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 Code Camp 2008.1 on January 12, 2008 was, in my opinion, the best Code Camp Philly.Net has ever had. This is supported by the comments of many of our attendees. We are very grateful to DeVry University  in Fort Washington, PA for hosting this event. Their top-notch facility really made the day special for the crowd of around 350 people. Not only did DeVry generously allow us to use their campus for Code Camp, but they had staff on hand to help out and make the day great. It was really nice working with them. Also a special thanks to all of the Philly.Net members who helped out setting up Code Camp!
Too long a blog post? Click to read about Partners, Prizes, Sessions, Feedback
Our Partners: Code Camp is only possible thanks to our many partners. Special thanks to our local Microsoft Developer Evangelist , Dani Diaz, for year round support. And we definitely appreciate the support of our other Partners: ComponentOne, Infragistics, Neudesic, RDA, RedGate, CodeBreeze, Spherion and Solid Quality Mentors. It was great working with them all to make this such a successful event. It was especially fun meeting some of our partners that were on hand for Code Camp. If you enjoyed Code Camp, I hope you’ll support all our Partners. Click on their logos for more information.
  
Prizes: I’d also like to thank our Prize Contributors. While we all attend Code Camp for the great sessions, everyone loves the prizes and giveaways that our partners provide. Of course, the XBOX-360 from Red-Gate was a big hit. Plus we gave away a ton of other prizes including books and software. We've continued our tradition of spreading out the prizes throughout the day. Each speaker gets a bag of stuff including a book, a shirt, and a water bottle to give away during each session. |
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Sessions:
We had an unprecedented 50 sessions at Code Camp! That included a wide variety of presentation topics split into 8 
tracks: Alt.Net, BI, Database, Toolbox, Architecture, Collaboration, Frameworks, and UI. With presenters with names from Andrews to Ziss presenting a huge variety of topics including: ASP.Net, Silverlight, Databinding, LINQ, TDD, AJAX, SQL Server, MVC, Katmai, Spring.Net, BizTalk, WCF, IIS 7, Visual Studio, Powershell, Sharepoint, Continuous Integration, Refactoring, Dependency Injection, Reporting Services, T-SQL, Mobile, InfoPath, SubSonic, Exception Handling and more.
For a full list of presentations, check out this list.
It would have been hard to gather this amount of speakers with the help of several other groups in our area:
PhillyAlt.Net
Philadelphia Area Office Geeks
Philadelphia SQL Server Users’ Group
Northern Delaware .Net User Group
Philadelphia Area SharePoint User Group
Feedback:
I'd like to share some of the feedback that we got from Code Camp. We got high marks and praises from most of our guests I've included a very small sample below. In addition, some people pointed out a few areas for improvement. I tend to agree with a lot of them. This was a great event and we'll get it even better next time.
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Some of the General Comments
First time to code camp – classrooms worked great. No technical glitches – excellent job. Speakers were able to get up and rolling on time.
Great job! Great Code Camp! I love Code Camp.
Great Location!
Good event, venue and speakers. Would definitely attend future Code Camps.
Overall, this is an excellent venue to get exposed to new tools and ideas. I’m glad the Alt.Net group was included, I think they have a lot to offer, a little unpolished, but that’s cool too. Great!
Great event. Will certainly attend another.
Some of the Presentation Comments
Great speaker, great info. Content “From the horse’s mouth”!
No Slides, all Code, awesome.
This guy was top notch.
Did a great job, especially considering the huge turnout.
Very engaging, dynamic, animated speaker.
Loved it! Superb!!
Really good topic w/very pragmatic approach… will be very useful to me.
Very useful and tightly focused. Speaker was excited about the idea and it shows.
Phenomenal session.
Very useful, Can’t wait to try this out.
A Few Suggestions for Improvement (my comments in [Brackets])
Just need more people to help register – great problem to have at a Code Camp… too many people! Good job. [Yeah, we'll get that one right next time.]
What, no internet connections? [Unfortunately, DeVry did not have Internet access for us to use. Maybe we can work something out for next time. ]
Need larger rooms for some talks. [A good problem to have! Many other conferences have a first come, first served approach like this]
No confirmation until 2 days prior to event. [I agree we should work on that one]
Birds Of a Feather – Good idea, not enough room. [We might need to rethink how we do BOF. Maybe a longer lunch would help?]
Keep coffee running throughout day please. More veggie food please. Overall awesome event. Thanks to all organizers. [The Veggie Food went pretty quick, sorry about that. Unfortunately, our Coffee Maker broke pretty early in the day. Luckily DeVry had a Coffee in the vending area]
More cookies! [They sure were good! I agree.]
Another 5 minutes between sessions would be good. [I like that idea too]
Some speakers too quiet. [This was obviously more of a problem during the really crowded sessions. Maybe we can look into some microphones.] |
 
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*Thanks to Melanie Wright from DeVry and our own Mark Magliocco for providing the photos.