St. Louis Code Camp Follow up and Slides

Yesterday was the St. Louis Code Camp, and what a great time! I believe around 70-80 people showed up, and we had some really great presentations. On top of the books Apress donated, Microsoft donated some books, goodies, and an XBox 360!

The day consisted of four sessions across four different rooms. The first session I went to was Kyle Cordes’s Lua presentation. He did a great job covering how to integrate Lua into an app (even if the app was Delphi), and though there wasn’t a lot of Lua code, it definately sparked my interest in using it more.

The second session I spoke on Ruby for C# developers (Powerpoint here (with the Fib sequence corrected thanks to feedback from one of the attendees)). The presentation went very well, and I even went slightly over time. But a lot of people came up to me afterwards to thank me because they hadn’t heard of Ruby and think they’ll be trying it out.

I was disappointed that I didn’t get to more of the Ruby and .NET integration – I just ran out of time. I did cover very quickly how to hook into a Windows Forms event using Ruby. That code looks like:

require 'dotnet'
loadLibraryFromFile 'RubyWindows.exe'
form = Form1.new
button = form.cmdMixItUp
form.outputText.Text = ""
button.click.add do
  form.outputText.Text += "Hello from Ruby, " + form.userName.Text + "!\r\n"
end
Application.Run(form)

Which loads an exe called RubyWindows.exe, hooks to the Form that is in it, then attaches a listener to a Click event on a button on that form.

We then had lunch, and Brian and the guys brought in a wonderful spread from a local deli. I should have the pictures of the event up today or tomorrow, so you’ll get a chance to see that.

Third session was Brian’s Agile talk. It was a very loose format where we, as participants, basically did a planning game to figure out what he was going to talk about, and then he spoke in 10 minute “iterations”, and calculated his velocity to see how many of the topics he was going to get to. It was good to see that his velocity was pretty stable (even if there were a lot of topics left on the board at then end).

The fourth session I gave my Fitnesse and .NET talk (Powerpoint here). It was a good presentation, though looking back I wish perhaps I would have gone more in-depth to the code behind the Fixtures. I also ran out of time in that one – I think I need to (actually) keep by chatting down a bit. (The code and Fitnesse test files are the same I used at the Mid-Mo presentation, and are available at that entry)

Overall it was a great time, and by the end people were coming up to Brian asking him to do this twice a year, so it looks like that might happen. Brian will also be posting a summary of all the sessions and links to all of the code on his blog, so watch for that!

I took several pictures while I was there, so I’ll get those up today or tomorrow.

See you all at the next one!