South Florida Code Camp 2011
Posted by bsstahl on 2011-02-13 and Filed Under: event
For the 2nd time in the last 3 years, I was lucky enough to be able to attend the South Florida Code Camp. Code Camps are free, community driven technical conferences that take place during off-hours, usually weekends, so I try to make it to as many of them as I can. I have attended most of our local (Arizona) Desert Code Camp events, and will be speaking at the upcoming Desert Code Camp in April 2011, but I also try to attend other code camps whenever possible to get the broadest range of speakers and experiences. If you haven’t been to the local code camp in your area, you are missing out on a lot of great technical content and opportunities to chat with some awesome technologists.
I was able to attend a session in each of the 6 time slots for South Florida Code Camp 2011. I’d like to thank the speakers for all of the sessions as each was useful and worth attending:
- Zachary Gramana - Custom Tooling Using a VS Add-In and T4 Templates
- Colin Blakey – Building OData/WCF Data Service Providers
- Bayer White - Hosting Workflows as WCF Services Through Windows Server AppFabric
- Olec Sych – ASP.Net Dynamic Data
- Woody Pewitt – Technical Debt
- Chris Eargle – Code Like a Ninja: Enhance Productivity with Visual Studio and Just Code
Three of these sessions deserve some special mention. The OData/WCF session was probably the most useful from a technical perspective as the demos gave specific examples of exactly what I’d need to do to implement the technology. The session on technical debt was the most useful overall, Woody from ComponentOne, who is always a fantastic speaker, gave some specific tools to use to calculate the costs of carrying technical debt. In fact, I was fortunate enough to come-away from the raffle with a license to ComponentOne’s Studio Enterprise product. I’m especially looking forward to trying out the Silverlight controls. Finally, in the last session of the day, which turned into a free-form Visual Studio tips session, Chris did a great job of going with the flow and giving the already rowdy crowd, exactly what they wanted, including demos of some of the coolest features of Just Code.
All of the speakers and organizers did a fantastic job and it was a great event. Hopefully I will be able to make it back for next year’s event.