Codeapalooza Chicago 2008

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Chris Missal, September 07, 2008

There were 3 really good talks that I attended at Codeapalooza yesterday. Here are my thoughts:

Writing Better Code - presented by Jason Bock

It was really nice to see somebody talk about a lot of new coding practices that are somewhat new to me. Jason gave a really good overview on unit testing, code analysis and code coverage.

One of the attendees basically said: "This looks good and all, but I just don't have time to write more code for testing purposes." I can see her point somewhat on this, but you can't miss what you never had. Knowing that your code works exactly like it is supposed to is so reassuring I can't even begin to describe it. I have written programs before that had no unit tests around them and felt very confident in their ability and stability, but once you add a test project to it, that confidence goes through the roof.
What is this XNA Thing Anyway? - presented by Chris Williams

I'm very glad I attended this track. I don't need XNA in my day-to-day work, but last fall I started futzing around with it and I like it so far. Since I had some experience with XNA, the beginning was mostly review. I did see a few things that interested me in the examples that Chris showed, which, when expanded upon, brings me to the takeaway: I'm not going to have a social life anymore! This talk got me really excited again about XNA and I'll probably spend most of my waking moments working on my game. This game hasn't had a title ever. It's been: "My XNA Game" for the past year or so.
Rendering Great Client-Side Controls with ASP.NET MVC - presented by Chris Sutton

One of the problems that becomes eminent when using ASP.NET MVC (currently in Preview 5) is the lack of user controls that are easily used in web forms. They can be used, but not as easily. Chris spoke about MVC for a bit just to give those who are not familiar with it a quick overview about what it is and how it works.

Since modern browsers are getting extremely fast at processing JavaScript, Chris recommends (and I agree) that JavaScript and AJAX can play a major factor in delivering plain data to the browser and letting the browser worry about the display work. A single request through the server could end up sending more bytes of HTML through the response than bytes of actual data.

Chris showed some jQuery examples (which included my Combine jQuery and Double Clicks to Get Data example. Thanks again Chris!) as well as some Yahoo UI controls. The YUI looks amazing! I haven't gotten into at all, but wow are there some cool things you can do with it. Still, I'll probably end up sticking with jQuery as my JS library of choice since I'm a John Resig fanboy.

Other notable points are the good times, eats and drinks we had at Mullen's and Charlie's. Also, our car won one of the XBox 360's they were giving away. By "our car" I mean that Tim and Chris rode in my car there and back, but unfortunately Chris wasn't willing to trade his brand new free XBox for a ride back to Iowa.

Filed Under: Events Tech Community jQuery XNA ASP.Net MVC