Brian H. Prince

I'm pleased and excited to inform you that CodeMash 2009 planning is underway! We'll be returning to the Kalahari Resort to hold our third event this coming January 7-9, 2009, and do hope you'll consider participating. Submit your proposed session through the CodeMash website by navigating to http://codemash.org/BeASpeaker.aspx . As with prior events, speakers are provided with a free conference pass, including food, admission to all sessions, and all of the fame and glory attached to being a CodeMash participant. The deadline for submission is October 22, 2008 , however given the volume of proposals we'd appreciate it if you could strive to beat this deadline by at least a few weeks. January 7-9, you ask? You read it right, we're expanding the event to include a third day! Dubbed the CodeMash Precompiler, this day long event (held on January 7) will include a number of hands-on labs which give attendees the opportunity to explore a topic at great depth. We...

Big Sigh of Relief! I just got home with my family. We have finally unpacked, and caught our breath. The past nine months have been a lot of work. And not just for me, but for the whole CodeMash planning team. Just some of the volunteers that put this year together: Jim Holmes , Jason Gilmore , Jason Follas , Jeff Blankenburg , Josh Holmes , Dianne Marsh , John Hopkins , Brian Sherwin , and Chris Woodruff . There are plenty of others that helped out, and I want to thank you folks as well. How do I even begin to capture the energy that was at CodeMash this year? The keynoters were FANTASTIC. Each brought a different something to the conference. Neal Ford did a great job setting the tone of the conference. Scott Hanselman really livened things up after lunch, and showed that cross platform is in the real world with his demo of PHP on IIS (with huge performance improvements). Then Brian Goetz showed that there were still some great challenges left for us to solve. Our speaker...

Scott Hanselman and I were up on stage, really grooving with what we were doing. The crowd was going crazy. Then Scott just lost his rhythm, the worst nightmare for anyone on any stage. He couldn't keep up, and I felt like I was loosing him. Three times I had to distract the crowd from his mistakes, until he could get back on track. Fortunately, it worked, and we made it to the end, without too many embarrassing moments. ... Of course, I am talking about Rock Band at CodeMash. Scott checked in at CodeMash fairly late on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008. I was packing away the TV and Rock Band setup we had at the QSI booth, when he walked up and asked if I could reconnect it so he could see what it was like. I wheeled it into the grand ballroom, and set it back up. Of course a crowd started to assemble around us. We started up a game, with Scott on drums, and myself on the guitar. Scott admitted he didn't know how to play drums, and it showed. :) In the game, if you mak...

CodeMash v2.0.0.8 is coming quicker than you know. The Early Bird pricing is going to close on November 15th. After that, the price will rise form $125 to $175. Alumni will still be able to register for $110 until December 15th. If you haven't received your alumni code, please let us know. The final session list has been published as well. We will soon announce the keynoters (big drum roll) over the next few weeks. Go register already! http://www.codemash.org

Jeff Blankenburg, the Dev Evangelist for the Microsoft Heartland District has launched a new screencast series titled JUXtaposed . JUX stands for Jeff on User Experience. Or Jeff Unglues Xylophones. His first screencast is a quick 10 minute walk through of some simple animation in XAML using Expression. What I like about his 'cast is that it isn't perfect. Smooth demos are nice, but when there are small mistakes, the speaker gets to show you how to debug and fix things. That is a very handy skill when you are trying to learn something new. I hear he is going to do 25 of these.   The best part? He chose to pimp CodeMash by animating our logo! And it only took him 10 minutes. Thanks Jeff.

Ding Ding! The content group for CodeMash has released another set of speaker confirmations. We have some rocking content this year. I know the content team is working hard to have a diverse set of talks, that really spans across all of the platforms we are targeting. They even have a special view in their database to monitor the distribution of talks across platforms. So, without further ado: ============ Leah Culver: "Getting Started with Django" ============ Leah Culver founded Pownce with her friends Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka as a way of sending messages, links, files and events to each other. Leah is the lead developer for the site, which has become one of the largest sites using the Django framework Leah loves the challenge of developing a web application from scratch and writes about her experiences as a software developer at leahculver.com. ============ Kevin Dangoor: "Overview of the Dojo JavaScript Toolkit" ============ Kevin is the product manager a...

CodeMash is proud to announce the first round of speakers selected for this year's event. We have some great sessions lined up this year. So many, I think they content is going to blow away last year. The content team (led by Jason Gilmore and Dianne Marsch) have been swamped with over one hundred session submissions, with only about 45 slots to fill. I don't envy them at all. I know they are working hard on picking the right topics, with the right mix and blend to really make this year special. So, here goes... Bruce Eckel: "Why I Love Python" Bruce Eckel has given hundreds of presentations throughout the world, published over 150 articles in numerous magazines, was a founding member of the ANSI/ISO C++ committee and speaks regularly at conferences. He provides public and private seminars & design consulting in OO Design, Python, Java and C++.   Neal Ford: "Engineering and Polyglot Programming" and "DSLs in Static & Dynamic Languages"...

