I had a great time at CodeMash this year.  Jim and crew (Brian Prince, Jason Gilmore, Jason Follas, Jeff Blankenburg, Josh Holmes, Dianne Marsh, John Hopkins, Brian Sherwin, and Chris Woodruff) once again did an outstanding job at putting together a great conference.  My only complaint?  I didn’t win a damn thing this year.   I think next year, I’ll lock Joe Wirtley in his room so he can’t win another cool console (last year he won the Wii and this year he walked away with an Xbox 360!).

My plan was to live blog the event, BUT my freakin’ laptop died (more in another post) on Thursday, so most of this is from memory.

After fighting a flooded basement all day on Wednesday, my family and I got a late start and arrived at the Kalahari around 8pm.  After a quick check-in, I made my way down to the conference area so I could take care of registration and hopefully catch the last few minutes of the experts panel (which actually started 30 minutes later than I thought it was supposed to).

I said hi to Jim Holmes before being really surprised at the number of people in the experts panel.  I expected to see 20-30 people, but the room was pretty full.  Jim said there were close to 320 people registered for the event this year!

I caught up with my former manager at Pillar (who is now on his own again) and met a current Pillar tech lead that talked to me about a potential gig late late last year.

As soon as the experts panel ended, I found Dan Hounshell and Joe Wirtley (and their friend Clark).  It was a crazy scene…we kept running into people (Jay R. Wren, Steven Harman, Josh Holmes, Jason Follas and many others) so it took us about 45 minutes to move 15 feet.  Finally we moved the discussion to the bar in Kahunaville where many drinks were consumed.   Wow…what a blast!  It was really cool to hang with Keith, Dustin, Dan and many others.  I finally met MichaelDotNet (after exchanging many, many tweets with him) too.  Good times.  Of course, those good times kept me from getting to sleep before 2am.   I’m not sure who’s camera was used when the waitress took the group picture, but I’d love to get a copy of them.

Ok, so after a few hours sleep, I made it for most of the morning keynote which was really good (Joe did a great write-up of the keynote).  Jeff Blankenburg’s Silverlight session was standing room only, so I ended up sitting on the floor in the back of the room.  His session was ok, but nothing I hadn’t seen before.

Jay’s talk on Castle was pretty good.  Earlier in the week, he suggested I hit the Python session instead since I already have some familiarity with Castle, but I’m glad I went to his because a) he’s very passionate about Castle and b) it gave me some ideas for blog posts.   His biggest mistake (which he admits to) is trying to talk about too much in such a short period of time.

I almost skipped Scott Hanselman’s lunch keynote, but I’m glad I stayed.  As Jim pointed out in his post, the first half of Scott’s keynote was hilarious!  Once he got into IIS7, things got a bit more serious, but it was still really good.  I’m one of the few that doesn’t listen to his podcasts, but after sitting through his keynote, I might start.

I skipped out on the vendor sessions so I could spend some time with my family. 

Keith Elder’s “Introducing Windows Workflow Foundation” was great!  I’m actually pretty excited to dive in and learn more about WF.  Keith is a great speaker and a very easy-going guy.

My last session of the day was Dustin Campbell’s “Putting the Fun into Functional with F#”.  It was really cool, but about 45 minutes into it, I had to bail because the kids wanted to see me (sorry Dustin…kids come before F#).   I really wish I could have stayed because it definitely looked really interesting.

After a decent dinner, I hit the vendor party where I hung out with Dan, Joe and Clark (non blogger) and watched paint dry….umm…I mean I watched a bunch of geeks play Rock Band.   After the previous nights activities, it was nice to be back in my room and asleep before 2am.

Day 2 started late for me because I could NOT crawl out of bed….I think I made it for the last 5 minutes of the morning keynote.

Bill Wagner’s “Real World C# 3.0″ was pretty cool.  Bill is another great speaker.  I almost wish I had gone to the Dojo/Google Gears session, mainly because I was already familiar with much of what Bill talked about.

From 11-12:15, a few of us (Dan, Mike Wood, Joe, Matt Casto and I) held an open space on “speak.net“.  Chris Woodruff was supposed to be there, but he was MIA.   Anyway, we discussed how to get involved in speaking engagements, use of Powerpoint and ummm….blogging I think.  It was a great session, especially for me since I work from home and don’t get the chance to talk to other devs in that kind of setting very often.

I ended up meeting my family for lunch and missing out on the one and only vendor session I wanted to catch (Monorail). 

After lunch, but before the next session, I talked to Sheri (HR @ Pillar) for a few minutes about kids and video games.   Dave “The Rockstar” Donaldson showed up minutes before his session was scheduled to start.  We BS’d for a couple minutes before he headed off to his session (which I attended BTW).

Last year I had an interview and one of the questions was about REST.  At the time I didn’t know much about it (and still didn’t before sitting in Dave’s session).  Dave is a very smart guy and great speaker and his session about RESTful Web Services didn’t disappoint.  I really loved how he incorporated movie posters into his slide deck to get some of his points across (sometimes just for comic relief).

My final CodeMash session was Keith Elder’s “Building Custom Workflow Activities”.  After sitting through his intro session, I was really interested to see this one and once again, he did NOT disappoint.  I’m gonna start cranking out custom activities now and make a million bucks now.

As I said at the beginning of this post, I didn’t win a damn thing during the final drawing.  Not a book, not anything. :-\  The kids already took all my swag from the vendors, so all I really came away with in terms of loot was some t-shirts. Geesh….well, there’s always next year.

If you couldn’t make it this year, make it a point to go next year.  I’m sure the 325 attendees from this year would agree with me — You will NOT be disappointed!

It was great to see everyone again!

References: Recruiters buzz software designers in Sandusky

Update: 1/15/2008 @ 5:14pm (EST) – minor edit to remove an un-needed word.