As I promised before, here is the detailed account for Tallahassee Code Camp. This time I drove in the morning to Tallahassee for Code Camp. Obviously, I missed out on the Speaker meetup on Friday. I reached in Tallahassee around 9:30 AM. My first session was at 11:10 AM. Bayer White had a session on Windows Workflow Foundation(WF) before mine in the same room. I decided to attend that. Bayer had some technical issues with his VPC image and the projector. Shawn Weisfeld helped Bayer to get his presentation going. Overall it was a nice talk, Bayer walked through the concepts behind WF and also showed some examples. I remembered times when I was working on a Workflow product myself in my first company. WF concepts seemed familiar. It was 11:10 AM. Time for my session. I had good number of people in my Visual Studio Tips Session. It was nice to have a familiar face in J.T. Taylor. I think the session was quite interactive. I received great comments via email/blog from Tom Kelley and Scott Davis about the session. Thank you both for that. I have posted the slides in another post of mine here.
During lunch I came across Jose Fuentes, one of the main organizers of Tallahassee Code Camp. The first thing I asked him was Where is Jay? Jay Karnik and Jose had travelled to Atlanta Code Camp last month. Atlanta Code Camp did not have a post event social. To compensate for that, the gang of four - Jose, Jay, Tom Fuller, and I went for dinner and partying. We had a lot of fun together in downtown Decatur. When I was in Atlanta, Jay had asked me to come to his home for dinner. He lived in Tallahassee. Jay told me he will cook Veggies for me. While in Jay's company in Atlanta, I was very impressed with his master skill of story telling. Tom and I would listen to him with complete attention as if glued to TV for an NBA Final match. Back to the question. Where is Jay? Jose asked me - "Did you get my email from last night?". I said, I have not checked my email since last night. He said Jay passed away. I was shocked to hear that. I could not believe what Jose said. Jose told the sad story of Jay's untimely demise. Whatever time I spent with Jay, I enjoyed thoroughly. He was a very lively person. I am sure Tom will agree with me. I'll never forget him in my life. He was a master story teller. May god bless his soul.
There was Pizza for lunch. Joe Healy pointed me in the direction of the Veggie pizza and I ended up avoiding the line (it was not very long anyways, you have to come and see Jacksonville Code Camp's line this year on August 26th). During lunch I got chance to talk briefly to my colleagues Kevin Ayers and John Holliday. I had my second talk right after lunch. This one was on Visual Studio Extensibility. I was expecting a niche group of people to be present. When I did this talk in Atlanta, there were only couple of people who had played with Macros and AddIns; None with Packages. I put the same question to the 10-12 people that showed up for the talk. I was surprised that half of them had played with AddIns. Awesome! I thought this would be a fun session. William Rawls asked me several questions during this session.
When I was done with my sessions around 2:30PM, I just sat in the lobby and had a little chat with Joe Healy. I wanted his feedback on my talks of Tampa Bay TechEd Outcasts. He gave me some tips on how I can improve my presentation skills. I will be blogging about that in another post of mine later. After relaxing for around an hour and trying to take my thoughts away from the happenings, I went to attend Ken Tucker's session on DLinq. DLinq, a component of the LINQ Project, provides a run-time infrastructure for managing relational data as objects without giving up the ability to query. I would not bore you here with DLinq, as it is not even going to be part of .NET Framework 3.0 (new name for WinFx). You might get to see it by the middle/end of next year. Moreover, it may not be even called DLinq by then. Jim Wooley alluded that the name might be different.
All the sessions finished by 5:00 PM. It was time for giveaways and closing. There were huge stacks of swag. Most visible being lots of Microsoft press books. Steve Lane administered the closing. Every one of the attendees got at least two books. I think there were around 200 give aways and 85 attendees in the code camp. The code camp was very well executed. The only thing I did not like was the projectors. The projectors were of poor quality and messed up many good sessions. My eyes still hurt, don't know about the attendees who had to sit through 6 sessions.
After FSU, I went to the Pub Club. The location was Paradise Grill and Bar. This turned out to be a great location. I simply loved it for the live music and ambience. It was so relaxing after a tiring day. I had a chance to talk to several people here - Tom Fuller, Raenell Garner, and Kulbinder. Tom Fuller had interesting multi-threaded stories to tell from his DevMentor training. I got threadache for a while. I also shared the table with Stacy Draper and Wes Dumey. I talked with Noah Subrin and Jim Wooley for a while. Both of them came from Atlanta. I talked to William on social computing and Web 2.0 for a long time. Both of us together asked few questions to several people there - Ron Larson, Chuck David, Jim, and finally Joe "DevFish" Healy. I would keep the questions secret for now. They are the source and inspiration for something big. Keith Rowe was entertaining as ever with his beach shirts. We had group pictures in the official attire for pub club - beach shirts. I hope Keith will post them somewhere. I am also looking forward to the late nighters picture. It was way after mid-night when we left from there.
This was one day that I'll remember for a long long time. Thanks to Tallahassee Code Camp organizers - Jose Fuentes, Jaya Kastury (the background grunt worker), Keith Rowe, Steve Lane, and our favorite developer evangelist - DevFish.
See you in the next code camp.
