Boise Code Camp ver. 2011

Spent the day at Boise Code Camp 2011, or Geekfest 2011, as my wife calls it .  And it was good for her because she's not been feeling well of late, and she got to rest without me fawning over her and stressing her out even more.

But on to the upside, I learned a lot today.  The problem is going to be retaining int all, and then finding ways to implement any of it.  Here's some of what I learned:

1. jQuery has the power to completely rewrite your entire web UI (including the CSS) under the right conditions.  Please don't ask me what they are, because I haven't even BEGUN to play with it yet.  I'm still trying to wrap my brain around CSS and Javascript int he first place.
2. WPF and Silverlight.  Need I say more?
3. Mobile computing may become less business-friendly in the future.  Why? See my explanation below.
4. In this country there really ARE kids that are moving into engineering fields.  Just ask David Star of Elegant Code.com. One of them is his son.

OK,  this mobile computing thing.  With the advances in Andriod, iOS, and Windows Phone 7, along with the HUGE leap in the available memory on today's phones in general, and smartphones in particular, one would think that it would be easier to have data run on the compact device as opposed to having to access business data from "The Cloud".  Not so fast.  I had a small discussion with the Microsoft Developer Evangelist for the Northwest area (Mithun is a really nice guy) today, and he gave me the short version of a few things that I had not taken the time to think about.

First, is the memory footprint that would be involved.  For SqlCE, the size limit on the database is 4GB, and then at some point, it has to be hooked up to a full install of  SQL server anyway,  in order to do anything with all that data.  The second thing that we talked about was what I felt was a missing piece in VS 2010.  I don't know how many have yet to realize this, but Visual Studio 2010 DOES NOT CURRENTLY SUPPORT the Compact Framework (this is really strange because with WinPhone 7 kernel runs on top of it, and you can only do WinPhone 7 development in VS 2010).  Mithun couldn't give me an answer on that one, except to say that he is as hopeful as we are that this issue gets resolved.  He couldn't give me a timetable, or even a solid commit on if it's even planned.  

Bed Time now.

Good-night