This session probably had the most relevance to my current project at work and it was pretty exciting to see in action just what ATLAS is going to be able to provide me in the future.

Rick was a great speaker and his demos really did a great job of quickly showing just what ATLAS could do for you. It was particularly nice to see just how easily you can convert an old ASP.NET web application to take advantage of AJAX with ATLAS. It basically consists of putting any controls you want to AJAX-ify into an update panel that you just drag and drop onto your webform. That’s nice. VERY nice.

Basically if you’re not familiar with AJAX, it’s a technology that allows you to do a partial post-back of content on a page so that an entire page doesn’t have to re-render in the browser. This is quite an advancement for UI development for web apps (although it’s not really a new technology, it’s just not been used much) and it takes web applications one step closer to although still not having “state”, at least simulating “state”.

ATLAS is a framework for .NET that makes developing your web applications to utilize AJAX a whole lot easier and watching it in action it looks like Microsoft has a great start on it. While I wouldn’t describe everything as easy, what I did see was a lot easier then trying to implement AJAX in your web pages yourself without the ATLAS framework.

This session, I was reacquainted with my favorite person of annoyance again, and they did indeed proceed to halt the session several times with some questions that just weren’t appropriate for the format. Rick (just like Lucas) showed amazing patience and was quite skillful at putting the session back on track again although it did end up going a bit long because of the side tracking questions. (Please people if you have idle curiosity about something, go home and play with it, don’t force the presenter to play with it during a free session with limited time. Those kind of questions just aren’t appropriate.)

Rick has been quite generous and has his demos and slides up on his site (get them soon, he’s not planning on keeping them there for long), so even if you couldn’t make it to Code Camp, take a look at his demos if you want to get a feel for what ATLAS can do for your ASP.NET web application.

Rory is just flat out one of my favorite technical speakers period. If you haven’t had a chance to hear him speak, well, make the effort. And when Rory is talking on a subject of some interest to you that you know little about, do whatever you can within the confines of the law (or maybe a little outside of the law) to make sure you don’t miss it.

WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) (formerly ‘Indigo’) is part of the .NET framework 3.0 (formerly ‘WinFX’, thanks for confusing the heck out of me Microsoft). Basically, it’s all those old APIs that dealt with communications gathered into one nice easily accessed and elegant API.

Watching Rory throw together a quick demo using 3 different communications methods (TCP, Named Pipe and HTTP) was pretty breathtaking. The first one you were like, ok, so you had to do that this and that and suddenly you can transfer text between two applications. Yeah, neat. But then, you saw him do it using the next communication method and guess what? YOU DO IT THE EXACT SAME WAY! That’s right. If you can setup a communication using HTTP, you can setup a communication using TCP. That just rocked.

I haven’t played with Indigo (I mean WCF) yet, but watching Rory’s sample application quickly come together was enough to make me think I need to start doing some playing.

All in all, some pretty exciting stuff for developers coming from Microsoft. If you’ve ever experienced the headache of remoting, be happy because your relief is coming very soon (just how soon is that Rory?)

Well, this session was the one I was most excited to attend and maybe because of those high expectations was the most disappointed with. First, I’d just like to apologize to anyone that attended this session. I became “that guy” and I’m sorry for that. I disagreed with so much of what was being said by David, that I had a hard time keeping my mouth shut. Especially when I felt it wasn’t even a disagreement of opinion, but just wrong information being given. So for not allowing the presentation to just go on and instead interjecting constantly to disagree I apologize and hope I didn’t ruin that session too much for others.

Coding standards and best practices is a passion of mine and I have some very strong opinions about it. All in all, I’m glad the session was held because I think it’s important, but the delivery for me just wasn’t what I wanted. For me, I think it’s wrong to say “here is the standard you should use, and it should be an underscore to identify class level variable”, but more explain why you need to have standard for something, like why is it important to have some identifier for class level variables. I also felt that the book pimping was a bit out of control, but I guess that’s his right and just to make up for me being such an annoying ass to him, I’ll help him pimp it. Here check it out.

Even though I didn’t agree with all of his content, the general message is one I stand behind wholeheartedly, everyone who is a developer needs to follow some kind of standard. You need to do this at work and in your hobby projects. If you are writing code, you should have a standard and follow it.

So, one of my most disappointing sessions, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut, but overall the message still rings true. Props to David for presenting such a controversial topic, it’s always hard telling developers they need to change how they write their code, maybe next year I’ll have the guts to do one like this myself.

The first session of the day and I was instantly blown away. Lucas Carlson presented an amazing introduction to developing with Ruby on Rails and I almost got physically sick in the classroom. What the Rails framework provides is the EXACT functionality I have been developing for a current project of mine for the LAST TWO YEARS!

