Or, "I came for the swag, I stayed for the sessions!"  Once again, there's a TL;DR version at the bottom of the page.

I felt much better this morning, so I got around, checked out since I wasn't staying tonight as well, then got to the banquet hall for breakfast and a keynote from Brian Goetz on concurrency in Java.  It was pretty interesting -- even though I don't work with Java and I haven't gotten to that level yet in .NET, honestly -- but it was good information and many of the concepts should be applicable in .NET as well.  It was a bit heavy for first thing in the morning though.  ;)

Following that, it was time for a very interesting presentation from Bill Wagner, Real World C# 3.0.  It was really very interesting -- a lot of info on things you can do with the new features in C# and also a bunch of ways you can shoot yourself in the foot.  That was actually the tagline of the talk: Our motto shouldn't be "hey, it's your foot."  Bill is always a great speaker (I saw one of his presentations at the Ann Arbor .NET User Group in late 2006) and it was nice to see another one of his talks.  One of the things he brought in is also something he blogged about recently, in fact -- using extension methods to extend IComparable<T> to get more readable comparison code.

After Bill's talk, it was time to hit the next room over for Neal Ford's talk on Domain Specific Languages.  After his keynote on Thursday, I was really looking forward to this talk.  Going in, I knew that DSLs are one of the big developments of the last year or two, but I didn't have a good handle on what they were or how you create them.  He did a terrific job of giving us an overview on them before throwing us into a whirlwind assault of slides and sample code.  ;)  I came out of it with a much better understanding of DSLs and also a few good ideas on how we could use them in our product at work... it's something I definitely want to investigate in the next few months as time allows.

As it turned out, that was the last session I attended at the conference; after lunch I got to talking with a guy that my boss is trying to recruit.  He wanted to see a bit of what we work on and discuss the company a bit.  We ended up having a very nice hour-and-a-half or so conversation on technology, programming, and software development philosophy.  The second afternoon session was about a third over at that point and I was starting to feel not so great again, so I chilled out for a while and then went to the closing session, where I failed to win anything whatsoever in the raffle.  C'est la vie... although one of the XBox 360 Arcades would have been nice.  ;)

I think I also figured out why I wasn't feeling that great yesterday evening and again this afternoon -- dehydration.  During a normal work day, I probably drink between 1.5 and 2 liters of water, and with the chaotic session schedule at CodeMash, I didn't get to do that.  As soon as I hit the road after leaving the Kalahari resort, I stopped off at the first convenience store I found and picked up a bottle of water... I felt quite a lot better after drinking that and I've been continuing to guzzle down liquids since I got home a couple of hours ago.

All in all, it was a terrific conference and I'm already looking forward to going again next January.  I might even be willing to take vacation time and pay for it myself, if my boss doesn't want to let me go next year... it's that good.  :)  Now I get to spend some time this weekend and early next week in PowerPoint, putting together a nice presentation on what I learned so I can pass it on to the other developers at work.  I do enjoy talking about software development though, so in its own way, that should be kind of fun.

I'd also like to note that after seeing a bunch of tablet PCs in action and playing one with a bit... I'd love to get my hands on one.  Would I trade my MacBook in for a Vista tablet?  Hmmm... I might have to give that some serious thought.  ;)

Too Long; Didn't Read version: Day 2 was good.  Interesting keynote, awesome presentations on C# 3 and domain-specific languages.  Spent a good chunk of the afternoon talking to a really awesome developer that I'd like to see on our team.  Dehydrated.  No luck on the raffle.  Want a tablet PC.  Hella tired, but looking forward to next year.