Well, I got through most of Saturdays presentations, unfortunately I had to miss the final two on Microsoft CRM and Expression Designer respectively. However the talks I did manage to attend were very useful, and overall I am pleased by the level of discussion at the very first Code Camp SA.
The presentations for the 07/07/07 included the following:
The highlight for me today was definitely Mitch Denny's insight into surviving the transition to using TFS for real world development. He had some excellent advice on how to virtualize your TFS server and build servers, how to get continuous integration going, and even some insight into how Readify tackled some of CI's issues in TFS (namely check in monitoring, build quality transition control and build cleanup).
Dr. Michael Baker presented some thought provoking examples on how to start implementing Programming By Contract techniques in your applications, although I have to admit that I thought the presentation would go in a completely different direction. I guess I should have known, but I was expecting to hear about technologies like Thinktecture's Web Services Contract First and associated methodologies.
Dave Glover in his typical, upbeat and enthralling style delivered an excellent introduction to Silverlight, Expression blend and Popfly. After seeing all this I just want to get going with Popfly on something like Microsoft Surface and start feeling the minority report goodness. Very exciting for the mash up scene.
I do owe an apology to Allan Baird et al, from the IT faculty of UniSA, I have had some less than stellar remarks regarding a university education in IT, however it seems that things are starting to look up with the likes of Allan at the steer. He informed the group of a commitment to start teaching Microsoft .NET technologies in core subjects in 2009 and I think this is an excellent step forward for our local IT education prospects in Adelaide. It also appears they are making great efforts to redress the imbalance of female personell in our industry. Not only that, but they are attempting to attract younger crowd to the IT scene in general.
All in all, it was a fun yet instructive day, good to catch up with some previous acquaintances from Code Camp Oz and to meet new people. Thankyou so much to UniSA, ADNUG and the Goodwood 3rd Scout group for putting on a great set of presentations. I'm sure tomorrow will be equally as good.
* sorry Jeff, couldn't get a decent Google fix on you!