I missed the first session because of lack of sleep and the fact that I hadn’t finished my slides for the day’s second talk. I came in at the end of Bret Stateham’s talk on Getting Started on Azure. I didn’t expect anyone to show up for my talk on Azure Tricks and Tips because of the advanced nature of the talk and that not many people are doing Azure yet. I was pleasantly surprised to find 10-15 people there, which was a great number for that kind of talk. The talk was well received and there were lots of good questions. I have uploaded the slides for the talk.

Afterwards I went to lunch with the DM gang. After I came back I was going to check out David Pallmann’s talk but I was about five minutes late, and it was in the same room as mine, so it was hot stuffy and crowded. Instead I ventured over to John Bowen’s talk on the Future of XAML for XAML Developers, which was in a much nicer room. I wanted to be in the same room for the talk after the next one, and Llewellyn assured me that it was going to be crowded, so instead of heading over to several other talks I just hung out in the same room and suffered through Fundamentals of Metro Style Applications. Then it was time for my favorite talk of the day – Michael Palermo’s HTML5 for the Real World. The crazy thing was that it was my favorite talk despite knowing all the material! His dynamic and engaging style was simply fun to listen to. After that was over I headed over to a fairly good talk by Paul Mendoza on Writing Maintainable JavaScript.

The Geek dinner was great – Lllewellyn was congratulated on the schedule, and I met a few people and had some interesting conversations on the CAP theorem and light particles as well as digitizing old film.

I was undecided as to which topic to attend first the next morning. On a whim I decided to attend the Hacking Your Memory session. Much to my surprise that became my favorite session of the entire camp – It Was Awesome! The speaker (Gary Hoffman) did a great job, the slides were well prepared, the topic was interesting and the audience was really engaged. Check out the site if you are interested.

Next I was trying to decide between WordPress Ninja!, and .NET TDD Kickstart. by Barry Stahl whom I had met two nights previously. I made the wrong choice and attended the WordPress Ninja! talk, which should have been renamed WordPress Beginnner!. During lunch Llewellyn talked me into doing the afternoon sessions that was supposed to be with Woody Zuill, but due to family emergencies Woody had to cancel. I begged out of the first one to attend a Node.js talk. I then trekked back over and helped give the talk on Testing EF, ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC. I stayed in the room to attend the final talk User Driven Development which had some interesting discussion.

Great conference as always. Kudos to Woody Pewitt, Bret Stateham, Llewellyn Falco, and the rest of the volunteers for their efforts.

This was my fourth year presenting at the San Diego Code Camp (and the 5th year attending).

On Saturday I went to see Dustin Davis speak on Aspect Oriented Programming with PostSharp because we had been e-mailing back and forth about combining our possible AOP talks. I then stopped by to see Mark Rotenburg speak about NetDuino which I hadn’t really played with but after that talk I really wanted to.

After lunch I tried to get in to see Jon Galloway speak about MVC 3, but the place was so packed I went next door to see Brad Cunningham speak about “Becoming a better ninja”.

Ike Ellis and I spoke next about Sql Azure vs. Amazon RDS. This was probably the easiest talk I have ever given with no preparation. Ike and I interact with one another quite a lot and it was really no different in front of an audience as it was front of a group of company developers.

Unfortunately I was peppered with questions after the talk, so I missed the final session.

On Sunday I was the first talk on Aspecting EF And WCF. I was glad to see that I was given a bigger room this year. Jim Houghton and Mark Taparauskas from DevelopMentor were also there. I was nervous because of the large amount of material I had to cover, but I think the talk went well considering how advanced the topic was. In the hour talk I managed to go over the WCF extensibility model, write an IOperationInvoker, discuss the EF provider model, plug in a custom provider, discuss how lambdas can be used to call services in a type safe manner, describe the decorator pattern, talk about how to bundle up reusable calling logic, and switch the calling model of my existing client. There were three demos, on aspecting WCF on the service side, EF on the client side, and WCF on the client side.

