I was at CodeStock in Knoxville over this previous weekend. Great conference. It was run very well, everything went quite smoothly. I attended some really great sessions, and got to meet a ton of great folks.
The twitter get together the night before at the hotel was awesome. It was sort of weird, a lot of the folks I have known on twitter for several months now, but this was the first time we got to meet face to face. As I told my wife, “I got to see a lot of old friends for the very first time and catch up on old times.” We got into some really interesting discussions on development topics, user group activities, and just had a lot of fun in general.
I attended a lot of good sessions during the day, but want to point out a few in particular. The first was put on by Amanda Launcher and Joe O’Brien. They talked about alternative languages such as Ruby and F#, and why learning them was important. They pointed out that alternative languages help you think about different approaches to problem solving. Gave us a lot to think about, and has me eager to dive into those F# books I bought.
The other two sessions were on LINQ. Joe Kunk did a LINQ to SQL session. His stated goal was to give us enough info to return to the office and write our first LINQ app. This combined with Jim Wooley’s session on LINQ Migration Strategies did just that, I sat down Sunday and, I admit with the help of a few books, in a few hours had written my first LINQ code to talk to SQL Server Compact Edition.
I thought CodeStock was a great investment of my time, and am looking forward to returning next year.
Arcane Code 