Musings after returning from STL Day of .Net

So I went to the St. Louis Day of .NET conference this weekend with most of my co-workers in the development group. All in all, it was a good experience, though there's apparently video of me asleep on the drive up that I haven't seen yet. The main complaint I have about the conference is that there's too many things I didn't get to see because I was in another session at the time. I'd love to have a video of each session that I could go back and watch. Particularly the Tips and Tricks for Visual Studio, since that one apparently was fast paced and I might need to pause it to take notes.

My favorite demonstration would have to have been the presentation on creating games with Silverlight. I'm not a game programmer, but the interface created by the methods used could be re-used in applications. As with many of my fellow geeks, programming started with games, not the "hello world" we all know and loathe.

The first app I remember writing was a maze game much like the Tron lightcycles, but with the bike as a single pixel with a line trailing behind it on my TI82. It was an adaptation of someone elses game that I reverse engineered and extended to have a map loader, a method of actually winning, and the beginnings of a map designer. I also wrote a TIE-Fighter FPS for it. Kind of cheesy looking back, but the drawing functions on the TI82 made it a lot easier to write a game in TIBasic than, for example, in C++ or C#. Those interfaces, though, were how I learned to create an intuitive and effective interface for later apps, some that I actually used for homework.

My first blog post

Ok, I've been ranting on forums, rambling on bulletin boards, bantering on mailing lists, leaving long winded comments, and even microblogging on Twitter. I keep running across these blogs that already know me from my Gmail account, so I figured it was time I made my own.

I'm an application developer and project team lead working for the Missouri House of Representatives (primarily in C#.NET), an avid Star Trek fan, and an otherwise geekish person. I also have a beard. That should give you a pretty good idea of what to expect to see me blogging about.