What a weekend! It started with a 12 hour drive from Philadelphia to Knoxville on Thursday, 25 June 2009. I am still trying to reconcile how a traffic engineer could design the approach to 495 from I-95. Having multiple lanes feed to 2 lanes three or four times before you finally get to 495 is absolutely amazing. 2 of my 12 hours was spent twiddling my thumbs in this traffic.
Once free of the DC bottleneck, the trip was uneventful. I arrived in Knoxville around 8pm and went to the Mellow Mushroom where the un-official pre-dinner was being held. It was good to see a bunch of friends and have some really good food. The place puts an interesting twist on all their dishes. My Italian sub had balsamic sauteed onions as well as some obscure italian meats. It was really good, but completely different.
The conference itself was awesome. I wasn't scheduled to speak until Saturday so I had a bunch of free time to indulge myself in sessions. The open spaces sessions led by Alan Stevens were the highlight of the conference. There were some really great discussions surrounding things like "how do I get started with TDD", 'How do you start a software business", "how to you advertise yourself to increase business", etc.
Saturday's sessions included an awesome presentation by John Robbins on the .net Debugger. I thought to myself what can I learn at a debugger session? I 'm glad I went. Calling functions and methods from the watch window... I would never have thought that was possible. I learned so much from that session alone.
The Silverlight sessions were great too. Chad Campbell talked about the "Out of Browser" experience and showed all of the new events and how to tie into them to determine whether or not the app is running in or out of the browser.
Sam Nasr talked about Server communications with Silverlight and demo'd an RSS feed class.
My Mobile talk was well received. There were approx 20 people in attendance and there was a lot of energy in the room.
Download MobileDevelopement-Codestock
The 1368 miles roundtrip was well worth the time spent with the crowd at Codestock. If you have the chance to attend next year, I would highly recommend it.
Recent Comments