sara has moved on to a position with Infragistics, and I know the Wintellect folks are going to miss her a lot. Luckily, we'll still see her around.
I've got catching up to do at work and at home. I've got a lot of book reviewing to do, a birthday party to help prep for this weekend and I really want to try out some of the new cool stuff I learned this week. I predict a big crash on Sunday once this all catches up with me.
Thank you Sara and Bethany and all the folks who made Devscovery possible, thanks to my South Sound .NET UG buddies for being so cool and fun to hang out with. Thanks to my family, especially my daughter, Hazel, for letting me go off and play with the other geeks.
My daughter returned from a week of camping with her cousins last night and though she had an awesome time, she was very happy to be home again with her moms and her cat. This morning she found out that I was going to be gone for 3 days this week and she wasn't pleased.
"Mommy, why do you have to be gone? I'm gonna miss you too much," lower lip quivering, staring up at me with those huge blue eyes.
"I know, baby, but I deserve to go do fun stuff too."
"Why are you going? What are doing?"
"Well, it's kind of like camp. You went to Girl Scout camp for three days and I get to go to Geek camp for three days."
Momentary pause as she considered.
"Mommy, do you still have the color comics from this week?" Alrighty then, moving right along.
So, yes, I will be at the 3 day Geek Camp known as Devscovery Redmond 2008 starting tomorrow (8/19). I'm really psyched because it's a great opportunity to get lots of technical information from the presenters/authors/gurus who are a part of Wintellect's stable. It's also time to reconnect and network, hang out with fellow geeks and take a break from the daily responsibilities of work and home.
So I'll be working today, and thinking about Devscovery and trying to figure out which sessions to go to. There are so many great ones to choose from, it really is hard to choose.
I'll be staying in Redmond, so I've got to pack, make sure my laptop gear is ready, snuggle my family, etc. Oh, and I need to find my mess kit, hiking boots, swiss army usb pocket knife ...
Please join us on Thursday, August 14th for a scintillating presentation on Asynchronous Web Pages by Paul Mehner.
Meeting Summary
Learn how to build scalable ASP.NET applications by using the ASP.NET thread pool as efficiently as possible. Learn how I/O operations can be potential scalability killers and how to properly write your code to take advantage of asynchronous I/O and page processing. In this session we will learn how to leverage ASP.NET’s three asynchronous (and largely undocumented) programming models: asynchronous pages, asynchronous handlers, and asynchronous modules.
Speaker Bio:
For more than three decades, Paul has been a software developer, architect, project manager, consultant, speaker, mentor, instructor, and entrepreneur. He is co-founder of the South Sound .NET User Group (http://www.ssdotnet.org) , one of the oldest recorded .NET user groups in the world, and was one of the earliest committee members of the INETA (http://www.ineta.org). Paul is the principal of Soundex Information Systems, Inc. (http://www.soundex.com), an Olympia, Washington firm specializing in .NET architecture and technologies for state government business systems. Paul is the author of Wintellect’s Mastering Workflow Foundation curriculum, a subject which he teaches in addition to Wintellect’s Mastering Windows Communication Foundation class (http://www.wintellect.com/Training.aspx). Paul is also a frequent presenter at developer conferences such as Devscovery (http://www.devscovery.com), and community events like Code Camp.
Prior to being reborn as a .NET protagonist in 2000, Paul's experience included over 20 years supporting many flavors of the UNIX operating system. Paul began his early computing career in 1977 on a homebuilt breadboard computer with 256 bytes of RAM, 12 toggle switches, 9 light emitting diodes, and an 8-bit RCA CDP1802 microprocessor (http://www.cosmacelf.com).
Devscovery!
Learn even more about this and other essential topics by attending the Redmond Devscovery conference August 19-21. A free Devscovery pass will be given away as a door prize! Register for Devscovery at http://www.devscovery.com. Save $150 by asking your user group leaders for our user group registration code.
Food!
Food (in the form of croissant and roll-up sandwhiches) will be provided by Milestone Technology, Inc., a recognized information technology company dedicated to the successful planning, organization, development and implementation of complete business solutions. Milestone is based in Olympia, Washington and was founded in 1995. Bring a beverage and enjoy a meal with fellow .NET geeks!
Meeting Specifics
August 14th, 7 - 9 pm
Olympia Center (222 Columbia NW)
All attendees are eligible for the prize drawings. Past prizes have included technical books, passes to Devscovery, copies of Visual Studio, Vista, Office 2007 and more.
Don't forget to let your friends and co-workers know about this meeting. Feel free to forward this email and/or direct them to www.ssdotnet.org for more information.
I've been working through Julie Lerman's upcoming book on Entity Framework as a reviewer. My role is to be almost completely ignorant of EF and try all the examples. Sometimes I get stuck, or get results that don't match, but usually because of version differences -- EF is still a moving target. Sometimes it's just plain old PEBKAC, but my latest problem was beyond my troubleshooting powers and I had to pull in Julie to help.
At first we thought having her remote to my box and tinker with my sample herself would be the way to go, and it might have been. We decided to exercise discipline and limit the time we spent trying to getting that method to work (cuz we're both apt to completely fall into the tangental problem and forget about the initial one). When it was obvious it would take too long (more than 5 minutes), we jumped to the next method: LiveMeeting.
Ok, that was just way cool. Didn't take long to get it running, even though I had to install client software. We started with Julie's desktop shared, then switched to mine. Using Messenger to communicate, and with Julie able to see first hand what was happening, we cleared up the problems quickly.
It's times like this that I really love being a geek.