This past Saturday, I attended Central Ohio Day of .NET. I spent a lot of the time running around, but despite missing a couple sessions, I really enjoyed the event.

A Friendly Game of Tag

Jeff Blankenburg had the fun idea of a Microsoft Tag scavenger hunt at Central Ohio Day of .NET, and he recruited me to help out with this event. Saturday morning, I had the stack of tags and surveyed the conference center for good spots to put the tags. Jeff and I had talked the night before about some potential spots, and that gave me ideas to run with. While he wrote up the hints, I was getting them in place. Special thanks to the guy who placed the tags in the Open Spaces room and on the open spaces board.

We had quite a few participants, and the scavenger hunt was done by about 11am, when Alex Moore came by and told Jeff the winning phrase - in a Ballmeresque way, he had to say "Developers! Developers! Developers!". There was great timing all around - Jeff and I were talking with some of the guys in the hall, including Andy Erickson, when we saw Alex and Steve Wallace heading towards the last stage. Andy put together last year's video recap and caught Alex's message - so let's hope he uses it in this year's recap!

We plan on doing a more challenging Tag scavenger hunt at another event later this summer, so keep an eye out for the Tags!

Intro to the New Data Types in SQL 2008

My SQL 2008 data types talk has made its second appearance at a Day of .NET. Some of the things that were covered included:

• Using date and time as separate fields, with the music collection example.


• Offsets are not time zones.


• FILESTREAMs extend SQL 2008 into the NTFS file system, related relational data to files.

My slide deck is available here.

TDD in T-SQL

This was the only other presentation that I sat through in its entirety. I had been hearing about TDD for quite awhile and had seen it in Python, Ruby, and Java. So it was about time that I saw TDD with a language that I use in my day job.

Phil Japikse presented on why to use TDD in general and then showed us what it took to do TDD with T-SQL. He used the T-SQL Test Tool, available through CodePlex. This tool works on SQL 2005 and higher.

I look forward to downloading it and testing it here at home to get a feel for TDD in T-SQL.

Thanks to...

This event was made possible by a lot of people, so I wanted to take the time to thank them here.

Sponsors

Without the sponsors, this event could not have been free to the attendees. Sponsors are the ones who provide the swag and financial support to cover costs like the venue, badges, programs, and any other incidentals. This year's sponsors were Microsoft, MAX Technical Training, DevExpress, Redgate, CBTS, Triune Group and SDS.

Speakers

The speakers bring the content to the event, sharing their interest on topics that you may be able to apply in the workplace. We had speakers from as far as Michigan and Tennessee. Thanks to all the speakers who came out and shared their passion for technology with the community.

Attendees

Without the attendees, the event wouldn't have a reason to happen. But we know there are people out there who want to learn more on .NET and who want to add to their technical toolbox. People traveled from all over for the event - it was amazing to see almost 200 people together for this event. If you attended, I hope you at least learned something new and were able to take home some nuggets of knowledge that you could put to work.

Organizers and Volunteers

And last but not least, I'd like to thank the organizers - Mike Wood, Jim Holmes, Carey Payette, Justin Kohnen, Bob Sledge, Matt Rigling and Chris Barth - and their crew of volunteers. Putting a successful event together takes just the right team, and this group had a successful team that kept the event running smoothly. Thanks for putting so much time and effort into bringing this event to the community!

I really enjoyed this year's event, and I look forward to some of the other Days of .NET that are yet to come.

Labels: Alex Moore, Central Ohio Day of .NET, Jeff Blankenburg, Microsoft Tag, SQL 2008 data types, T-SQL Test Tool

This weekend, I was up in Ann Arbor for Ann Arbor Day of .NET. I arrived there on Friday, where I hung out with a group of friends for a bit before having to head back to the hotel to finish my presentation. Saturday morning, I was up early to look at my presentation one last time, as I had a 9am time slot.

When I arrived, I saw Todd from Domino's and Chris Roland working the registration table. Once I checked in, I went to find out where my talk was so that I could setup my laptop. I found Dan Rigsby, and since I knew his talk was right after mine, I figured that he was in the right room. We ran into a room assignment problem, but once we got the right room assignment, Dan and I worked on getting the projector setup for our room.

My talk was on the new data types in SQL Server 2008, which was based on a talk that I had given in September at the Ohio North SQL Server SIG. I briefly covered the datetime data types, as I wanted to focus more on hierarchyid, geography, geometry, and filestream. Since Jason Follas was giving his spatial talk, I sent people to see his talk for more detail so that I would have more time to get into hierarchyid and filestream. My slide deck and scripts will probably be made available by the end of this week.

After my talk, I took some pictures of the event and talked with some of the sponsors. From there, I joined a few people downstairs for lunch, where we had an impromptu women in technology discussion.



After lunch, I had to confirm rumors that Dave Redding photoshopped a picture of me from Cleveland Day of .NET into his presentation. Sure enough, I made it into the last production of the "C# Variety Show" (albeit someone needs to learn to photoshop things a bit more proportionately). Now if you haven't seen Dave's presentation before, let's just say that it isn't for the sensitive audience. It's quite sexist and can easily be seen as offensive, but that's just Dave. Honestly, as bad as it sounds, I really liked how he explained programming concepts in a way that others could relate to it easily. Poor Dave, though, had a tough crowd - quiet food coma after lunch probably didn't help, but I think more of us were afraid to be heckled. None of us use delegates... none of us use event handlers... and we got Dave mad enough to swear when he asked how many of us clicked a button in Visual Studio. Oops!

The last session I caught was Brian Prince's "How to Be an Architect". He had me help him pass out swag - yay for green Microsoft stress balls! The stupid move though was giving me a marker for the white board and telling me to write down what they were saying. I've got pictures from that session, and I will make a separate blogpost specifically for that. If you haven't seen Brian's talks before, I'd definitely recommend checking them out. I'm a developer that has to think like an architect every now and then, but I'm better as a dev than an architect. I liked how Brian explained what an architect is and just what it is that they do. His slides in this presentation are in the same style as his "Soft Skillz" talk, which really bring a point across without killing the audience with bullet points.

There were so many sessions there that I'd have loved to have seen. But I haven't successfully cloned myself to be in multiple places at once, so I will have to attend more events and maybe catch a few more sessions. However, the main reason why I go to these events is to see the people again, and I met a lot of new people and saw a lot of my friends who I've met on Twitter and at the various events I've attended this year. This was definitely a great event -- thanks to all who made it happen!

Labels: Ann Arbor Day of .NET, Brian H. Prince, Chris Roland, Dan Rigsby, Dave Redding, Jason Follas, SQL 2008 data types