Life on the Bus

Code Trip - Day 1

Last night around 8:00pm I left MIX08 early and hopped on the Code Trip bus. I was extremely excited. My head was still spinning from the announcement of Silverlight 2 Beta 1. I had spent the previous 2 days at MIX meeting people whose blogs I read, playing Rock Band, building new apps/demos with Silverlight 2, and ultimately not getting enough sleep.

Shortly after the bus left the Venetian and the excitement subsided, everyone sat down, pulled out their laptops, and started coding. Now as I think back, that's pretty funny. This was definitely going to be a "Code Trip" and it was finally underway. The bus had wireless and many of the sessions from MIX had already been posted. I was in heaven.

By about 1:00am everyone was asleep on a bunk. I coded until 12:00am, which is when I couldn't think anymore. I made sure to sleep in one of the bottom bunks, that way if I rolled off I wouldn't fall too far. It took a bit to fall asleep, but once I learned that I had to lie flat and not on my side I konked right out. I woke up a little before 4:00am as we were pulling into the hotel at Salt Lake City. Some of us stayed in the hotel and some remained on the bus. I didn't wake up again until 9:30am.

Code Trip - Day 2

We started off the morning with a hearty brunch at Denny's. That was at 11:00am. After eats it was back to the bus and out came the laptops. The first stop of the trip was going to be at the Franklin Covey building at 3:00pm. I was given the task opportunity to show off Silverlight 2 and got busy preparing. I figured this would be good practice for the Boise Code Camp presentation I would be giving on Saturday (3/12).

The event at Franklin Covey went really well. Tim gave a Code Trip / MIX overview; Woody talked about IE8; I talked about Silverlight 2; and Jason talked about the new Deep Zoom technology. The attendees were from many of the various Utah .Net User Groups. It was good times and a lot of swag was given away (Smart Phone, copies of Office 2007, Vista, Expression Studio, Infragistics, etc).

After the event a number of attendees joined us for a nerd dinner. Those that came got to check out the bus, eat good Greek food, and talk technology.

Before we left Salt Lake City, Craig Berntson hopped on the bus to join us. Craig is a Senior Software Engineer with 3M and will also be presenting on Continuous Integration at the Boise Code Camp.

So about the Boise Code Camp...right now there are 475+ people registered for this. Wow. That's a lot of people. Here's some sessions straight from MIX and/or related to the Code Trip:

• Technologies behind the MIX announcements, by Tim Heuer.
• What's new for developers in IE8, by Woody Pewitt.
• The technology behind the Code Trip, by Jason Mauer.
• Continuous Integration, by Craig Berntson.
• Silverlight for Developers, by Erik Mork. Erik also does a Silverlight podcast which I recommend you check out.
• Silverlight for Designers, by Kelly White.

Right now as I'm writing this it is 11:45pm and the bus is 42 miles southwest of Boise, Idaho. Jason wrote an app that takes in the GPS coordinates of the bus, calculates where we're at, and the posts it to the web site. That's one of the things he'll be showing off in his presentation tomorrow. I really need to finish this post and get back to preparing my presentation for tomorrow. However, I can't get the Deep Zoom demos from MIX out of my head right now. Those presentations combined with what I've built so far have given me a bunch of ideas for how to put to use that Canon 100mm Macro USM lens I purchased last summer.