I haven't stayed on top of this blog because I've been so busy with so many different things that taking time to write a post seems to be far down on the priority list.  I'm not going to say that will change this year, because that's almost cliche, but some of the things on my goal list will naturally lead to some posts here.

CodeMash

CodeMash v2.0.0.8 was awesome.  There have already been so many other blog posts talking about how great it was, so I'm not going to go into detail.  I'll sum it up by saying that it was totally worth it, and I'd be insane to miss it next year.

Resolutions

I have some goals for 2008, but really only one resolution.  My resolution is to do the push-up a day challenge.  But I decided to also do a sit-up per day, and throw in jumping jacks to toss in some cardio.  Today I've done 20 of each.  As the year moves on and things get harder, I may have to only do the exercises every other day, in order to give my muscles a chance to recover.

Goals for 2008

• Present at at least 2 technical user groups
• Write at least 2 articles for established websites
• Contribute to a well known open source project
• Create a fun game in Silverlight and host it at CodePlex
• Create a custom layout for this blog and port it to SubText
  

Wow, that's a lot, but I already have one user group talk scheduled.  Should be a fun year.

I haven't posted in a long time, not because I haven't wanted to, but because I've been spending every minute of my free time working on a Session Scheduler application for CodeMash.

I can now talk about it because it's gone live!

The session scheduler was written in Silverlight 1.1 Alpha.  I would have written it in Silverlight 1.0 but I really wanted to be able to use Isolated Storage.  With Isolated Storage I was able to make the application store any changes the user makes locally, so the next time you go to the site it will be exactly where you left it and retain any of the sessions you've scheduled.

Using the Session Scheduler

The default view of the scheduler shows all sessions and Wednesday.  Unfortunately I didn't get around to implementing some sort of scrolling for the session list, but it was low on the list of features since the typical view of the application only has 6-8 sessions being shown at once.

You can click on the track buttons in the upper left to filter the session list by that track, or you can click on a session slot on the right (the agenda) and the session list will filter based on which sessions are available for that time of the day.

If you hover over a session menu item the session's details will drop down.  From that view, the green button can be used to schedule that session in your agenda.  Just hovering over the button will automatically show the time slot in the agenda where that session will occur.  Also, clicking on the speaker's name will show the speaker's bio.  This will show a picture of the speaker soon, but I'm having an issue displaying images in there at the moment.

You can click on the link image in the upper right to get a URL that can be used to send your custom agenda to someone else.  Currently, if you view another person's custom agenda it will overwrite any changes you've made yourself.  A workaround for this would be to copy a link to your agenda first, then use it once you're done looking at the other user's agenda.  I'm currently working on modifying this to save a history of agendas that you've looked at.

You can view my schedule here.

You can also click on the email image to view a simple HTML page with your custom agenda allowing you to print or email it from there.

I will be following up this post with several more describing the roadblocks I hit, and how I resolved, or worked around, them.

I was walking down a empty hall, not sure where I was. Ah, there's the room I was looking for. As I walked through the door, the people inside turned around and looked at me. Some had clothes with penguins on them, or carried devices with logos of partially eaten fruit. "Where you from, cuz?" the one up front said. Oh no, I'm dead now!

Okay, so maybe that's what I imagined it might be like walking into a session focused on Python. I was definitely outside of my Microsoft comfort zone. But that's what CodeMash is supposed to be about, so I figured I'd go out of my way to see a presentation on something almost totally unknown. It turned out to be nothing like my overactive imagination, and I don't think I stood out at all. I'm not sure why I expected anything different, really.

I was at Mark Ramm's presentation on SQL Alchemy. Honestly, I wasn't following all of the details and I'm not clear on what I took away from it. At the very least I gained a basic understand, exposure or awareness of something that I wouldn't normally see. It was definitely interesting, but the Q & A was totally over my head so I ducked out early.

