CodeCampSA 2007 - Reflections

• I'm glad I organised wireless network access!
• The directions weren't great, which Peter has acknowledged. A few temporary signs around City West campus would have probably helped too.
• I liked the food (catering was done by 3rd Goodwood Scouts) - a nice change from pizzas, but I think Mitch is probably right in that a barbecue doesn't scale to a Wagga-sized event. You'd start to run into concurrency issues - nothing worse than a deadlocked sausage :-)
• Wagga does have a tradition of all going out to eat somewhere on the first night - maybe something could have been arranged for Adelaide too.
• Nametags - not everyone likes them, but I think they help with mingling/mixing and getting to know other people.
• Public transport in Adelaide isn't great early on a Sunday morning. Not a problem for everyone, but for those of use with one car it's something to consider.
• It would be great to make use of all the talent in the room and finish Sunday with an "expert panel". When you have the likes of Mitch, Dave, Greg, Greg and Darren in the same room, that's a great opportunity you want to take advantage of.
• I missed not having Rob around. That would have been the icing on the cake!
• For a CodeCamp, I'm not sure that there was heaps of code to be seen. Having said that, I found some of the non-code talks really interesting - Design by Contract and Web Sales come to mind.
• The turnout was good, but it could have been better. I know that weekends aren't always free for people, but to pass up an opportunity to learn from some of Australia's top speakers is a big call.
• It was great that UniSA's School of Computer and Information Science sponsored the event, but apart from Allan Baird welcoming everyone on Saturday morning, it wasn't clear to me if there were any CIS students or staff actually attending the weekend. I would have thought this was a great opportunity for students to network with people in the industry as well as learn heaps too. Funny it doesn't even get a mention in their News and Events.
• Interesting discussion on Saturday as to whether naming the event 'CodeCamp' is a turnoff for people attending.

You can only have 65535 temporary files in a single directory

This limit caused us problems yesterday. For some reason, the temporary files weren't getting deleted.

The first clue was that the temp directory contained exactly 65535 .tmp files. The corroborating clue was that the last .tmp file was named "uplFFFF.tmp" - FFFF would be 65535 in hex.

The .NET Framework mentions this limit for the GetTempFileName method, but curiously the corresponding unmanaged GetTempFileName API doesn't (so I've submitted some Community Content to note this).

CodeCampSA 2007 - Day 2

I discovered this morning that there are no buses or trains that go to the city early on Sunday mornings. Thankfully my wife was able to drive me in instead!

Ben Mackie

ORM overview. A pity this wasn't before my LINQ talk yesterday, but hopefully it helped people understand the theory behind mapping objects to relational data.

Dave Glover

Overview of features in Windows Mobile 6. Dave made use of Pocket Controller in his demo. He also mentioned using CompressSoapExtension to compress data with SharpZipLib going through web service calls.

Peter Cornish

A good presentation on the sales process, and how important it is that your web site is found by Google. I now have a better idea about "organic" (aka 'Free') search and "Paid" (aka AdWords) search.

Peter pointed out that for quick changes and campaigns, paid search is the way to go, as Google will display your new ads immediately, rather than waiting weeks or months for your site to get re-indexed.

Don't forget that keywords are what the client/customer types in to Google - they might not be the same names as you use in your business yourself.

Jey Srikantha

Talked about K2 and MOSS, but I missed this session as I had to do some birthday present shopping.

Greg Low

DMV's - dynamic management views in SQL 2005. These views were originally developed for the SQL Team at Microsoft to aid in their internal debugging and diagnostics. They live in the SYS schema.

Greg showed how you can use CROSS APPLY to run a TSQL function for each row of a result set.

There's also a new feature in SQL 2005 SP2 that let's you view reports of your databases (you don't need Reporting Services for this to work).

James Chapman-Smith

An overview of NHibernate (seems like there's a bit of an ORM theme this year). Greg asked a good question about dealing with concurrency. As an NHIbernate user myself, I'll have to research this a bit more.

Yes, it was ironic that James - self-confessed Database non-fan was sandwiched between the two Greg SQL gurus :-)

Greg Linwood

SQL Server execution plans explained. Greg really knows his stuff and it was very worthwhile to see this talk, which was similar to his presentation to the Adelaide SQL group last year.

Remember, execution is serialised, read execution plans from top-right to bottom-left, and clustered indexes aren't always the best choice.

Darren Neimke

A talk about how Readify manage all their staff who are out there developing remotely.

They use Scrum, but the stand-up daily meetings don't really work if you're not all in the same place, or if you're all working on separate things.

They really like WSS v3, and use SharedView to share documents and screen views (eg. do pair programming remotely)