We have put a lot of work in refactoring how the registration process works this year. It wasn't 'bad' last year, but we made it a little nicer. We added a section for tracking demographics. This will help us plan the content this year, as well as show our potential sponsors that awesome audience they will have access to. Remember, without sponsors, our registration prices wouldn't be this low. PLEASE REMEMBER TO RESERVER YOUR OWN HOTEL ROOM. Details on how to do this will be included in the receipt email you receive after registering. Thanks to the efforts of the team, especially the volunteer testers, we have just pushed a new build that includes registration. This new build also includes a new title graphic, and an upgraded session submitter form, plus some copy changes here and there. We also just send out the emails with Alumni discount codes. The from address was registration at spammers suck codemash dawt org . Please check your spam filter in case you didn...

We just updated the CodeMash site to include the Sponsor Prospectus . Please pass it around. We had some great sponsors last year, and I appreciate their support. We did lower some of the prices this year for sponsors.   We have also opened the " Submit a Topic " form. If you would like to speak, please submit your session.   We hope to have attendee registration open in a couple of weeks.

As many of you know I am on the board of CodeMash . We are now working on updating the site for this year's conference.  We just pushed v1 live, and are now working on the attendee registration features. Last year we had a great site. It was ASP.NET, web services built with the service software factory, and SQL Server 2005. It worked great. One of the features for the site was a news channel that was on the homepage, a news page, and an rss feed. In order to manage the news content we also had an admin tool, and some supporting tables and so on. This worked fine. But this year, as I was refactoring, I just didn't want to deal with remote DBs, and upgrading the admin interface. So, one day while I was talking to local WSS bad boy (amongst other things), I came up with the idea of having the news content come from a WSS list that was on our planning portal. Sounded easy to me; wire the news business object to the web services for WSS instead of some EntLib code that I had i...

We have leased our own dedicated server as part of working on getting the back end tech setup for CodeMash 2008. Last year we used Sharepoint 2003 for the planning portal. This year we will be using WSS v3. There are a lot of great enhancements that will help us a lot. I installed WSS on our server, and then deployed an asp.net application that we are going to use to collect speaker submissions. This app is a simple form, with some validation, that then submits the topic to a list in WSS via the WSS web services. The app worked great on my laptop connecting to our WSS site on our dedicated server. When I deployed the app however, it was failing the authentication into the WSS web services. The first step to troubleshoot this was to log into the portal from my machine. That worked. Then, try to login from the server itself (since that is where the web service is being called from.). That didn't work. The portal was working fine, but wouldn't let you login from the local machi...

We have finally finished the paperwork from last year, and have now made commitments for the next CodeMash. We will have CodeMash 2008 at the same place, the fabulous Kalahari on January 9-11, 2008. We are still working on the details, but it will largely be like last year. Stay tuned for more information. We are also currently reworking the site. Up until now we have been working on all of the behind the scenes tech. Pretty soon a new site will be posted. Keep a look out here or on the Google group for more information.

The past 48 hours has seen a huge spike in registrations! The Early Bird discount of $50 (from $149 to $99) just expired about half an hour ago. I guess there are a lot of procrastinators out there. We have received word that the hotel still has some rooms left at the $88/night rate. So while the CodeMash registration fee is now $149, the hotel room is still a great value. We can't guarantee this hotel rate for long, because when they run out of rooms in our block, then you will have to get a normal room at the normal rate of around $150 or so (I don't know the real rate off the top of my head, but it is up there!).   So, act now! http://www.codemash.org/

So, want to win a Zune ? Register for CodeMash here : www.codemash.org Put the blog badge on your blog, and blog about CodeMash. Then send an email with your blog link to contest@codemash.org . Don't have a blog? Just start one. There are plenty of places to start one. What? You're still reading? Go do it. Now, while you are thinking of it.

I just received confirmation from the content coordinator, Jason, over at CodeMash.org, that I have been selected to present my "Networking for Nerds" topic. Many of you are rolling your eyes. Why Brian, you ask, how could you be surprised and excited? You are after all one of the many co-founders. That is a very good question. The CodeMash tribe has set the bar so high for the quality of the content and speakers that we didn't want to assume that the planners would have be good enough. After all, what makes a good planner, doesn't neccesarily make a good speaker. So, go register while you still can, and come check out the best tech event there is.

Wow! CodeMash is coming soon! We finally have registration up. Go forth and attend. -bhp

It has been almost a year since a bunch of us had met at a Japanese restaurant last winter to discuss a new type of event. We had all delivered one day conferences before, and had success. But we wanted more, and we thought attendees did as well. We wanted something that spoke to technology a little further up the though chain. Instead of a whole day on how to do .NET, we wanted sessions on topics that affect all developers. Better architecture. Better development practices. Better guidance. We also wanted to learn more about our own platforms by learning about other platforms. To that end, we have formed an Ohio Non Profit organization whose goal is to put on technical education conferences. The first conference will be CodeMash Conference 2007. It will be held at the Kalahari, in Sandusky, Ohio on January 18th and 19th, 2007. We have arranged some major sponsors, and even more importantly, some GREAT speakers. Great Speakers? YES! Bruce Eckel, Neal Ford, and Scott Guthrie! Chec...