Fervent Coder

So it's not above me to go get free T-shirts and stuff at the conference.  Two reasons.  The first is that that I get to meet and interact with a lot of new people. I did hang out with JetBrains for a little while. The exhibitors always seem to put their best foot forward (i.e. very good looking ladies are there to assist in your vendor selection).

The second reason is the free stuff.  :D You can almost always find something that you will actually use after the conference.  I got quite a few things, but here are just a few notable mentions.

1) The coolest thing I got was the flashlight/laser pointer. It was from Blackberry, and you had to get a form they had stamped.

2) Spam-Aid.  These people used to give out Red Bull, but Red Bull gets heavy when you bring it to conferences.  So now instead they give you a shot of caffeine.

3) These are classic at the office.  Someone else that went to a conference earlier this year brought a bunch of these in and the fun began.  These babies can fly when you know how to aim... :D

4) The strangest thing I got was the gift from MailFoundry.  The guy at the booth told me that it is what I think it is.  Well, in that case it looks more like chewing gum (WE COME FROM FRANCE).  :D  Anyone?

If you use CruiseControl.NET or are thinking about setting it up, it can be daunting because of the XML document that you have to write for the configuration.  If you already have it set up, you definitely want to check out CCNetConfig, a configuration editor for CruiseControl.NET.  It works like many of the configuration editors such as the WCF configuration editor (comes with .NET Framework 3.0 I believe) or the Enterprise Library Configuration Editor.  Definitely something worth looking at.

CIFactory by contrast, is a complete solution for you.  If you haven't set it up, it walks you through a series of questions and has everything set up for you.  It even installs CruiseControl.NET and Nant for you. You tell it where your source control is and a few other steps and you are off and running with Continuous Integration. It comes bundled with some goodies, and you can also download some others or even write your own.

I really enjoyed this discussion.  I knew I wanted to go to this when I saw that it was Scott Hanselman (great podcaster and now a Microsoft employee), Phil Haack (of SubText and now Microsoft), Rob Conery (of SubSonic and now Microsoft developing Subsonic full time), and Shaun Walker (of DotNetNuke).  I love how panel discussions take on a life of their own, depending on the audience.  This was definitely like that because we had some interesting people in the audience.

Among the crowd, the first person in the audience to want to ask questions was Charlie Poole (of NUnit). He was animated! He was wildly waving his hand back and forth until someone gave him a microphone. I took a picture, but it was not a very good one though.  He was talking about how Microsoft hasn't always supported OSS projects.  He also spoke of being disinvited from conferences in the past.

There was also Jay Flowers (of CIFactory) hanging out in the audience.  Troy went to the session he did on CIFactory and says that it is definitely worth checking out.

I was definitely surprised by the number of hands that went up when it was asked how many people contribute to an open source project.  Of course that session was in the Open Force Conference Side, so it is really not that surprising to see that number of people in the conference are contributors to open source.  It makes me want to contribute to an Open Source Project.  I am definitely taking the recommendation from Phil about a book to read.

Mostly the discussion was towards licensing.  Licensing is apparently one of the most important choices you will make in an open source project.  Another one is where to host your project.

So the discussion was good, although we were with a group of MS employees that have a total of 8 weeks with a blue badge.  They all contribute to Open Source Projects themselves and that is where they are coming from.  The feeling coming out was that there is much better support for OSS and Microsoft.  That is where we see a lot of stuff getting out to CodePlex that MS employees are posting.  I think it will be great if the feeling is still there when they are more seasoned employees (although I think they will continue it because Scott Guthrie has the same attitude).  The Gu <raises hands and bows down> unfortunately was not able to make the discussion as he had to get back to Redmond the night before.