Monday, April 07, 2008 12:02 PM
by
RickM
Code Camp 9 in Waltham, a Retrospective
I went to my first Code Camp this weekend. I was a bit wary at first because it was hosted by Microsoft and I hate Corporate Kool-Aid. Thankfully, that was kept to a minimum and the focus was where it should be: on the code.
All of the panels I went to were worthwhile to some degree. However, three stood out to me as particularly informative or entertaining:
While this talk was all business and no glitter it was by far the most informative presentation I went to at Code Camp. Edwin focused on NMock2, which I previously hadn’t heard of. I had read about mock objects but actually building them always seemed more pain and time than they were worth. With NMock2 it is possible to quickly create mock objects for testing in .NET. It also allows the user to easily build in assertions and expected output. I’m going to start using NMock2 for my own testing right away.
Atalasoft’s own Lou Franco gave a really entertaining introductory talk about Powershell. Powershell is the scripting language Microsoft should have had built into its operating systems ages ago. With it you get all of the power of Linux shell scripting along with full .NET support. Powershell is not only useful for programmers who want to throw something together fast. It’s also a great tool for Sysadmins and IT workers as it also supports access to the guts of many of Microsoft’s server and operating system products.
I was happy to see that Chris didn’t dwell on the obviously-premade-by-Microsoft-Marketing XNA slides and got right into the meat of things. Using XNA, Chris built a pong clone complete with graphics, sound and simple AI, in about an hour. Everyone from Atalasoft who attended was blown away. Granted, all of the code came from prewritten snippets, but it was clear to everyone who attended just how fast and simple game development with XNA is. He also a mentioned a Boston XNA users group, if I lived in Boston I would defiantly check it out.
Room for Improvement
The worst thing about Code Camp was the poor accommodations. There was no Wifi for non-presenters which really shows poor hospitality on the part of Microsoft. It’s 2008, there are whole towns with free Wifi, is some internet really too much to ask for? The catering was a fiasco, with the beverages showing up way after the food and there being no dressing for the salad. The coffee disappeared after about noon and so I almost passed out in a couple of the afternoon talks. The food for day two was exactly the same (Plain Cheese Pizza) and so we decided to bail on the second half of the day and go get some real food. It wouldn’t have been so bad if enough time had been given for lunch so that we could go get something and stock up on caffeine. Also, the content of the panels was great, but it would have been nice to see more Advanced-rated panels.
In Summary,
- Overall, I found my first Code Camp to be a very positive experience.
- There were some great panels and I learned a lot.
- It was full of friendly and like-minded developers.
However…
- Two days without Wifi is a lot to ask.
- A longer Mid-day break would have helped a lot.
- I would like to see more Advanced panels.