Code Camp Redux

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  any thanks to the enthusiastic learners who showed up to my session at Silicon Valley Code Camp over the weekend. It was early on a Sunday morning, and I'm glad 15 or so of you found your way into my classroom.

The topic was .NET Development and Excel Services, and I think it was very well received. It had a better curriculum than the MSDN Webcast (which is available for download here) I had done the previous week. In my MSDN session, I bit off more than my audience could chew. I was explaining uses of grid computing to scale UDFs behind Excel Services. It's a very cool topic, and in the coming couple of years it's going to help a lot of people...but it's too early for that now.

Most people (even developers and Office power users) don't really know what Excel Services is all about. Informal polls at both my webcast and my Code Camp session proved that. So, in trying to explain why grid computing will be an important tool for people writing UDFs, I was really a few months too early. At Code Camp, I just talked about writing .NET add-ins for Excel Services, and that in itself was plenty to fill up an hour!

All in all, I had a great time at Code Camp. Attendees are always very enthusiastic, so the atmosphere is great for speaking. I received an invitation this week from Jason Mauer to do a session at Code Camp Seattle v2.0 (I spoke on grid computing at v1.0).

Arg! I wish I could. I've got a bunch of travel coming up, both personal (hanging in Vegas with my rock star friends) and professional (no links here, but some exciting trips on the near term horizon). Have fun at camp, Jason.

Technorati tags: grid computing, excel services