CodeMash absolutely ROCKS!  Each session I attended was excellent.  This conference has experienced, down-to-earth speakers.  I am very impressed.  The keynote sessions were thought provoking and entertaining, the burning man in the desert thing was too cool.  The people at the sponsor booths don't hunt you down either, you approach them, and they take a no pressure attitude.  Codemash is certainly a conference out of the ordinary in a good way.  The Open Spaces idea is great too.  I hit the water park today, the roller coaster thing was the best!  The slides were good too.  I guess the only comment I have is  why is it so dark in those tunnels?  But hey, you're going fast, and you're getting soaked so what's the difference ?

 

It is too late to add to the swaglog, but I'll add a picture...

The drive to the Kalahari was pretty much uneventful, except for a little side-road detour the GPS sent us through in Ashland, but all-in all it wasn't too bad, and we did get here just as timely.  Heck, we wouldn't have seen that nice house with the awesome lawn and the flagpole had we not taken those township roads!

 

The Kalahari is pretty impressive, it is big, and you definitely get walking miles here.  The waterpark looks awesome, but I haven't gone out yet.  I have SO got to try the surfboarding thing, I'll just try not to break my other ankle doing it.

 

The panel discussion this evening was real interesting, Python and Ruby are touted as the best languages for RAD and for beginners.  Webservice transactions, latency and granularity are a big issue in SOA.  REST and POX is recommended over SOAP (due to the overhead no huge surprise there).

 

I haven't gone collecting any swag yet, but the swaglog for the day will show what came in the "swag bag at the giving tree", included in here is the official CodeMash T-Shirt, a bunch of conference sponsor marketing flyers, a real cool notebook & pen from SRT, a sketchbook from APress, a Visual Web Developer Resource Kit CD, a pen from Dundas, a QSI beer cozy, and a QSI retractable ID badge holder.  I am stealing the swaglog idea from Brian Prince and his recollections of TechEd last year.

 

 

 

I guess the logic in me is screaming a bit, upon arriving a couple of AEP folks and I helped QSI attach these little metal clips to the lanyards, which hurt the thumbs like ten.  Just to see the retractable thing in the swag bag, probably would have been easier to attach those to the lanyards instead, buttons vs. brute force *LOL* ... Oh well Que Sera Sera

 

After the panel discussion it was on to Kahunaville restaurant and bar, where the 80's music was cranking and the people were gathering.  I learned a bunch at this meeting as well, thanks Steve!... I know now that you CAN display and serve Shrimp in the air, and I know the full lifecycle of a Twinkie...

 

 

I hit an issue today while working with the GridView control. I have a column that contains the Wilco RowSelectorField checkbox control, and I needed to collect each checked grid view row upon a button-click event.  The problem was that the primary key id value of the row that I needed to perform a database operation was in a hidden column and trying to obtain the cell text of that column always returned an empty string. 

 

Having always used the Infragistics UltraWebGrid control in the past, I had never had this problem before.  As it turns out, if you set the visibility of the column itself to false, trying to obtain the cell text from that column will always return an empty string.  What you need to do is on the GridView's OnItemDataBound event, set the visibility of each cell individually to false, then it will work like a charm!

 

e.Row.Cells[0].Visible=false;