Edmonton Code Camp 2007 has come and gone for another year. Looking back I would say that this year was better than last year. I still have not had the chance to look at all the comment sheets to see what we can do better next year. Thanks to Dave Woods for helping with the website and to everyone at Edmug for helping organize everything. Also thanks to the people that offered to help even though I couldn't find them anything to do.

The UofA venue was a lot better than I expected and we will probably have next years code camp there. Thanks to Mack for suggesting it. The only problem seemed to be with Conference Services telling us that we could tell attendees to park in lot M and then blocking it off for the opera that didn't start until 6pm, those opera singers can be huge divas, I didn't know that they needed a whole parking lot just to accommodate their entourage.

I am most proud of the fact that our community is growing big enough to support something like Edmonton Code Camp. You can bitch all you want about the quality of software developers in the city but if you aren't doing anything to help improve their skills you are part of the problem. As a developer you have to remember where you came from and help people get to where they want to go.

It is also awesome to see that developers from Edmonton and Calgary are getting to know each other a lot better. I remember driving down to Calgary about a year and a half ago and meeting people for the first time. Mo Khan has some good thoughts on the growing community.

I'll be posting my code from my Introduction to Windsor Container presentation on the Edmonton Code Camp website in the next couple of days. In the meantime you can check out the code from the other presentations at the Edmonton Code Camp website on the source code page.

Instead of answering questions about specific technologies in technology specific forums, try your hand at the universal language of Refactoring at a new site from Marc-André Cournoyer named Refactor My Code. Cool stuff!

public static void ThinkBeforeYouUseADataSet(this DataSet dataSet)

{

throw new NotSupportedException("Use a rich domain instead");

}

I finally got something published but it is not technical by any means. Two pictures of my dog Daisy have been published in the book Dog Trick or Cat Treat: Pets Dress Up For Halloween by ECW Press.

When you have to do 5 timesheets to let the business client know your "status".

I feel bad for the poor person on the business team that has to go through all the timesheets that are submitted, I would guess they aren't even reading the timesheets and it is all a big conspiracy to waste hard drive space. 

Will they be confused if I add a task for entering time instead of developing?

How come people don't realize that a business client can get more from a 5 minute standup than they can from reading timesheets?