Friday, January 11, 2008

Codemash Day 1 part 2

After my "Ask the Exports" time, I headed over to see Keith Elder talk about Microsoft Workflow. The meat of his presentation can be found here. It was an bit of an entry level talk, which I think is desperately needed. There are still a lot of misconceptions out in the Enterprise community about what Workflow is, how it works and how it fits in with things like the .NET framework overall and Biztalk. He's doing an more "advanced" talk later today "custom activities" which I'm looking forward to.

After that I went to see Dustin Campbell do some F# stuff. I was playing with F# a bit before my laptop died (Note to Dell, you actually have to plug the fans in for them to cool the laptop down.) I haven't really had time to re-install and get back into it. Dustin's talk was almost SRO; functional programming, F# in particular, seems to be something that has gathered a lot of interest.

After dinner, I got to play a lot of "Rock Band" with Keith Elder and Scott Hanselman. Keith is scary good at the "Guitar Hero" type games. Scott claims he's never played the game before, but he did a great job on the drums! As for me... well, have I even mentioned how much "Guitar Hero"is NOT like really playing the guitar...

... speaking of playing guitar, the "CodeMash jam session" also happened last night. I didn't feel like dragging my rig up (I already got enough shit from Kaufman and Wingfield about my "larger-than-necessary suitcase) and I'm kind of glad I didn't. Most of the group seemed to be older guys with acoustics play country and CSN stuff. I doubt any of them know any "Iron Maiden", "Helloween" or even "Limozeen!" I'll track Dustin down later and make him a deal for next year; if he brings his stuff, I'll bring mine.

OK, drink now, more writing later.

2 comments:

Tim said...

Princess Vespa would be jealous of your "overnight" bag, who would have noticed a guitar?

Luc said...

I was the guy that brought the drums and you're right, I don't know any of the music you mentioned. :) I could probably ad-lib if I heard it once though.

Regardless, you should bring you stuff next year. We need more exciting jammers that aren't afraid to funk out for at least 10 minutes or so. This year was too "koombayaa" for me. :( We had one or two jam moments when someone else would jump in on bass, but not enough to consider it a "jam session" IMO...