Richmond Code Camp 3 reviewed

This last Saturday morning, the Thycotic team headed to Richmond at a bright and early 6am.  This alone wouldn't have been too bad but some on the team had been busy until 2am on a client project!  For the first Richmond Code Camp ever, it actually didn't rain (it rained all day for the last two).

John started out with his presentation on NHibernate which drew a large audience.  I watched Hal Hayes (of Acritech) present on XQuery which is an interesting session that I have somehow missed at the various local usergroups over the last year.  Then I caught up with Frank at his Tablet PC session - he confirmed my suspicions that the handwriting recognition has been greatly improved in Vista.  He also pointed me towards these great tablet applications which I just had to try - Ink Art allows you to paint in oil on your tablet!  Frank was showing it on Vista but it doesn't seem to be included in the Experience Pack for Vista ... Frank?   

I did find ArtRage2 in my quest which seems to do a similar job.  There is something incredibly cool about painting on a tablet.

Unfortunately I didn't get to attend any further sessions since I was presenting for the last two slots of the day.  Which also meant that I missed John's second session (Lucene.NET) and Kevin's first presentation at a Code Camp where he covered Cryptography and Hashing which is something he knows a great deal about - Kevin did the second round of Cryptography work in our Secret Server product.  I also heard wonderful stories about our other presenting team member, Bryce, whose laptop wouldn't cooperate and he had to wing his entire session on Code Access Security with no code or slides (this was also only his second Code Camp presentation ever - nice job Bryce!).

My two sessions were Refactoring (a hands on session using Bob Martin's Prime Generator example) and Unit Testing with RhinoMocks.  Session slides should be posted on the Richmond Code Camp website soon.  The Refactoring session worked out really well with the sizeOfArray and primeCandidates variables naturally emerging as the instance field candidates - the audience also got very involved and yelled out lots of ideas.  Working with code line by line and generating discussion is always fascinating.

Thanks to the folks at the Richmond Code Camp for organizing another fine event.

Jonathan Cogley is the CEO and founder of Thycotic Software, a .NET consulting company and ISV in Washington DC.  Our product, Secret Server is a enterprise password manager system for teams to secure their passwords.  Where do you keep your passwords or do you still use the same password everywhere?