The NHL season starts tomorrow, I can’t wait (even if Toronto is the first game on).

I am feeling pretty good about the team I drafted for my hockey pool. They are a young team but I think they are all going to have great seasons. Comments and criticism welcome:

– Eric Staal

– Rick Nash

– Patrice Bergeron

– Justin Williams

– Marek Svatos

– J.P. Dumont

– Nathan Horton

– Glen Murray

– Steve Bernier

– Raffi Torres (can’t go wrong getting Raffi this late).

– Patrick Eaves

Overall, I think that the Edmonton Code Camp was a huge success. I remeber talking with my co-worker Anand about starting one and at the time it seemed to me like it was not possible.

 Fast forward a couple of months later to a .NET Wizards meeting with John Bristowe. John came up to me before the meeting and gave me some ideas to help get the code camp ball rolling.

With the help of the guys at EDMUG, our speakers and our contributors over the months leading up to the code camp it all came together.

Some things that I will do different next year based on the comments

- Change of venue. 1 meth addict walking into the room is 1 too many.

- Rate presentations on the 100, 200, 300, 400 scale. This was something simple I could have done but forgot to do.

- More coffee, investigate airborne caffeine. This was the best I could do.

- Do a trial run with projectors. The projector troubles of the Edmonton Rails Group is entirely my fault. I apoligize!

- The thing that I regret the most about the code camp is the way the swag give away at the end went down. I had no idea that security would kick us out the way they did. I worked hard getting the books and swag and I was looking forward to seeing who would get each item but this was not possible due to time constraints.

I was very happy with the attendance and the patience of the attendees. One thing I didn't expect was Lee to bring a shuttle PC to the event:

Lastly, thank you to all the speakers! Everyone exceeded my expectations in their presentations.

If you would like to check out the rest of my pictures from the code camp you can check out the Edmonton Code Camp Flickr photo set. The code camp is also going to be podcasted on Developer Night in Canada so subscribed in your favorite rss reader and keep an eye on it.

If there are any other questions, comments or concerns about the code camp, please leave a comment here and I will see what I can do.

Technorati Tags: Edmonton - Code - Camp

I was going to do a screencast to show people how to install RubyCLR, but if you are familiar with Ruby gems John Lam released an experimental Ruby gem that will take care of installing RubyCLR for you.

I had a lot of fun presenting to everyone today but now that the presentation is complete I can point you to some good RubyCLR references!

The first site I recommend that you visit is the homepage for RubyCLR at http://www.rubyclr.com/ here you will find the RubyCLR download and instructions on how to install RubyCLR. I am going to make an additional screencast on how to install RubyCLR and post it on this blog so stay tuned!

I will also point you to John Lam's blog where he has a great article called Fun with const_missing and method_missing, this article explains the magic behind RubyCLR. I mentioned this in the presentation but I think I didn't emphasize how important this really  is!

Another good resource is John's presentation at the Lang.NET Symposium.

Here are the completed (and error free) code files and the screencasts for my part of the presentation: CollectionsDemo/CollectionsDemo Screencast  LinqExample/LinqExample Screencast. Please note that in the CollectionsDemo screencast it should be require 'rubyclr' not require 'rubclr'. If you are new to Ruby please watch my co-presenter Justice give an intro to the Ruby language beforehand.

I encourage you to check out the samples in the sample folder when you install RubyCLR. There are some great examples that show using WPF and ActiveRecord.

The other efforts to unite Ruby and .NET are IronRuby by Wilco Bauwer and Ruby.NET by the Queensland University.

And, last but not least is my powerpoint for the presentation. If you have any questions, my contact information is on the slides, feel free to give me a shout.

Technorati Tags: RubyCLR - Edmonton - Code - Camp - Ruby - .NET

[ Currently Playing : Nothing Owed (live) - Bonobo - Live Sessions -EP (6:24) ]

Tonight we put together the swag bags (hey that rhymes) for the Edmonton Code Camp. Some choice quotes:

"Hey, now that were done this, I can finish my presentation."

