CodeStock 2008

By CSharpner · August 9, 2008

• 7:30 am: Registration.
• 8:00 am: Jeff Prosise gave the keynote address and gave a really good and informative discussion of SilverLight. I'll post a separate blog post about this.
• 9:00 am: There were 5 or 6 separate seminars going on that you could freely choose from. I went to one on WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) presented by James Bender (who had previously been a lighting engineer for Slayer... unless he was joking! :). Was pretty good. I learned some useful stuff that applies to what I'm currently working on. I'll write separate post about this.
• 10:50 am: Again, 5 or 6 separate seminars... I chose to attend an XNA game development conference, hosted by Chris Williams from Magenic. Was pretty cool. It's really easy to make games for XBox 360, Windows, and now Zune. I plan on playing with this a lot. My son (8) is really interested in this too, but I doubt his 8 year old brain has the attention span to do it just yet. I'll do a separate blog post on this.
• 12:00 pm: Lunch. Had lunch with a prior colleague from Chattanooga and an old friend from Chattanooga and several new friends. Apparently, none of them like cookies for desert. Luckily, as it turns out, I do.
• 1:00 pm: Again, each time slot had 5 or 6 separate seminars. I went to an ASP.NET MVC class. I've been reading a lot about this and it looks cool, but not quite ready for prime time. Anyway, it was presented by some dude from Telerik (I'll post his name once I find it in my bag of goodies).
• 2:20 pm: LINQ to SQL - CRUD was the class I attended. I've never actually used LINQ to SQL yet, but I've read bunches and bunches about it. I've been using LLBLGen Pro, which is way more powerful, but not quite as small a learning curve. I figured, one more tech speech on it would be useful. It was only the guy's 2nd time presenting it, so he fumbled some, but seemed to know his stuff... mostly. The dude in the far back left corner made sure that everyone knew that he knew it more (and well, he did).
• 3:40 pm: WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) presented by Philip Japiksi from Pinnacle Solutions. And yes, I'll provide a separate post about this.
• 5:00 pm: Everyone meets in the auditorium for prizes. There were about 200-300 people there. They drew names and I was the 4th winner. The 1st prize was an $11,000 MSDN full sub (wow!) Freakin' Philip from Pinnacle won that!!! (Update:  I was the grand prize winner for CodeStock 2009 and I went hone with that same $15,000 prize this year! :)) 2nd was an XBox 360, 3rd was Halo commemorative set (with the funky helmet). 4th, was me and I chose a $1299 license of the full Telerik Web and WinForms controls with a bonus set of SilverLight controls (wooohooo!). Biggest prize I've ever won!
• 6:00-8:00 pm: Hanover Fist is playing (local band)... still going on. I skipped it... needed to get home. They're probably still playing as I write thie (It's only 7:32 pm now).