There are a few things I've noticed about CodeMash so far. As the conference has progressed, I've noticed people being a lot more comfortable asking questions or giving comments without being prompted. So far, the sessions I've been in where the audience contributed have been the best experiences.

Also, I never imagined I'd be live blogging, but today I found that I had a lot to say. I still don't like the term and wouldn't really admit to doing it.

Oh yeah, and I sat near a guy who totally looked like Don Knotts.

Labels: codemash

Today's sessions that I plan on attending definitely focus on data access, which actually has me excited after the ridiculous models at my last job.

I just got out of Scott Guthrie's keynote on LINQ. LINQ definitely has me excited, and I need to play with the release from last year.

Right now I'm in Dave Donaldson's session on NHibernate. Code with no more stored procedures? Excellent! I'll follow up later with my impressions.

Impressions:
Dave has written an interesting framework called NHibernateRepository that I might look into using. Its not integrated into the NHibernate project, but Dave said that he's going to eventually look into getting it incorporated into a contrib project.

I was suspicious of what the performance would be with an O/R mapper, but since NHibernate uses parametrized queries, its virtually no different from stored procedures in that respect. From Dave's demo I got the impression that if you need to do tricky things, the way to go about it is using a syntax called HQL, which looks just like hard coded queries, and weren't we supposed to get away from that?

Differences between NHibernate and LINQ were also on my mind. LINQ has a nice visualizer that shows the actual query when you're debugging, which is a lot nicer than having to use the profiler or read a log file. It occurred to me when NHibernate's insert/update/delete features were being demonstrated that I haven't seen any examples of updating data with LINQ. Is LINQ supposed to be used solely to query data, and not modify it?

You have to write a lot of configuration and code by hand with NHibernate .... unless you use a code generator. Dave demonstrated a CodeSmith template that would (have if it hadn't crashed) create entity classes and config from your database. But the code still wasn't pleasing to look at. I wondered if, like Dave's NHibernateRepository library, if anyone has adapted the Data Access Application Block to work with NHibernate, or another O/R Mapper for that matter.

Another, maybe totally unrelated, thought was "where is the c# in stored procedures?" C# embedded in stored procedures was a feature that was highly touted in .NET 2.0, but I have yet to see anyone use it other than code in MSDN documentation. Is this feature really something people want to use? Don't we want to stay away from business logic in stored procedures? Yeah.

I'm in Mark Ramm's session on O/R Mapping with SQL Alchemy right now, which is definitely outside of my comfort zone. This is what CodeMash is supposed to be all about, so we'll see how I like it.

Labels: codemash

I made to CodeMash with about 10 minutes to register before the morning keynote. I'm really glad I made it to the keynote, which was about domain specific languages. Neal Ford did a really good job and I can't wait to go back through his presentation and compare it to my notes about ways I could incorporate DSL into some various ideas I have. I'm not ready to share those ideas yet, but when I feel like they're not totally silly I'll be posting them here.

Other sessions I attended today were ...

• Smart Clients - more like an introduction and didn't see anything I didn't already know.
• Ruby on Rails - This was a pretty cool session on Active Record and talking about how Rails works. My only complaint is that I should have sat closer because I couldn't read the text on the code examples.
• TDD - a session about benefits from TDD beyond the main idea of units tests - very good.
• An excellent keynote by Bruce Eckel that ... well ... I'm not sure what the focus was, but it was very entertaining and sparked some interesting thoughts.

I'm not sure what to expect tomorrow, but if its anything like today I'm going to be rocked. I know it starts off with Scott Guthrie doing a talk on LINQ, which I'm stoked for.

Labels: codemash

I just registered for the CodeMash conference and I can't wait to go!

I held off registering in order to make sure it would fit our schedule and budget, and missed the early registry discount and also the block of rooms at the resort, but that's okay. I'll probably only stay there one night anyway.

woot!

Update: There were still rooms available in the block for the conference, even though the CodeMash site didn't reflect that.

Labels: codemash