I went to the New England Code Camp last weekend and is was excellent!  This is my third or fourth Code Camp - I think Thom was right when he said this was the best one yet.

Here's a few quick notes about the sessions I attended.  (Slides and such are available online)

Advanced Server Controls and Web Parts in ASP.Net 2.0 (Pat Hynds) - This was a great session to start off with.  Pat really did a great job of going through server control construction.  Pat's a great speaker, with a quick wit who made the session a lot of fun.  My only compaint was that there just wasn't enough time to really cover everything.
Pat also raffled off a copy of Telerik's RAD Server Controls and I was lucky enough to win!  I checked out their website and I am pumped for these.  They'll be more on these in a future post.  Special thanks to Pat and Telerik for this.

SMTP, MIME, and the System.Web.Mail namespace (Marshall Rosenstein) - Anyone who's used mail from an ASP.Net app know that it can throw some pretty cryptic error messages.  Marshall did a great job of explaining the pitfalls, plus how to diagnose and overcome them.

Using Issue Vision to Jump Start .Net 2.0 Smart Client Applications (Dave Burke) - Dave's session at CC3 was the reason I started blogging in the first place.  I've really enjoyed both of the sessions I've seen him present because he spends most of his time walking through code that's ready to run.  Writing code on-the-fly is great for some sessions, but I always feel like I've seen a broader range of things in the “walk through” style session.  Plus, using an existing app as a starting point is just a great way to improve productivity.

Programming with Virtual Earth (Julie Lerman) - I went to this session purely for fun and I wasn't disappointed.  VE is a relatively new mapping application from MSN.  I won't be using any mapping for work but just wanted to learn alittle more about this.  Since this is largely undocumented, except for www.viavirtualearth.com, Julie was sharing her experience with “deconstructing” it for use in her own application.  Since VE is exposed through a Javascript “API” Ilearned a couple of debugging techniques, too.

Deploying a DotNetNuke V3 Site (Jim Bonnie) - Saturday after dinner might have been the highlight of the weekend for me.  Jim's a good friend of mine who gave his first Code Camp presentation ever.  I've been messing with DNN for my personal sites and use some pretty similar concepts at work so a lot of it was a little introductory for me, but I think most of the other attendees really enjoyed it and got alot out the presentation and demos.  Jim really did a great job with the material and evertything went smoothly.  Nice job, Jim!

Building a Reporting Environment and ETL Overview (Raheel Retiwalla) - These two presentations on Sunday morning really complemented each other nicely.  Raheel did a really good job of explaining the topics from the beginning for the “uninitiated” and also gave a ton of info on how SQL Reporting Services and SQL Integration Services (formerly DTS) have been improved from the current verions.

Update (10/1) - fixed some typos and updated some links