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Here is my experience at the Lansing Day of .Net that took place June 21st, 2008. I awoke at 5:30 and got ready to head out for a 2 hour drive to Lansing, MI. A little over half way there I managed to run over a nail and get a flat tire. Because of this slight snag I ended up being a bit late and rolled in a little after 9:00am.

Signing in was easy and quick.  I had planned to see Patrick Foley’s talk MicroISV: Start your own software company. Since I was late and a bit grumpy from the flat I just decided to head into room 3 Since I wanted to see the next presentation An introduction to Castle ActiveRecord, or stop writing CRUD by Michael Eaton.

I ended up catching the last quarter of Tim Golisch’s talk on The Entity Framework.  I’m not familiar with the entity framework but from what I caught at the end it appears to be a framework to allow developers to abstract themselves from the database. Pretty cool stuff!

Michael’s presentation for Castle ActiveRecord was very good. Castle ActiveRecord implements the active record pattern described in the book Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. Basically this a open source framework that provides a simple way to write less code to access and manage your data layers. If I get some free time I’ll download and play around with this handy tool. Could be very nice to use at work to get off of spending so much time writing code to access databases and extract and process data.

Next I went to Keith Elder’s talk Structure and Guidance for Organizing Applications within Visual Studio. I highly recommend anyone that’s pretty new to working in VS.Net to see his presentation if you can. He provided a great walkthrough of many tips and tricks to keeping your projects files and code organized. It’s something many don’t bother thinking about but once you get working on projects many times you get lost in the sea of code. It can be very hard to find where functions and classes are. His tips make it almost foolproof to keep on top of things.

After that it was lunch time so I rolled over to the nearest Midas to get my tire repaired. Well my luck once they popped the tire off the rims it was clear that there was no chance of a quick patch. The tire was shredded. I guess I could have driven home on the spare but I just wanted to get the damn thing taken care of that day. So I stayed and they got a new tire put on my car so I was set to go. This did however take a long time and ended up make me miss the 4th session.

I had wanted to go see Michael Wood‘s presentation on the Windows Workflow Rules Engine. I’m very interested in seeing what it can do and how it could help my company.  So I was bummed and just sat out in the open area and surfed the web for a bit. I ended up meeting Michael Eaton and chatted with him a bit. Alan Stevens also caught up with me and invited me to join everyone that was going to a party after the event. I was very honors to be asked. Heh, I’m such a nerd but it was cool to be recognized, from Twitter, and talked to by some of the top developers at the event.

Up next was probably one of the coolest presentations I saw. Jennifer Marsman, of Microsoft, gave a great talk on WPF (Windows Presentation Framework). Now I was familiar with WPF and read a bit about it but until then I still kind of had a “What’s the point?” view on the whole thing. Jennifer’s presentation did a very good job of explaining WPF to where I could understand the reason for it. And the demos were great too. So now I finally “get it” and look forward to playing around with WPF and seeing how it can be of use to me.

Last but not least I FINALLY got to see Dan Rigsby’s Scrum presentation. I wanted to see him at the IndyCodeCamp but his presentation was at the same time as Alan Stevens TDD / MVC presentation and MVC won out.

Anyhoo Dan did a killer job and his talk was really great. Out of all the presentations this one really hit home and inspired me. Hey Dan, ever thought of being a motivational speaker? This is another one of those must sees folks. I had heard a bit about agile development and scrum but was pretty much a newbie on the topic. Afterwards I really get the idea of the scrum method and how it can work.

I really wish I could get my company to run our projects using scrum. I doubt we ever will but this week I decided to get the IT department to agree to do the daily scrum meetings, which I will post about more later.

After that we all got together to do the big swag giveaway. I won a TechNet subscription but haven’t been able to get ahold of anyone to get that yet.

Then we headed of to Jeff McWherter’s house for a “little” party. It was all the event organizers and a ton of the people from Twitter. I managed to meet and talk with just about everyone I think.  There was plenty of food and drinks. Keith made me one of his soon to be world famous drinks called “An Elder”. It was very good. It starts out slow but time you finish it you get a good buzz going.

The night finished up with a bunch going out back and lighting up a big bonfire and just talking about cool stuff. Several people could play guitar and took turns providing background music.

Not to sound lame but all in all this was probably the best day I have had in a very long time.

How did you get started in software development?

I figured I’d join in and do the Mike Eaton Challenge and post my history as a techie…

How old were you when you started programming?

Oh I was about 10 or 11 I guess when I started programming.

How did you get started in programming?

My family had an Epson 286 12Mhz w/ 4mb of ram and MS-Dos 3.22. I used to play a game called MathBlaster(tm). The original version was writing in gwbasic. You had to start the gwbasic interpreter then stick in the mathblaster game disc and type run “color” to start the color version of the game.  Occasionally we would mess up and mis-type this and got error messages. Finally one day I found the manual for GWBasic and was introduced to all this code and started trying sample code.

What was your first language?

GW-Basic 3.x originally but quickly switched over to QBasic and later to PowerBasic.

What was the first real program you wrote?

I guess my first real program was at my first job. Basically a vb6 app the parses xml files and generates web surveys from it. It builds the HTML/ASP, Javascript verification and SQL table definitions.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

GWBasic, QBasic, PowerBasic, Visual Basic 6.0, VB.Net, C, C++, C#, PHP, Perl, T-SQL, Javascript and a tiny bit of Cobol

What was your first professional programming gig?

Programmer at Corporate Research International.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

Most definitely. I think the biggest thing was that I believed that the market in the area was larger than it really was. While there are plenty of “IT” jobs there really isn’t that much programming work around. I would have done a few internships and spent more time networking to get my name out there when I started to search for programming jobs. It would have made my job searching a lot easier.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

Don’t get too focused on specific technologies or tools. You can always learn a new technology within a short period of time. It’s more important to practice methodology and learning how to solve problems. I’ve seen too many “programmers” come and go that have an impressive list of technologies and/or tools on their resume but struggle to solve basic problems.

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had… programming?

Hmm.. I guess I would say the most fun I’ve had programming was early on when I first started programming. I used to create all sorts of silly basic programs on that old 286 machine. I made banking software where floppy discs were atm cards. I created the system to control a submarine. I build the software that would automate and control Jurassic Park. I even setup a serial port connection to a 386 laptop and created a simple web server and browser to simulate the internet before my family ever got online.

It seems there’s a bit of explosion as of late of social micro networks.

Micro networks are what I call the micro-blog type sites, Twitter being one of the largest right now. Being bored with life I think I’m going to start writing some c# libraries for the popular ones so people can easily interact with them.

My short list of libs are Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku and Tumblr…

I’m just bored and need something to do to prove myself that I can still actually program some cool stuff.