With my alarm buzzing at 6:00, I ensured my arrival at the Gene B. Glick Junior Achievement Center by 7:00. Now if only I had bothered to check the temperature before putting on my Underoath T-shirt and cargo shorts, I wouldn’t have become a meat popsicle while waiting outside for the doors to open. If anything, my attire was my downfall…

Dramatic intro aside, we actually were waiting outside for about 20 minutes for the keymaster to open the doors so that we could start registration for the Indy Code Camp. I handled last names F-L, so if you were Faaita through Lyvers, then you dealt with me.

Anyway, registration went smoothly and so we all went to our first session. I attended Jeff McWherter’s talk on ASP.NET performance and optimization. I’ve only been in the ASP.NET game for a few months now, but I was already familiar with most of the standard tools like FireBug. Heck, I’ve even blogged about them. But I did learn about a neat little performance analyzer called ANTS Profiler. It can show you the amount time spent in each method as well as lots of other cool metrics:

Than I attended Michael Neel’s session on "Zen and the Art of Website Maintenance". I learned a lot about how they made samurai swords back in feudal Japan and so I thought my time might be better spent in Jeff Moser’s session "Better Know a Framework".

Jeff is the man and did a pretty darn good job. He showed code up on the screen the whole time (which was sadly the exception rather the rule). He basically just debugged through his sample app line by line explaining the classes and how the internals work. Nice job, Jeff! But the best part was definitely seeing who almost died each time Jeff threw a pair of InIn flip-flops through the crowd.

Next I went to Bill Steele’s "What’s New in Visual Studio 2008". After about five minutes, it started looking like the same content I had seen at other recent Microsoft events I’ve gone to, so I headed out and dropped by the speakers table. Shortly after, lunch came in the form of a butt load of pizzas. Mmm… good stuff. Next up, afternoon sessions!

Next on my plate was Alan Stevens‘ sessions on TDD with ASP.NET MVC parts 1 and 2. Alan is already well versed in ASP.NET MVC and TDD. That’s pretty obvious. Part 1 was mostly on the basics of MVC in the ASP.NET framework as well as the building blocks of TDD. Pretty interesting, but if you’ve stayed up to date with the blogs then you’d probably already know most of it. In Part 2 we dove into it further. Still good stuff, but my lack of sleep was starting to hit me. I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Lastly was Dan Rigsby’s session on Intermediate WCF. Jeff and I figured we could learn a little or at the very least get to harass Dan during the session. Both objectives accomplished! Dan’s a good guy though and rolled with the punches.

Overall I thought the code camp was a great success. Great job Aaron Lerch and the Indy NDA. I know it was a lot of work, but I definitely wouldn’t mind if there was a 2009 version.