So, I'm home from codecampoz and I haven't really gone and had a look at the blog reactions... the one thing I think we all noticed, and probably the most important point from the camp was "Where was the bird guy?"

I looked out for him, even without the bird and I didn't see him this year...

Anyway, on to what was there!

Obviously I traveled with mabster, so we kept the same schedule - ie we didn't make it to any of the nightly events because we traveled down from Albury each day, we missed the first session on Saturday with AJAX - mostly because we don't do much in the way of the web and the only place we'd find any interest for it is with sharepoint, we skipped out before Adam Cogan's CRM talk - even though it could have been interesting we just don't use CRM and since our IT Manager is in charge of our financials and it's his pet project we're not likely to, missed the Excel Services on Sunday - just no interest and I saw it at the SQL Code Camp, and before the XNA - if we need to know anything about that we work with Pete over at brownbot and he's our resident genius for all things gaming!

So recapping what we did see:

• Saturday Session 2 - Building Applications you can take on the road with Nick Randolph

We've seen some of this stuff previously, and follow Occasionally Connected Systems on DotNetRocks and really have not so much of a business use for these systems, so not a whole lot of interest.  Seemed like a good session though.

• Session 3 - Extending and Managing Team Foundation Server with Grant Holliday

Kind of interesting, but I think Grant was really working against the fact that 90% of the people there all thought the same thing - the price of the software is too much of a barrier to us purchasing it.

We'll stick with Fogbugz and Vault as our solution until TFS becomes remotely affordable, then we'd probably look at the benefits of each system.

It was an okay session, but as it stands with no interest in actually adopting the software we got nothing out of the session.

• Session 4 - Windows Mobile 6 with Dave Glover

Dave's come and given a presentation at AWDNUG and he was just plain brilliant.  He was the same on this day - WM6 looks like it'll be a useful and fun piece of software to code against, there's just two barriers for us - getting management to approve it, and getting the devices!

I gotta say, just for a nicer calendar on my phone it'd be a good piece of software, but I'd also like to see what applications we could develop against it.

• Session 5 - Workflow foundation and Biztalk - making the kids play together with Bill Chesnut

Basically it just seemed like this session was to tell you when to use Biztalk and when to use Workflow - something that I think I already had a pretty good handle on, at least it seemed really straightforward to me.

There was also no demos this was just all slides - so it didn't really hold the interest.

I remember Bill did some small demos last year and I was kind of hoping we'd see some more detailed demos this year - like when he mentioned CRM adapters I would have loved seeing how programs integrate together using Biztalk.

The other thing that really stood out for me was when Bill said, and hugely paraphrasing here, that one of the barriers to Biztalk adoption was that it was marketed to enterprises and not to programmers or mid-small size businesses... and yet here in a room full of us we didn't get to see it in action.

So that part of it was disappointing to me.

The other thing I can't quite remember is that I thought last year he mentioned that the Workflow engine in Biztalk was based off the same engine being brought into .NET, but he mentioned that it couldn't do some of the same things this time, like looping - so it makes me wonder if that is still true or where the limitations lie.

I guess hopefully we'll get to play with Biztalk at work a bit and find out what you really can do.

• Session 6 - Protecting against code level attacks in .NET with Corneliu Tusnea & Andy Reay

A pretty great and fast session that showed us the true vulnerabilities in our .NET apps, where I think when I go back to work after this weekend I'll have to load up a few and see if Corneliu's app Hawkeye and see what we discover.

I think the only thing that I wanted to see more of was seeing how we should be protecting our apps, but I think the session was really top notch in showing us some of the things we just really overlook in our day to day development and where we all have some work to fix our vulnerabilities.

Heh, I just opened Comicster which is mabsters application and had a bit of a play... very interesting.  I really don't know how you'd lock it down though - something to investigate.

• Sunday Session 10 - Concurrency and Parallelism: Next generation scalable apps with Joel Pobar

Went right over my head.  Seriously wow... it was a great session but all I really could understand is threading and thread pool = good.

I guess the great thing is, you may not understand everything you hear at a session like this but it gives you some foundation to go study some of this stuff and come back to your thoughts.

We basically came in halfway through anyway, so I don't think that helped.

I did have to sit next to Mabster when Joel came up and sat basically across the aisle from him and listen to "I am 2ft away from Joel Pobar!!".  Being not so knowledgeable of .NET celebs I wasn't as excited, but he wouldn't take my advice of just saying g'day and all that.

Although this is the guy who I had to embarrass by going up and asking to get a photo of Ron Jacobs of ARCast fame!  I guess this is why I am on the stalker list and he isn't :)

(And I get to score points by embarrassing him by pointing out his fanboyness now!)

• Session 11 - Practical Magic / SOA with Chris Hewitt

This was a great little session because it gave us a bit of an idea of what WCF was about with a real-world kind of solution, well one moreso than any others given! Plus since Chris does this out in the wild he gave us a bit of an insight into how he structures his Objects and communications.

We also did a little bit of the fanboy thing and accosted Chris out in the lunch line with a few questions and he was a really great bloke, open to discussion and really knew his stuff.

This was really a good standout for the weekend as well, just because it used something we could relate to.

It also backed up some of what we (okay mostly mabs) have been doing when we organise our web services and communications internally in our programs at work, so we liked it quite a bit.

• Session 12 - Topics on WCF with Daniel Crowley-Wilson & Paul Glavich

I've known Daniel for about 10 years since back at my days at CSU so I know where the bodies are hid.  Well not really, he was much too cool for me to roll with, but we were both members of the old IT Club there so this is an entirely biased review.

BEST PRESENTATION EVER!

But seriously, it was pretty good - we hadn't really progressed beyond using the basic settings that come wrapped into WCF so we hadn't played with the different options in WCF instances and threading and such.

So seeing them in action - even a basic counting demo, really gave us some idea of what we'd do back at work - and although I don't think we'll be going past simple persession and single as our options, apart from maybe knocking it back to percall - well, it was good to see what affect it might have using the other settings, especially with concurrency and locking.

Again, seeing as it isn't something I do on a daily basis and if I am involved in setting up this sort of thing it's more or less set up as default and forget it - it's good to be able to sit in on a session like this and find out what the software is capable of.

Daniel also came and caught up with me at lunch time and was very cool with a guy who was geeking out at just being around guys who do this stuff every day.

• Session 13 - Building a real world WPF application with Joseph Cooney

This was the last session that we stuck around for and I am so glad we did.  I've had a look around WPF before and even thought about starting a project and with all I have to do at work and the simple fact I'm not a daily .NET guy I was kind of hesitant to start something like WPF, but I have done some basic setting up form work but as soon as I got to the bindings and such I didn't go any further.

Although I did download Paul Stovell's TrialBalance to look around.

It may sound stupid but as soon as I saw some of it I just backed off and went with what I knew, but Joseph Cooney really demoed it in a way that I'm kind of interested in going back into it - now that I know where the bindings attach to .NET objects and conversions and all.

I know he said he was going at a higher level but I am glad he decided to go into showing us that side of it because now I feel like it's something that I can give a try and already have a lot more excitement about it.

We'll have to see how it goes!

But this was one session that I really got a lot out of.

Overall, I hate to say but the weekend was a tiny bit of a letdown over last year where we had the excitement over some software that was brand new being shown off like Mitch's LINQ session, and the Sharepoint, and Biztalk with demos and all.

But it was still good to get out there and see what other developers were getting into, some great numbers coming along and yeah, for the fact that this is one weekend where we can come along FOR FREE and get the latest and greatest intel, I can't really complain at all!

If you're wondering at all who I am, well thanks to Damian Edwards - here is the back of my head!