I just got back earlier today from Codestock in Knoxville Tennessee. It was a huge blast and I had an absolutely wonderful time. I rode down there with Kevin Hazzard and James Avery which provided a ridiculous amount of conversation and laughter to fill the 9 hour trip (one way).

The day started off with a keynote, and then the first session that I attended was “The Emergence of Choice in the .net Ecosystem” by James Avery. Actually, the title was “10 Open Source tools you should use”, but that was his “enterprisey” title that he made up. It was a good talk that introduced a lot of cool tools to a bunch of people. I recorded this section, so I will hopefully get this up soon.

Next I attended a session done by Joe O’Brien & Amanda Laucher. It was called “CLRing Your Head: Looking at Alternative Languages”. It was another very cool session that focused on Ruby and F# and showed some of the ways in which they allow you to solve problems in different ways. I also recorded this session and will try to get it up on the blog soon.

For the rest of the afternoon I sat in the open spaces and participated in a two different discussions on .net user groups and Erland. Well, the Erlang discussion went a bit off topic and ended up being a very cool discussion about functional languages, databases, distributed computing, and lastly economics. Yeah, I told you that it went off a bit.

Afterwards we left and grabbed some dinner and then went back to the hotel to get a nap and a shower. (Sorry to the CodeStock guys for not going to the After Party, but we needed to recharge!) After we felt refreshed we went over to Alan Steven’s house and had a great party. I honestly don’t remember the last time I laughed that hard and for that long.

Overall it was a great weekend and I can’t wait for the next one!