[CodeCamp] It was successful (I can get some sleep now :))!
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Disclaimer: This is a looong report 
This year was very special. We had some great content (thnx to Dean Vitner who had helped me in talks with the speakers), our contributors which reacted great to our needs so we got allot of goodies and licenses to give out, and our attendees reacted great and showed up almost filling up the all the places.
Content
Live Meeting/Office Communication Server – development platform
This was the first session of the day in which Tomislav Bronzin had shown us how we can use Live Meeting/Office Communication Server in our applications to facilitate communication between our teams, colleagues, etc… all in all, a great session to open up the day.
One special thing was also that Tomislav’s plane from Macedonia was late, and he came in the country on 15 minutes prior to his session and rushed over to the center to be with us – many thanks Tomislav for this!
SQL Server myth-busting
Marko Čulo in his usual great style overwhelmed the visitors with often misunderstood and mistaken myths about the SQL server, explaining to us that sometimes we cannot believe everything we hear – especially when hearing about indexes, backups, performances and other important bits of SQL server - he even tried to convince us that using cursors in T-SQL isn’t always as bad as people say - that part even he couldn’t believe he was telling us
Implementation of Enterprise Library as a part of an ERP system
In his first time appearance Srđan Njirić had shown us the practical usages of Enterprise Library which he along with his team had implemented as part of a large ERP system, and thus sharing personal experiences and problem solutions which they had to implement to solve their specific business needs.
Srđan also had the best supporters while doing his session as he brought probably the best looking girl DBA/Developers in our country – maybe that’s why he did such a great session?
Linq to SQL: ORM for masses
In his detailed overview of Linq to SQL our Slovenian guest Miha Markič did a great job explaining to us the technology from the architecture to the implementation point of view – covering all the details and showing us his personal experiences along the way.
During the session Miha also battled very successfully the DBA side of the room (especially the dreaded first row :)), and thus preparing us for the final showdown in ORM – hero or zero discussion which was to follow a few sessions later. Great job Miha (if you haven’t guessed it yet… I coming from the developer side :))
Silverlight
During the presentation Tomislav Bronzin helped his young and ambitious protégé Bruno Kovačić to show us his work and already rich experience with Silverlight while showcasing his Silverlight gadget which he made for this CodeCamp – showing us how easily you can make a cool Silverlight gadget when once you master all the right bits and pieces of Javascript, Silverlight and .NET
Congratulations to Bruno for his first session!
Object-Relational Databases?
Dejan Sarka overwhelmed us with his very detailed knowledge of the subject, and finally answered the question about the question mark at the end of the session name.
During his hour long session, Dejan went from principles behind the whole idea to detailed technical demos showcasing to us the particularities of implementing such model with C# User defined types, usage of XML and XSD in SQL and other neat things.
As Miha, Dejan was also a colleague from Slovenia, who had traveled all the way from his country to ours to be able to present on our CodeCamp – thank you both for that!
Panel: ORM - hero or zero
The final showdown!
In the blue corner - Dean Vitner - presenting the DBA side, and in the red corner - Miha Markič – presenting the O/R (developer) side. Both armed with solid arguments and a great intent to show off their opinions while moderating a discussion with the attendees.
As Dean had some great help from Dejan Sarka and Marko Čulo (the dreaded DBA front row :)) we (the developer side) tried to give back some arguments to even up the scale – eventually the discussion went in the neutral zone and we all agreed that in any case – we will not agree leaving this debate – well – up for discussion
The day
We’ve started on Saturday at 09 AM and were finished with sessions by 19+ PM (imagine that, whole 10 hours of technical talks and discussions!) after which we’ve closed the event with a raffle in which we gave over 25 prizes to attendees (on average every second attendee or presenter got a book or a license for some great product).
Just before lunch a special guest from one of our main contributors – Telerik – gave us a chance to meet their great products and presented us with a special 20% discount offer from his company for all the attendees of our event.
Attendees
Over the course of the day we had up to 60 attendees and as the day were ending that number only fell down to some 50 persons. We were very happy to see almost all the registered attendees appear and stay up with us for almost 10 hours on a Saturday day - this was the best part of it all.
As mentioned with the session overviews, we also had for a change some women attendees; making this event even eye pleasing (can you believe that we met two good looking blond DBA/Developer girls?)
From the demographic point of view, we had guest speakers from Slovenia, members of the community coming from Dubrovnik, Osijek, Zagreb, Split, Rijeka, etc… thus truly joining together our community.
Contributors
This year our contributor list has grown even larger, these are all the companies without which help we probably could not organize this good event.
We had divided the contributors in three categories, Gold, Silver and Bronze or Swag ones:
Gold contributors being Microsoft, INETA and Telerik
Silver contributors being RedGate, JetBrains, SourceGear and NETMedia
Bronze or Swag ones DevExpress, LLBLGen Pro, CodeSmithTools and Algebra
Because of the great help from our contributors, we were able to organize a big raffle at the end of the event, handling out 2 books donated by Microsoft, 3 Developer licenses of R.A.D. ASP.NET Controls Suite donated by Telerik, 2 licenses of ANTS Profiler donated by Red Gate, 3 licenses of ReSharper and 3 licenses of DotTrace Profiler from JetBrains, 2 licenses of LLBLGen Pro from LLBLGen Pro and 10 licenses of CodeSmith from CodeSmithTools.
People
I would like to thank the people who have helped me organize this with their efforts:
From the community: Tomislav Bronzin, Dean Vitner and Davor Smojver
From Microsoft: Marin Mamić and Anka Novković Slaming
Speakers: Tomislav Bronzin, Marko Čulo, Srđan Njirić, Miha Markič, Bruno Kovačić, Dejan Sarka and Dean Vitner
From my company: Siniša Dolinac, Ante Maljković, Ivica Munitić and Denis Brulić
Thank you all, without you – it could not have been done!
Recordings and materials from the sessions
With the help of Davor Smojver we were able to organize the recording of sessions with his camera. We have videos of each session and when we get the materials from the speakers we will publish it live on our website and thus making It possible to re-view the sessions again or listen to them if you’ve missed them (like I did as I was running around taking care of operational things… can’t wait to see the videos)
Pictures
As soon as we collect the pictures from all the digital cameras (thnx to my colleagues which I’ve bothered to take the pictures) we will publish them and put the link up
Final thoughts… I am very proud I was a part of this; hope you’ve had a great time like I did… see you next year!
Cheers!
