Another CodeCamp, another success!

Again this year we’ve organized a great event with the help of our speakers and contributors. The fact that this time around it was not a full house (we had only up to 30 visitors) gave us a great chance to intensify the discussions and conversations which turned up to be great.

The day

We’ve started on Saturday at about 09.30 and were finished with sessions by 19 hours (imagine that, almost 10 hours of technical talks and discussions!) after which we’ve closed the event with a raffle in which we gave 11 prizes to attendees (almost every second attendee or presenter got a book or a license for some great product).

Attendees

Over the course of the day we had some 30 attendees and as the day were ending that number varied on some ~25 people. At first we were a little bit disappointed that about 50 people registered and only a little bit more than half showed up, but as the day progressed this turned up to give us a better chance to engage in discussions and talks.

From the demographic point of view, this year all speakers were from different parts of Croatia, and we had members of the community come in mostly from Zagreb, Osijek and Split.

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 and INETA

Silver contributors being RedGate

Bronze or Swag ones Telerik, DevExpress, Ekobit and Perpetuum Mobile, Microsoft Innovation Center Varaždin

Because of the great help from our contributors, we were able to organize a big raffle at the end of the event, handling out 1 SQL Compare license donated by RedGate, 1 voucher for any Microsoft Innovation Center Varaždin course which lasts 1 or 2 days, 2 bundle developer licenses of RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX + WinForms + Telerik Reporting donated by Telerik, 2 licenses for CodeRush + Refactor Pro donated by Devexpress, 2 licenses for TeamCompanion for Outlook and 1 one license for Test Manger for Team edition for Software Developers donated by Ekobit and 2 licenses for Report Sharp Shooter donated by Perpetuum Software.
 

People

I would like to thank the people who have helped me organize this with their efforts:

From the community: Tomislav Bronzin

From Microsoft: Marin Mamić, Marko Drenovački and MIC team

And our speakers: Tomislav Bronzin, Andreaj Radinger, Dean Vitner, Josip Šaban, Marko Čulo and Bernard Katić

Thank you all, without you – it could not have been done!

Recordings and materials from the sessions

With the help of Marko Drenovački and Microsoft Innovation Center Team we were able to organize the recording of sessions with Live Meeting. 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

Pictures are already available at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vladanstrigo/sets/72157608227020050/

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!

Disclaimer: Again, this is a looong report

Disclaimer 2: This is also the first post about this years CodeCamp because I’ve been overley busy organizing that I just didn’t have time to post about it here.

This time around event was much dearer to me. Finally I’ve had a chance to do it in my hometown! As we’ve also had great content this time around the attendees reacted in a great manner by showing up on really sunny Saturday day for a full day of technical sessions (which believe me was a challenge concerning how much we like our weekends here, and especially how much we like sunny days).

Content

What LINQ brings to the table?

This was the very first session of the day in which Ivan Šaškor had shown us the perks of using Linq to Sql throughout the new Visual Studio 2008.

As first session of the day, Šaški did a great job warming up the attendees for the upcoming sessions by other speakers.

Has world become a better place now that we have Linq2Sql?

Dean Vitner’s session was the most expected one for me personally, as he is a DBA, his look on Linq to Sql sounded as a view that shouldn’t be missed.

As usual in his casual style Dean welcomed us to a well thought of set of arguments on the benefits as well as flaws of using Linq2Sql (couldn’t believe my own eyes and ears when I heard Dean speak even some good arguments in defense of Linq2Sql).

Ms Sync Framework & ADO.NET Sync Services

In his first time CodeCamp appearance Bernard Katić took us on journey towards the new Microsoft Sync framework and ADO.NET Sync services. In his session Bernard successfully explained to us the differences between some of the previous attempts from Microsoft and the new ones as well as shed a light on all the important aspects, problems and ideas which he had discovered from his use of the new framework.

Overview of new features and possibilities in Visual Studio 2008 with .NET Framework 3.5

Tomislav Bronzin together with young Bruno Kovačić continued on Bernard’s footsteps by talking about the new features for integrated development with the new Visual Studio and the features of the new .NET Framework.

Tomislav gave some great examples on how integration between designers and developers could be done with the new tools like Blend, showing us the direction in which the new toolset is leading us.

Dependency Injection with Windsor

Ivica Munitić decided to show us the perks of using Windsor in our applications, as well as generally employing IoC and DI while developing.

His overview of Windsor DI container had shown the attendees some of the possibilities that we can employ more easily. Although Ivica’s theme was on the more advance side, he made sure that each attendee grasps the big picture more easily and that they have some concrete takeaway’s after the session.

