Phew! What a crazy, fun weekend!  I'm finally getting caught up.

This past weekend (April 14th, 2007) we had the opportunity to host and participate in the second Code Camp in Utah officially entitled “Utah Spring Code Camp 2007”.  Our goal is to put these on every six months, the next one sometime between Sept and Nov of this year.

Nonetheless, this event was a lot of fun.  There were many in attendance, though not quite as many as we were hoping for.

I had the opportunity speak on .NET Serialization.  It was a variation on a presentation that I had prepared a few months back for the Utah .NET User Group and this time, after rewriting the presentation and code samples from scratch it went MUCH better.  I am quite happy with how it came out (I hope those in attendance gleaned some nuggets of information).

As it turns out one presenter was not able to make it out to the Code Camp (calling in around 10:30 or 11:00 in the morning) so we had to scramble a bit.  I had some ideas up my sleeve based on what I had trimmed from my presentation and we focused the second hour on XML Serialization.  That was a lot of fun!

The third block was a shortened (30 min) presentation in which I discussed an evolution in accessing application configuration files (e.g., web.config, app.exe.config, et al).  Beginning with the most basic access method via AppSettings, we progressively made the transition to ConfigurationSectionHandlers and XML Serialization.  We used this technique to deserialize a block of XML from the configuration file into an object in code that we can access.

All in all, I'm quite happy with the Code Camp, though I wish I could have attended more of the presentations.  I guess that's a drawback from having multiple tracks running simultaneously - you have to pick and choose what you're gonna see.

The code for my presentations can be downloaded here.  Enjoy!