CodeCamp

Wow, what a great geek coder event, it is sponsored by MS and although they want to keep a low profile and invite all open source guys to go give talks, the secretary put the Microsoft logo no all speaker badges so they can't escape the public recognition that this is a MS event, sponsored buy and largely about MS. Woody did make it clear that they wanted open source guys to come talk, so if you are out there, come and give a talk about Ruby, Drupal, LAMP or whatever you want.

I got there after all the Geek Dinner tickets where passed out at 8:15 AM, 200 tickets went fast. I first went to a talk the Sleepless people gave about SharePoint, which worked great for me as it matched the book I got at registration. I even got to be in some video about the event where I pretty much talked about this blog and I was asked about Sharepoint, my expectation is that it is easier to setup and run, might have more eye candy then open source stuff. But it is probably easier to then use the open source stuff after it is installed, since it is hard to install and you learn more about internals. At least that has been my experience with other things. When you have simple apps with source available it makes lots of things simple. Anyhow there was a nice breakfast spread outside room UH 248, I ate again, since I had been up since 5am. So yet another thing to eval from MS. They do good marketing, and the MVPs do help out. Full disclosure, I do own the stock right now, but I try to ignore that when reviewing.

I next went to room 246 Everything Developers need to know about Active Directory, which started out with a slide that talked about everything they were not going to cover in the talk, and since I don't know much about AD, I was rather amiss with all that stuff missing, no matter the WikiPedia will fill me in. Sometimes I will put links in my blog for me to read, I do need to learn more about AD. Active Directory Application Mode was mostly what was left in the talk.

After lunch Geoff had a great talk about Data Stories With Virtual Earth put your data on a map and it makes so much sense when you look at it. Followed by a great talk about management. Scott Dunn got a big round of applause and certainly deserved it. No slides, but a nice count down to the talk at the start. Anyhow he clearly knows what he is talking about.

We then networked and headed for the Chase Hotel to go in the basement for the Geek Dinner. They had pasta coke and a bar, tickets were very scarce at the beginning and lots of people left, but plenty of drinks later. The 2 bands were pretty good, especially the second Sound Cake I have some video, but do I want to post? Lets just say that the recruiter from Avanade is quite the dancer.

A ride over the the Marriot with someone from SocialMixr to find that the room MS rented for the all night coding was deserted. I walked over to my car from there in a drizzle and drove home. Rather scary drive, we are not used to so much rain, but I guess at least it had already washed all the dirt from the road, so other then some unexpected puddles, it all went well and I got home soggy and happy.