Tampa Code Camp 2008 Wrap up

Jay Kimble — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 20:36:53 GMT

Yesterday I had an excellent day at the Tampa Code Camp. My wife gave me a vacation day from the family (thank you!) which makes for a good day that I can just hang out catch a couple sessions, speak, and connect with a few other geeks.

I have attached my slides and sample projects to this post (the sample solution requires that you have Script# installed). I also attached my MS Ajax Cheat sheets as well.

Normally that would be all that I would put up here, but there were some additional things that happened as a result of me meeting a few people. BTW, I absolutely love Code Camps, but usually not for the presentations. I normally end up meeting a couple people that I have a really cool conversation with. In this case I had a little chat one of my attendees that got me thinking. Morgan mentioned that she would love to see me do something that would help someone like her wrap her head around all this client scripting stuff (she’s an experience Windows Developer whose now having to build some web sites and is starting to see the need to be able to dive deeper than throwing an UpdatePanel on a form.

She got me thinking about doing what I’ve started thinking of as "Dive Deep" into ClientScript. I wanted to do another Day of Ajax (but I think Joe is a little hesitant to let me do it as in the past I have tended to dive just below the stuff I’m currently doing losing most of the people in the room... actually my talk yesterday was probably another one of those... sorry, if you were one of those people...) Actually Joe wasn’t the only one who kind of shot me down, so an event sounds out of the question.

New Blog post series (for Morgan and folks like her)
Since I can’t do another Day of Ajax (well, I could if someone wanted to give me a facility to do it in...), I’ve started thinking about doing a series of blog posts to help someone go from minimal knowledge (I can drop a control on a WebForm) to being able to customize a behavior/extender in the Ajax Control Toolbox and to be able to build your own controls. These skills really go outside your core MS skills... you need to be able to look at things a little differently. These blog posts will have source code in JavaScript and in Script# (since I imagine a lot of people doing ASP.NET would rather leverage a skill that they use on a regular basis). We’ll be leveraging both the MS Ajax ClientScript library and the jQuery library.

I’ll try to get some of this going this week and will try to regularly blog about it.... with the holidays please forgive me if I fall behind.

I was right BDD is cool and translates to my world really well
I also had some conversations with Sean Chambers and Chris Bennage. Between conversations I have had with Chad Myers and Sean, I have a decent agile community in Los Techies who seem to be less thick skinned and are really good at communicating their methodology in a very clear manner without being zealots. My conversations with Chirs really showed me the practicality of the whole discipline (looking forward to having more conversations with Y’all). I actually attended Sean’s BDD talk and found it really enlightening... I’m looking for a good project to try BDD on (and BDD first). If I can manage to not tick off Mr. Reynolds, maybe I can find some Agile friends in Florida that I can pick a few things up from (I leave it all open ended at that).

So you’ll probably hear some posts around this subject as well. I actually had Chris admit that he over-architected a sample once (which has probably been my problem with some of this stuff... FWIW, all my conversations about DI seem fairly stupid at the moment as what I build typically is DI in some form or another). Anyway, BDD is something I’ll definitely be exploring a little more (since I was given a copy of TypeMock, I’ll be exploring that was well).

Summary
All in all a really great day for me.

Here’s the files Slides

Sample Solution

Jay’s MS Ajax Cheat Sheets