Watching just how quickly a CRUD (create, read, update and delete) web page could be developed for a database table was just sickening to watch. I’m talking just a few lines of code in Ruby and you are done. The language itself is developed with “The Principle of Least Surprise” and after watching this session, it was easy to see how well that principle was achieved. At no point during the presentation was I “surprised” at how a function worked or where something was found in one of the libraries. It is just such an elegant language.

Lucas himself was a great speaker. Soft spoken and extremely intelligent. Watching his fingers fly as he would enter command line commands and switch back to the development environment to type a single line of code to make a web page was just phreaking impressive.

The only downside of the whole session came from the attenders themselves and it’s a problem I’ve been experiencing a lot lately when I attend presentations. People really seem to believe that saying “there are no stupid questions”. Stop it people, that’s a lie, so quit believing in it. I really find myself frustrated with people that halt a presentation with these questions that just aren’t appropriate. I don’t want to spend my whole time talking about this issue right now, I think since it bothers me so much I’m just going to have to do a post in the future about learning to ask the right questions at presentations.

So for now let’s just say there were a few individuals asking certain types of questions that made parts of this session particularly grating, hat’s off to Lucas though for his patience in dealing with the questions and moving the session along.

All in all, this was one of my favorite sessions of the day and had me so excited about Ruby on Rails that I got the environment setup on my computer to play with the next day (although one of the other 4Guys was even MORE excited than I was….). If you haven’t taken a look at Ruby on Rails and are involved in web development in any way, I would highly recommend you read up on it. It never hurts to be familiar with other web technologies and you’ll get over that sick feeling in your stomach when you realized you could have spent 3 months learning Ruby and 3 days making your entire project instead of 2 years eventually…or at least I hope you do.

This year I decided to try to catch some of the Ruby sessions, and see what all the hype was about. Apparently I have been missing a lot. Fortunately Lucas Carlson was around to show me the light.

As it turns out, Ruby (or Rails, really) is just awesome. Actually, I’m not sure awesome is quite enough to really describe my thoughts, but I can’t think of a better word…. (if only I had a way with words like Rory maybe I could come up with something. (But I’m not. (So I can’t. (But (Maybe (I ( Can (Get (More (Parentheses (Into (One (Sentence))))))))))))).

OK, so back to Rails. If you haven’t tried it, you should. I’m pretty sure you can re-create the internet in about 4 lines of code. Yeah, its that good.

I have found a really good bit of aggregated info about Rails on this site, so check it out.

Honestly, I had a terrible headache during the afternoon, so I don’t remember a lot of the afternoon sessions very well. I remember thinking “Atlas is cool” and “That guy isnt wearing any shoes”, but most of it is kind of a blur.

P.S. It was somewhat difficult to get setup on Windows, but its probably because I was falling asleep. I have it down pretty good now, so if you need help, leave a comment and I will e-mail you back and help you through it.

Portland Code Camp v2.0 was held this past Saturday (7/22) on the WSU campus in Vancouver and man, what an event! If you didn’t have room in your schedule to attend it this year, start writing “Portland Code Camp” in your day planner for every day of next year just to make sure you don’t make that stupid mistake again.

I just want to say to all the people involved in making it happen, awesome job guys. You really pulled it off and code camp was a total success in my opinion. The code camp was cut back to just one day this year (due to lack of presenters, not lack of attenders), but what a day it was. Coffee in the morning, an quick opening session, 2 awesome sessions, a great box lunch outside near the WSU fountain, followed by 3 more awesome sessions, a nice catered dinner with good conversations with fellow technology enthusiasts in the community, live music, Frisbee golf, geek karaoke and croquet on the lawn. Quite a day.

The sessions were varied and covered a wide range of topics from ASP.NET to Ruby to AJAX to Use Cases to.. well, let’s just say you could get a LOT of information about many technologies in just a single day.

While the sessions were awesome, the true power of the code camp is in meeting other members of the technology community. If you didn’t take the time to introduce yourself to at least one new person, you really missed out on some serious networking opportunities.

Well, that’s my little blurb about the Portland Code Camp v 2.0 in general, I’ll try and get some of my session specific observations up in just a little bit. Throughout the day it was possible to attend five sessions, but I only went to four of them. During the third session, I took a little Code Camp break and went home to give my wife a little break with the boys (we have 3 of them), but I’ll make sure to post my coverage of the sessions that I did attend.

So, I was laying in bed the other night, bugging wifey as I love to do (a guy has to have a hobby right!), when I got this delightful little phrase thrown in my general direction.

GET THAT WOOKIE OUT OF MY FACE!

Man, i thought she LIKED the wookie! I guess I’ll be nice and put that in context for you….

Nothing like putting the Wookie in your wife’s face….