Flash | Retrospective

Today was the first day of TodCon in Las Vegas. I live here in Vegas so I had a short commute this morning from my house over to the Excalibur. I don’t frequent the Strip much… in fact, I don’t really head down there unless my wife or I have friends or family in town… definitely feels like I am driving to a whole new city.

The morning started off with the keynote by Danny Kastner, CEO of Popstick.com, or more widely known as the Appentice “diaster”. Side note: my wife regularly watches The Apprentice (I don’t), but I caught an episode or two with Danny and thought he was the only one who was entertaining. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the keynote, but Danny didn’t disappoint. Kim Cavanaugh has a nice write-up on the keynote on his site (http://brainfrieze.net) so I won’t even attempt to recap. Head over to Brain Frieze to check it out.

After the keynote, the conference split up into 3 tracks. I choose the CSS track for most of today. I have been very consumed by Flash and other work for the last year or so, so I was looking forward to getting a dose of HTML and CSS (I am out of touch on CSS).

I started off with both of Molly Holzschalg’s sessions on “Hardcore CSS Theory” and “The Box Model”. I got more than what I could have hoped for. Molly kept the discussion geeky enough for me and the Holy Trinity (cascade, inheritance, and specificity) made a lot of sense to me. I had a good understanding of cascade and inheritance as the topics weren’t too far from ActionScript and OOP (fundamentally). Specificity is something I hadn’t heard about. Since I spend a lot of time debugging ActionScript, so any rules that apply to tracking down bugs and conflicts are right up my alley. The next session was about the Box Model. This is something that completely pissed me off about CSS when I first started learning CSS. And guess what, it still pisses me off when I have to do html work. With IE 6.0 though and various tried-and-true hacks out there, that pain of different browers and WYSIWYG tools is getting less and less.

After Molly’s two sessions, we stopped for lunch and shortly thereafter, got back to the sessions. I started off my afternoon with Stephanie Sullivans session on CSS-P Layout and Bug Busting. It was a good session on planning your CSS-P and she went through a sample design to see how she would break it down. I wish we had more time since I woudl have enjoyed to see more code. I think I heard Stephanie or someone else mention a cd image or a download would be made available with the snippets, etc that she showed off during her session, but near the end, I didn’t recall anyone mentioning a URL or anything, but maybe it will be given out later.. I hope.

After Stephanie’s session, I split from the CSS and jumped over to Danny Patterson’s session on Service Oriented Architecture with Flash. Danny gave a good overview of using WebServices with Flash using .Net and ColdFusion (what? no love for PHP?) I would really like to start using more Remoting and WebServices, because I can easily see the payoff.

The last session of the day for me was the SQL Tricks and Traps. I am pretty much self-taught when it comes to SQL (and it probably shows looking at some of my SQL statements), but Tom Muck showed some very cool SQL that will definitely improve my SQL practices. Jeez — I need to find an extra 3 or 4 hours a day to invest in all these “extra” things I want to learn and get up to speed on.

There were sesssion on other tracks throughout the day that I missed out on, but really wanted to see. Hopefully others will blog their experiences and/or the presenters will put their presentations and files online.

Day 2 will be mostly a ColdFusion day for me but I want to catch the session on Open Source.

Thanks Dianne for bringing the power strip so a lot of us were able to plug-in and get power.