I got a chance to watch a few great presentations at Code Camp yesterday:

Ivan Towlson - Thinking in WPF:

I've seen Ivan's talk already at the Auckland Code Camp, but I got a few new nuggets of WPF goodness out of it. It was fun watching people get up on the stage and act out the named parts pattern :)

John Rusk - Linq to SQL:

This was a really interesting dive into the good and bad of LINQ to SQL, and some of the stuff John and his co-workers have had to do to work around and extend it, including checking that the model matches the database, in memory save points and model inspection.

It sounds like they've got some really cool code that can be re-used by others -- now we just need to convince them to release it!

Jeremy Straub - IIS 7 Extensibility:

Jeremy gave a short talk about how easy it is to automate IIS administrative tasks, such as creating websites and setting properties, and showed how to do so from within C# and PowerShell. It's really nice how much you can do programmatically against IIS7.

Baroon Anand - Team Foundation Server:

Baroon's talk introduced TFS, and went through some of Intergen's customisation and uses of TFS within their business process and projects. A good overview with some interesting nuggets on running projects through TFS.

Lightning Talks:

I was being the dastardly timekeeper for the lightning talks which was a fun task. There were about 7 lightning talks @ 5 minutes each, on a variety of topics from C# to paper prototyping, solving real-world problems and PDC / Azure announcements. Well done to everyone who presented, there's at least an hour of content from each of that I'd love to hear!

Matt Smith - Productive Sharepoint Development:

Matt is a great presenter, I really enjoyed his talk. It was similar to his TechEd talk (which I didn't go to), so the above link will help you out if you want some tips on how to be a productive developer using Sharepoint (summary: ask your boss for a fast PC, and make your build/deploy as quick as possible).

A bunch of cool tools and tips punctuated by good humour :)

Kirk Jackson - Overcoming your web insecurity:

I can't really comment much on this talk, except to say that there's more stuff in the slides if you're interested :)

David Bales - Scrum Game:

This was a lot of fun. Rather than teaching Scrum via PowerPoint, David had us organised into groups trying to complete tasks by running a series of sprints. I think everyone in the room had a better understanding of the Scrum process and a little idea about the challenges you come across by the end of it.

Clarus is running a Scrum course in December.

Of course, there were other presentations through the day (there were two streams), so I didn't get along to all of the great Code Camp presentations. Well done to all of the speakers for great content, and to the organisers for a really interesting day!

Kirk