Twin Cities Code Camp IV

Yesterday, I was in the Cities at the fourth Twin Cities Code Camp.  It really was a fantastic experience, likely the the best one yet (I presented at the first two code camps as well). From the presentations I attended I would say that the quality of the presentations was very high. They easily would rival what you get at a paid conference. I also met a bunch of people I had never seen in person which is really cool.

Some of the Iowa crowd that went up was Javier Lozano, Bryan Sampica and Greg Wilson. There were several other attendees from Bryan’s company as well. The Iowa presenters and attendees have grown significantly since the first one where I was the sole Iowan as far as I know.

Some interesting people I met/saw were D’Arcy Lussier, Neil Iverson (Inetium), Brandy Favilla (New Horizons), Robert Boedigheimer, Chris Williams (Magenic), Aaron Erickson (Magenic), Kent Tegels (DevelopMentor), Jeff Ferguson, Chris Johnson, Saviz Artang, John Thurow, Kirstin (Magenic), Nicole and Kristen (New Horizons) and Justin Chase.

My favorite session was Neil Iverson’s PowerShell for Developers.  It was a fast paced live demo that kept incrementally building.  Rarely have I been so engaged in a session. D’Arcy’s MVC vs ASP.Net talk was also really interesting.  We only had about 6 people in the session, so we went around the room and said where we were coming from in our ASP.Net development experience. Then D’Arcy showed us how he typically structures his webforms applications, and we peppered him with questions.  I learned a lot from the session.

My talk was the second of the day in the large seminar room so we actually had about 50 people in the session.  One thing that was cool was that D’Arcy Lussier did an intro talk right before mine, so I got to build off of what he did in the session before. Mine seemed to go pretty well. There were a lot of questions and interest in what MVC brings to web development in the Microsoft space.

Jason Bock did a great job again bringing this all together.  It’s a lot of work coordinating an event like this.

If you liked what you got at the Twin Cities Code Camp you’ll definitely want to check out the Iowa Code Camp.  We’ll be a little bit smaller, but have some top notch presenters, a great facility and will have great prizes as well.  The registration is right on the home page and is as simple as it gets.

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Iowa Code Camp – Spring 2008

We are planning our first ever Iowa Code Camp.  It’s going to happen at the University of Iowa’s Conference Center in Iowa City on Saturday May 3rd.

The details are coming together nicely and we already have about 1/2 of our speakers in place.

Our current sponsors are:

• University of Iowa
• Microsoft
• And several others are in the works

We are currently looking for more sponsors to provide some good food, drinks and prizes.

If you are interested in helping in any way, leave me a comment and I’ll make sure to pass your information on to the right person.

Javier has already posted the Code Camp on bostondotnet.org

Twin Cities Code Camp Follow-up

I did my first Code Camp talk last weekend up in the Cities and had a great time. My time slot was 9am and it was in a huge seminar room (which caught me a little off guard). I was envisioning a smaller more intimate setting maybe 15 people, but I ended up with 30+. I got good feedback from many of the people who attended and I’ve adjusted my talk to really show the value of WPF more clearly. I’m improving the demos to get to point a little quicker and cutting back on the time I spend talking about the background to WPF.

To be honest, working with WPF makes me want to do Windows programming for the first time. I’ve done mostly web development for the last 7 years, so it pretty cool to find a new way to develop for the desktop and have it change my bias toward the web. The whole stateless nature of the the web and web development has always made sense to me but I’m coming around.

The quality of the the speakers I listened to was fantastic. For the price of the Code Camp ($0) I can’t say enough good things about the quality of the speakers. I got to present in the same room as Rocky Lhotka (only 7 hours earlier :)). If you are interested in intelligent business objects and you work in the .Net world you really should look at his CSLA framework. I’ve been reading his blog and books for about 3 years now and have learned a lot from him.

Nathaniel Schutta‘s AJAX talk was great. I only got to talk with him briefly, but got a better view of what is going on with AJAX and got a great overview of the players involved (dojo, Google Web Toolkit, etc).

Jake Good is a Rails developer up in Minneapolis for Space 150. I think Jake’s talk was the most entertaining, I got to see some good Ruby integration with the CLR, the hybrid monster and hear about Guitar Hero.

Michael Dunn gave a good talk on the Microsoft Speech technologies. I probably won’t use it any time soon, but it was pretty cool to see what it can do.

The best talk I heard was Robert Boedigheimer‘s talk on cryptography. He was presenting out at the Heartland Developers Conference, but I missed his talks so this was the first time I had heard him. His knowledge of the topic, clarity and the ease of his talk was top notch.

Big thanks to Jason Bock for organizing and coordinating the Code Camp. Maybe we’ll have one in Iowa next year.