After my talk I headed over to see Alex Shah talk about PhoneGap. Having done a little phone development myself I found the topic interesting, although the talk could have used a little polish.

I went to lunch with Mark, and when I got back Llewellyn was waiting to prepare our talk on Reactive Extensions. My original talk had ben introducing some concepts and then building a couple of nifty demos. When Llewellyn joined he wanted to show the Koans for each particular set of functions. So we wrote up the demo slides that followed every slide of what I wanted to cover with the name of a method two from the Koans. We finished early but unfortunately not in time to catch the talk before ours, so we just hung out until the end and gave the final talk.

During the talk Bart texted to say that Run was now called ForEach? Not sure if I agree with that rename, but there it is. The final demos were on Drag and drop with Silverlight, and throttling text event to issue web service calls. We had one question at the end around Throttle which I will post when I get a chance.

Another year, another San Diego Code Camp I signed up for this talk way in advance, and forgot to check up on it. There were a couple of presenters giving similar talks. What I tried to do was demo my way through WCF REST support, WCF Data Services, and WCF RIA Services, explaining what each one was and how it differed from the others. I had a *TON* of questions and so the talk ran a little long, and I didn’t get to do any of my RIA demos. I think I stopped after slide 15. However, I did have a couple people come up to me afterwords and say that my talk was there favorite talk of the whole code camp, so in that respect – mission accomplished! The room was jam packed standing room only, so thanks to everyone who came out.

Here are the Slides and Demos

I drove up to Fullerton yesterday to give a talk on Cloud Computing at the Southern California Code Camp. My talk was first thing in the morning which was nice. Llewellyn was recording me, and Steve Evans dropped by as well. I ran out of time, but everyone said it was a great talk. Here are the slides.

I attended the following talks:
10:00 Richard Campbell – Scaling
12:15 Michele Bustamante – Implementing Claims Based Security
1:30 Chris Love – WCF and jQuery
2:45 John Miller – Introduction to the T4 template language
and finally I stopped by
4:00 Aaron Skonnard – What’s new in WCF/WF 4.0

Aaron has always been one of my heroes and I had never seen him speak before, so I dropped by to check him out.

Unfortunately that night I got food poisoning and had to miss the second day.

This was my second year presenting at the SoCal Code Camp San Diego.  Unfortunately this year I had to miss Saturday because of my daughter’s 5th birthday party.  I heard the evening festivities weren’t as nice anyway, because they didn’t have band.  As Dave McCarter said, “Where’s the Rock and Roll?”

My topic this year was “REST vs. SOAP or Why can’t we all just get along.”  It was on implementing both REST and SOAP from the same service using WCF.  The official session info is here which contains the slides and the demos.  The talk was first thing in the morning on Sunday, but despite the time the room was packed.  The talk went extremely well even though I ran out of time and didn’t finish the entire demo.  Both Daniel Egan and Lionel Wong asked if I would present at other events.  I had several people come up afterwards to ask for business cards, and two people said it was the best talk they had seen so far this year.  Thanks to everyone who came out!

I just got back from the Southern California Code Camp in Los Angeles. I gave a talk on Fixing Legacy Code with Llewellyn Falco. I was just filling in for Jason Kerney (http://bagheertech.blogspot.com/). The talk covers two topics from Michael Feathers’ book on Working Effectively with Legacy Code (http://www.amazon.com/Working-Effectively-Legacy-Michael-Feathers/dp/0131177052): slicing and peeling. Afterwords the attendees were asking lots of questions about Resharper, CodeRush, TypeMock, and RhinoMocks that I was able to help clarify, so at least I was able to contribute.

I gave my second talk at Southern California Code Camp San Diego.
Instead of slides, I just opened a notepad and started asking what the audience wanted to know and or understand about WCF. I got a huge range of topics, so I tried to weave them into a coherent story on the spot.