Team Foundation System - In Practice

During the last session of the day, Srđan Njirić talked about his personal experiences with Team Foundation Server in his company. His session quickly turned into a great discussion on the subject of practices and general experiences in guiding projects and was a great way to finish the technical part of the day.

Srđan once again did a great job in guiding our discussion in the right direction.

The day

The day started once again early at 09:30 AM and lasted long till 19:00 hours PM (a WHOLE day of technical talks, discussions and general fun) after which we’ve closed the event with a BIG raffle in which we gave over 20 prizes to some 30 or 40 attendees that survived the packed Saturday day.

Attendees

Over the course of the day we had up to 50 attendees and as the day were ending that count fall only to some 40 persons. Again our approach to attendee registration has triumphed, showing us that only a small part of the registered attendees did not show up (of some 55 registrations, only 2-3 attendees did not make it to event… which is for a free event IMHO a great accomplishment).

Viewing the attendee demographic profiles we’ve had visitors coming from all parts of Croatia… such towns as Dubrovnik, Zadar, Osijek, Zagreb, Split, etc… thus once more uniting our community under one roof.

Contributors

As previous years, the zero-friction-contributor list got even larger, thus helping us to have a sound background to organize such a good event.

We had divided the contributors in three categories, Gold, Silver and Bronze or Swag ones:

Gold contributors this year included: Microsoft, INETA, Telerik and Nevron

Silver contributors were: RedGate and NETmedia Sistemi

Bronze or Swag ones: LLBLGen Pro and Ekobit

We were especially happy this time around to include some of the more successful Croatian companies like NETmedia Sistemi and Ekobit, and thus expanding the reach of CodeCamp even more on the Croatian IT scene.

Because of the great help from our contributors, we were able to organize a big raffle at the end of the event, handling out 2-3 Vista’s, 2-3 Visual Studio/Windows Server/SQL Server 2008 packages donated by Microsoft, 2 Developer licenses of Controls Suite donated by Telerik, 5 licenses of Nevron User interface for .NET professional and 10 licenses of Nevron Chart for .NET Lite donated by Nevron, 2 licenses of .NET Developer Bundle donated by Red Gate, 2 licenses of LLBLGen Pro from LLBLGen Pro, 2 licenses of TeamCompanion and 1 license of TestManager for TeamEdition donated by Ekobit.

People

I would like to thank the people who have helped me organize this with their efforts:

From the community: Tomislav Bronzin, Siniša Dolinac, Siniša Bencetić, Denis Brulić

From Microsoft: Marin Mamić

Speakers: Ivan Šaškor, Dean Vitner, Bernard Katić, Tomislav Bronzin, Bruno Kovačić, Ivica Munitić and Srđan Njirić

Thank you all, without you – it could not have been done!

Recordings and materials from the sessions

With the help of Siniša Dolinac 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).

This will be done in the following 1-2 weeks pending the editing which will be done by a colleague from my company Siniša Jakelić.
At the same time we will also publish the presentations and other materials from our speakers.

Pictures

As soon as we collect the pictures from the digital cameras (this time around we don’t have that many pictures, but the ones we do together with the videos should help you get a feeling of how good it was J) 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!

It’s interesting to see what people say about the event, interested?

http://live.mscommunity.net/blogs/tbronzin/archive/2007/10/02/codecamp-2007-great-ineta-community-success.aspx

http://cs.rthand.com/blogs/blog_with_righthand/archive/2007/09/27/Speaking-at-CodeCamp-in-Zagreb_2C00_-Croatia.aspx

http://blogs.solidq.com/EN/dsarka/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=871e778d%2D7617%2D45b7%2Da6ce%2D7b8215ed5aea&ID=100

http://live.mscommunity.net/blogs/mc/archive/2007/10/10/codecamp-zagreb.aspx

http://darkojo.bloger.hr/post/codecamp–vikend-za-geekove/410208.aspx

http://blog.roub.net/2007/08/croation_code_camp_sponsorship.html


and with a cheery on top

http://blogs.technet.com/grahamtwatson/archive/2007/10/12/community-done-right.aspx

Then check out my Flickr account with over 100 pics currently available from our three great photographers.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/vladanstrigo/collections/72157602353446506/


A big thanks to:

• Davor Smojver
• Ante Maljkovic
• Ivica Munitic

for taking the pics at the event!

Cheers!

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!