"I can't keep up to the guy in front of me, I am going to have to start eating the bags, like in I Love Lucy."

"Holy shit."

"Don't knock over the scotch with the swag."

"I need to spend some quality time with my wife."

In case you signed up and you were not planning on attending the code camp tomorrow, this is what you are missing (note the copious amount of swag):

Tonight at Edmug we had Jean-Paul Boodhoo give a talk about the MVP pattern. Although I voted for PEAA and because we use the MVP pattern  at work, I was a bit disappointed that MVP won, however I still found the presentation to be very informative.

There is always an opportunity to learn something new when JP presents, so if you are a user group he has recently been added to the MSDN speakers bureau so bring him to your group on MSDN's dime!

This weekend, Catherine and I participated in 2 charity walks this weekend. The first one was the Superwalk for Parkinson's. The Parkinson's Superwalk was extra special because of the passing of my Grandpa last week.

Thanks to everyone who was kind enough to donate, Catherine and I managed to raise over $1,000 for Parkinson's research, hopefully next year we wont have to! If you would still like to donate you can still sponsor me using the instructions here.

Today, Catherine and I also participated in the 15th Annual HIV/AIDS Walk for Life. We decided to bring along Daisy along for the walk and she got pretty tired after 1km so I ended up having to carry her for the rest (4km) of the walk.

Technorati Tags: parkinson's - hiv - aids - charity - walk

Recently I installed Windows Vista and I noticed that after installing it all of my purchased music from  iTunes was gone (kind of). Normally this wouldn't be an issue but I had bought the entire U2 library and I can't lose that!

When you install Vista overtop of Windows XP, everything is moved to a folder named Windows.old. For some strange reason, the new search in Vista will not search Windows.old!

To restore your purchased music go to C:\Windows.old\Documents and Settings\Your Old UserName\My Documents\My Music\iTunes

Copy all of the folders in here to C:\Users\Your Username\Music\iTunes

Next in iTunes go to File->Add Folder to iTunes and select C:\Users\Your Username\Music\iTunes this will add all of the files to iTunes. You will have to re-authorize the files to play on your new installation of Vista. If there is an easier way please let me know! You only have to re-authorize it once.

[ Currently Playing : The Entire Purchased Library of U2]

When my Grandpa was 17 he joined the Canadian Navy just for the free boots. Little did he know that during his service in the Navy he would meet Winston Churchill, become one of the first Candians to learn how to use radar, chase the Bismarck, ram a U-Boat and storm the beaches of Normandy on D-Day.

I loved hearing his stories about the war but despite the many adventures he had, he always spoke out against war. If you asked him, he would say that his greatest achievement was the family that he raised after the war.

My Grandpa passed away today. He was a great man who I respected a lot. The impact he had on my life will be carried with me until the day I die. I am not very good at putting it into words but I will miss him a lot.

My friend and fellow team member at work Jonas is blogging. His stuff is definetly worth checking out.

NYAHHHH!

I have to disagree with Don on the use of enums instead of booleans. Using an enum instead of a boolean may be more readable but you are bound to run into a true, false, maybe wtf.

Instead of a long parameter list I like to use a parameter object. 

So instead of:

string SomeStringManipulation(strInput, true, false, true, true, false)

I would use the following:

string SomeStringManipulation(StringManipulationArgs args)

Now if I want to change the number of arguments that are passed into the SomeStringManipulation function I only have to change it in one spot and the code is more maintainable.

Tonight I finished my examples for the upcoming Edmonton code camp. I think that they really show the strengths of the effort that John Lam has been putting in to bridge Ruby and the CLR.

After the code camp, I think I will create a couple of screencasts showing how to setup the RubyCLR (something that I am going to skip in my presentation because it isn't easy) and I will also add my code samples to the code camp site for download.

I also spent a couple of hours on Saturday putting together the swag bags for code camp and I still have more swag to add to them. Just for showing up everyone is going to get some great stuff from our contributors. If you are reading this and you have not yet signed up, I suggest you head on over to http://registration.edmontoncodecamp.com and sign up because we are getting pretty close to being full.