Eliot Center, 1226 SW Salmon Street, Portland, OR 97205
I’ll be at the PDX Code Camp at some point tomorrow. Usually I’m excited to go, but this year not so much. I’m strung out from work and ready for a mental break. This weekend is supposed to be really nice. We’ve had a record setting low temperatures this spring. A day above 70 has been extremely rare. To make matters worse, it has rained everyday since we got back from Vegas. This weekend it is supposed to be sunny with temps in the 80s. Sounds like a great time to head out for some canyon carving or maybe the beach for a little Fascination. Anything but sitting in a stuffy lecture hall.
Also, the community garage sale is this weekend as well. We’re putting a few things out and I’ll be gone instead of helping out. The woman is still under her post-op restrictions, so she can’t lift anything of consequence (or shouldn’t) in any case.
I’m usually fine once I arrive at the event. We’ll see.
The Portland event is this coming Thursday. It’s been sold out for a couple weeks, but you might be able to crash the party… 
Microsoft has yet another new initiative. Ramp Up This site is geared toward giving developers fast-track learning. If you need to learn about mobile development, you can find a module to help. Learning ASP.Net, covered. Blah, blah, blah. It might be useful. It might be more marketing garbage. I don’t know enough to comment on that issue at the moment.
Then there’s always the .Net University. I learned about this one today as well. Again, I don’t know enough to comment on its usefulness.
I went to an MSDN event yesterday. The topics were Azure, Debugging and Mobile Programming. Azure was interesting. I learned a lot about Azure and I learned that I shouldn’t think too much about it just yet. It won’t do what I need it to do at this time, plus it is a CTP and not ready for prime-time. That’s why they call it a community technology preview. Duh. One huge topic is storage. They don’t have rows. I can’t save a single record. This rather small issue makes it almost impossible to transition data between a local SQL server with a row-based relational model to the entitiy-based Azure data model. That could be a problem. But, as I said, it’s a CTP and lots of smart people are working on it. <shrug≶
The dugging section was the best for me. I learned a few little tidbits that should make my life a little easier. The speaker, Bruno Terkaly, had already posted his debugging tricks to his MSDN blog so I could pay attention and not scribble down notes. I skipped out a few minutes early so I missed all of the mobility discussion. (The word is I missed getting a free book as well.) Read more…
