Code Camp 6 was this past Saturday. It started out with a somewhat nervewracking 200 mile drive to Waltham due to torrential rainstorms and high winds. But I had a fun companion in the car who kept me well entertained throughout – Dave Burke, who was ridiculously kind when I was adamant that we needed to go south on Route 91 (totally wrong) and let me get away with it for 10 miles before I let him convince me to turn around. I suppose it’s one thing to deal with female logic when it’s your wife, but a totally different conundrum when it’s another chick.

When we arrived at the event on Saturday morning, I learned some wonderful news. Athough we are all sad to see Thom Robbins go (and thrilled at his new job at Microsoft) he made a fantastic choice for our new Developer Evangelist in Chris Bowen. Chris is a local guy who has been involved with the .NET community in Boston for a long time and is someone I have a huge amount of respect for. So I was very happy to hear this great news.

Since people quickly disappear into the conference rooms, it’s always hard to tell how many are really there, but at lunch time, it certainly seemed like major swarms of people heading for the pizza. I did only two of my three talks. As I expected, the Persisting Ink on the Web talk, which I was hoping to practice prior to Mobile Connections in a few weeks was waaaaaay to narrow so nobody showed up. But the Managing and Deploying ASP.NET 2.0 Websites and Moving Big Data with ADO.NET 2.0 talks were both well attended.

I spent most of my free time futzing with the impact of the “click here to activate and use this control” issue that is now a permanent part of IE7 and has a big impact on the embedded winforms controls that I use to do ink on the web, rather than sitting in on other talks, so I missed out on Richard Hale Shaw’s C# talks where I’m sure he couldn’t resist a dig or two against VB ;-).

There were a bunch of VTdotNETters there which is always great to see.

The other very nice surprise was seeing Noah Coad who I have known for a number of years, originally through the MVP academic community. He has been at Microsoft for a while now (they scooped him up the day he graduated from college), but I didn’t realize he had recently moved to the east coast. So I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of him.

When all was said and done, Dave and I hopped in the car for the drive back to Vermont in what was thankfully great weather on a beautiful fall night.

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