• Datum održavanja: 29.09.2007 (Subota)
• Mjesto održavanja: Zagreb, Microsoft Hrvatska - http://www.microsoft.com/croatia/about/map-zagreb.mspx
• Trajanje događaja: Cijeli dan (09:00 – 19:00)

In Croatian again…


Upravo smo popunili i zadnje mjesto na CodeCampu! Regularne prijave su zatvorene.

Ali ne očajavajte… od danas isto tako otvaramo listu čekanja. Naime, uvijek se dogodi da netko u zadnji tren sazna ne može doći, odjavi se tokom ovog tjedna i slično, iz istog razloga smo krenuli s popunjavanjem liste čekanja i to na način da svi koji su na regularnoj listi prijavljenih imaju prednost dolaska do 30 minuta prije događaja (dakle u vremenu registracije… 08:30 – 09:00). Nakon toga i tokom dana svi ljudi sa liste čekanja nam se mogu pridružiti, popuniti slobodna mjesta, poslušati predavanja, sudjelovati u nagradnoj igri te u potpunosti biti dijelom ovog događaja. Također ukoliko se tokom ovog tjedna dogodi da se još netko od sudionika odjavi sa liste prijavljenih na njegovo (ili njihovo) mjesto ćemo promovirati ljudi s liste čekanja.

Zato prijavite se!

Nekoliko još detalja:

Niste sigurni da li ste na listi čekanja ili na regularnoj listi?

Sigurno možete znati da ste na regularnoj listi ukoliko ste se prijavili prije današnjeg dana (25.09), međutim da budete sigurni mi ćemo u petak, posljednji dan prije događaja kontaktirati i potvrditi mjesto svakome na regularnoj listi prijavljenih, kao i onima koji su na listi čekanja.

Prijavili ste a niste sigurni da ćete uspjeti doći?

Da li ste prijavili na događaj a saznali ste da nam se nećete moći pridružiti? S ciljem pružanja slobodnih mjesta onima koji stvarno mogu stići na događaj molili bih Vas da se odjavite kao korisnik stranica događaja.

http://codecamp.mscommunity.net/

Znate nekoga tko se još nije prijavio? Niste se prijavili?

Iako popunjavamo listu čekanja, još uvijek se možete prijaviti te ukoliko se oslobodi koje mjesto sudjelovati na događaju!

http://codecamp.mscommunity.net/Registracija.aspx

Vidimo se u subotu

In Croatian…

• Datum održavanja: 29.09.2007 (Subota)
• Mjesto održavanja: Zagreb, Microsoft Hrvatska - http://www.microsoft.com/croatia/about/map-zagreb.mspx
• Trajanje događaja: Cijeli dan (09:00 – 19:00)

The cat is out of the bag…

MSCommunity ALLCommunity CodeCamp has been announced once more!


Here is the scoop in English:

http://codecamp.mscommunity.net/English/Overview.aspx

And in case you are a Croatian viewer, the complete site is in Croatian:

http://codecamp.mscommunity.net/


Do join us! More on the content and other neat things this year in future posts!

Cheers!

Last week (well on Saturday) I’ve organized with the help of my friends and sponsors a CodeCamp in Croatia.

Although it was great and the people loved it we had a relatively low turnout. Out of 70 registered people only about 30 people came. Some attribute it to the fact it was on Saturday, others that it was a week before Christmas, but I see it simply as irresponsible. Also as one of the biggest problem with free events… they are FREE; You can basically register for the event, take a place in the list and make a no show without any consequences.

Well enough with the rant. The event itself went really great; we had a complete day of presentations, discussions, etc… at the end of the day we had a hour and a half long discussion about SOA and interoperability (at moments we want so far as to compare our “better” half’s with “messages” in SOA world, and the shoe repair man with the “service” J); Also at the very end of the day we had a “rich” raffle game in which we gave great products from our contributors (INETA, ComponentArt, CodeSmithTools, Telerik, Red-Gate…).


I am also pretty satisfied because I know now which areas to target more next year to make the event even better (e.g. send one week prior a mail to reminder and ask to unregister if someone will not come.)!

For the last few months I’ve been struggling to start the organization of a first CodeCamp in Croatia. In the last few days I’ve been able to confirm finally the office space for the event and publish a call to speakers and call to attendees via an official site for the event.

Suddenly my great expectations for the event are coming together, and my hopes of brining together ~100 people are looking very good!

If you know Croatian languge (on the right part of the site you will find a link to an overview in English) you can find more information on the official site:

http://codecamp.mscommunity.net