Codemash Summary
Codemash was a really great conference. Kudos to all the planners- you guys did an awesome job. It totally blew my expectations away!
I'd say the highlight today was hearing Scott Guthrie. He is by far one of my favorite presenters (I LOVE his tips and tricks sessions) and delivered a great keynote. It was more "down in the weeds" with the new LINQ stuff, which I think as Dustin says, will be the next "darling of .NET". I thought it was very applicable and I'm sure developers from other backgrounds found it interesting. I was a little bummed I couldn't make his talk on ASP.NET Ajax Tips and Tricks, but I happened to be presenting at the same time on Intro to Ajax. I was actually pleasantly surprised there was a showing in my session- it was more geared on the abstract/ conceptual and I think that helped.
Oh, and things kept getting better as the day went on! After all the sessions were over, everyone was in a hurry to fill out the codemash conference eval. We filled up the Indigo room and the planners roled out the "swag waggon". It was quite impressive. I won a hard cover book entitled "Refactoring Databases- Evolutionary Database Design" by Scott W. Ambler and Pramod J. Sadalage. Scott was speaking at the conference, and I got to eat breakfast with him on the first day. I know this one will be a great addition to the library. And it gets better! I put my name in the box at the Microsoft booth... And sure enough, Josh Holmes called my name for the Xbox 360! The one with the hard drive, at that! Two more of the five individuals that went from my company also won great prizes, including an IPod and a portable DVD player.
What a great way to end the week.