Spoke at the SWFL Code Camp on Saturday
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Sep 15 2008 - 04:32:05 AM by
Timothy Khouri) - [
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So South West Florida was on fire this past Saturday (September 14th 2008), as they held their first annual SWFL Code Camp! There were a lot of great people there to kick off the event including John Dunagan who ran the event, Joe Healy, Microsoft's Developer Evangelist for Florida, and Bob Suess, Microsoft's Developer Evangelist Manager for the "East Region" (basically New York down to Florida).
The campus was great, the turnout was really good too with 175 registered devs (even though this is a new code camp), and plenty of speakers. There was even an "Open Space" session going on all day encouraging the dev community to open up to expressing their thoughts that much more. Everything went well... except...
Jonas Stawski - I.O.U. a Beer!
I had the great pleasure of presenting ASP.NET MVC for two sessions, first as an "Intro" then a "Deep Dive", and I had a lot of fun. For my first session, there were about 55 people (the room seemed packed), and I was excited to hook up my laptop to the projector and start my presentation.
So, why do I owe Jonas Stawski a beer? Well, the answer is simple. Even though I just saw Joe Healy use this very same projector... I, unfortunately, could not figure out how to use it... for 15 minutes... not just me, but 4 other people just couldn't get it going.
So, there I was, doing my presentation to a few dozen developers on a white board! Trying my best to capture their attention over the group of very smart developers trying to get my laptop setup. Then, after 15 long minutes, I see my desktop projected on the screen! Jonas hooked up his laptop to the projector, and used Remote Desktop to go to my laptop, and let me use his for the session.
Everything went very well from there, except for the fact that Jonas had his session in the next time slot, and so did I. This meant that I had to either figure out how to use my laptop, or try to convince everyone to stay for a riveting white board session :)
Stop Being So Stupid Timothy!
Between my sessions I realized that this should be very easy, and I must be trying too hard. So, since we tried the keyboard "function + F8" (which simply set the projector to a black screen), and we tried the "Extend the desktop onto this monitor" in the Vista display control panel (which set the projector and my computer to black)... I figured I would look one more time to see if I could figure it out.
Yup, it was that easy. About 3 seconds after clicking on the NVIDIA Control Panel link there, I saw a radio button "copy this screen to the other". I clicked it, pressed OK, and all was good from there on.
ASP.NET MVC Presentations
I'm really getting into MVC, TDD and the ASP.NET MVC framework in general, so I'm slated to give another presentation next month at our local developer group, and I'm hoping to sign up for the Tampa Code Camp when the call for speakers goes out there too.
And now it's 6:54am on a Monday so the fun is over and it's back to work time!