First off USC is amazing. What really got my attention was that almost 1 out of 3 people on campus were on a bike or longboard.
I’ll start with saturday. Sadly, I missed both iOS sessions because we got there at 12pm, reasons: bus arrived an hour late to school, there was a huge line to cross the mexican border (most schools were going to six flags that weekend), and because of those two reasons we experienced a bit of traffic.
Two of the sessions I attended were about developing for Windows Phone 7. My conclusion about it is that it’s success or failure has equal chances, here’s why.
It can succeed because there is huge amount of developers that already know the tools, compared to Android it won’t be fragmented so it’ll be easier to test on device, and it does have a couple nice development features.
It can fail because it’s so immature. Not only was it late in the game, but it’s missing a lot of stuff that iOS and Android have from both user and development side. From the user side, biggest missing features are Copy Paste and Multitasking. From the development side, the only way to distribute your apps are through the marketplace (bad news for enterprise app development and beta testing), there is no built-in local database (like SQLite for iOS), you have to make sure your UI works with all the themes users can choose, and saving state just looks like a pain in the ass.
So let’s see how well it evolves.
Sunday it was only 5 of us and I drove all they way from Tijuana to LA, first time I drive that long and first time I used GPS (that shit is awesome), we got there at 9:15am (way faster than the day before).
The first session we attended was about how to make your development business and it was great, best thing I learned was that you sell more if you’re offering to cure a pain rather than provide pleasure.
At the end of lunch the raffle took place and I won “murach’s ASP.NET 3.5 web programming with C# 2008”, which I will probably end up selling.
The next two sessions where about Lambdas (C#) and GoF Design Patterns, both were explained really good by Jeremy Clark.
So it was worth the almost 0 sleep I got and the small amount of food I got through out the weekend.
