Boston Code Camp 5 - May 5th and 6th

I didn’t blog about it much here, but I went down to the Richmond Code Camp, April 22nd & 23rd.  I was originally going down with the whole family, as my oldest daughter was interested in checking out Virginia Commonwealth University (she wants to study forensics, and is currently a junior in high school).  But, her wisdom teeth had other plans, and needed to come out, 2 days before the trip.  We had plans to have them removed this summer (which is early, since she will not be 17 until Sept.), but these things happen on their own schedule.  She had them all removed, and is doing fine. 

At the Richmond Code Camp I gave the Intro to Web Services Contract First presentation, and a brand new presentation, Intro to LINQ – Reinventing Visual Basic.  They both went over so well, that I decide that I just had to go up to Boston and do both presentations at  Boston Code Camp 5 (which is where the whole code camp thing started).  I’ve been in constant communication with the LINQ team, and they are really looking for feedback, especially the Visual Basic folks.  So, I decided to do a presentation to get the masses juiced about VB 9.0 and LINQ.  It is a whole rant on how Object Oriented Programming doesn’t seem to be the solution.  Seems like most assignments I see never use OOP, and use what can loosely termed procedural programming.  Oh, there are some classes, but for the most part developers don’t seem to be using OOP.  It doesn’t seem to matter if they are VB or C# programmers, mostly seem to use Datasets, strings, and loosely typed collections or arrays, with very little custom classes containing anything more then simple methods returning strings (this is especially true in the ASP.Net world).  So, in the LINQ presentation I pitch functional programming as a logically replacement for the procedural mess that I seem to find. No matter if you are for or against procedural programming, the idea of the presentation is to get you to rethink your style of implementation, and how LINQ should be able to help you create better code faster.