Well, as expected the 4th Code Camp pulled together by our most awesome D.E., Thom Robbins, was fabulous. I had to basically breeze in and out as I fine tuned my talks until noon on Saturday, drove the 4 hours to Waltham and gave 2 talks. Then gave 2 more talks the next morning, hung around for a bit and headed back to Vermont. With my focus on 4 topics it was hard to absorb content from other people’s sessions which was a big disappointment. There were so many great people talking about very interesting and valuable things. I still haven’t figured out how Sam Gentile pulled off doing 3 talks in one day! I think a few other people did this too. Amazing. I was most disappointed thought to miss Dave Burke’s session on Building Smart Client Apps in .NET 2.0. He is reluctant to present at his very own user group but I will keep pressuring him (mwuahaha) to get him to do this talk for Vermont.NET sometime in 2006.

There was a crew from Vermont – over 10 people from Vermont.NET, which is the most who have made the trip of all four Code Camps.

I really enjoyed not only seeing old friends, but meeting in person for the first time some folks who I have communicated a lot with on email. In particular, Phil Denoncourt, who runs the New England C# group and Andy Beaulieu who started CNY Developers in Syracuse New York (my home town) where I am going to speak next week.

I loved doing my sessions. One on Virtual Earth where I made sure everyone was familiar with the awesome resources on ViaVirtualEarth and showed them some of the tricky things I have had to figure out in my Virtual Earth does Ink app. I think what made the deepest impresssion on those in the session was seeing some of the various imaginative and useful web applications people have done using Virtual Earth. It really helps get the ideas rolling. I will write another post with specific links for this talk.

 I also did two “standards” which I am very passionate about – new goo in ADO.NET 2.0 which was followed by an impromptu lunch time session digging further into Query Notification and the other is my attempt to teach the world about some of the crypto tools that are key for doing Web Service security.

The fourth talk is a new one for me: What’s new in WSE 3.0. I really love what the team has done with this new version of the WSE API and love being able to share this information.

Again, I will write a separate post with links to resources, decks and demos for these talks.

But what is most important about Code Camp is to thank Thom Robbins. He pulls off a 2 day “conference” with 80 sessions and over 500 attendees as though it was absolutely no effort at all. Get the speakers to commit to sessions, create a schedule, order some pizza and sandwiches and the rest just seems to happen all by itself. Or so he likes us to think. 🙂 Thanks Thom, once again.

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