The Day

Since it was the very first CodeCamp organized by MS Forge community we were a bit frightened but when we saw almost 100 people in the Vuk Karadžić Theater early in the morning on Saturday, 31th October 2009 it turns out that audience gave us a very pleasant surprise!

We had six sessions, few coffee breaks and a lunch. Sessions started at 9:00 in the morning and lasted until half pas six. At the end of the day we draw prizes and closed the event.

You can read event review from one of the attendees (in Serbian)

Attendees

At first we planned  to organize small event for up to 50 attendees but as it turns out we had more than 100 registrations few hours after http://codecamp.msforge.net was up and running. Initially, we planned to send two or three event reminders to increase number of attendees but we decided against it because we just was not prepared to host so many attendees… this time :)

We had approximately 90 people present throughout the day with 70 people present at closing session and prize draw

Content

We had six sessions

1. SQL Server 2008 Data Warehousing (and beyond), Arian Stipić (MS Regional Director)

2. jQuery tips&tricks, Janko Jovanović

3. Report Builder 2.0, Dragoslav Ogar (MVP)

4. Microsoft Silverlight 3.0, Danijel Štulić

5. Agile Software Development with Visual Studio, Bojan Jovičić

6. WPF in business applications, Rastko Čolić i Ivan Pavlović (MVP)

The event begin with short opening ceremony. Tomislav Bronzin gave a short overview of INETA and community activities in region. Srđan Božović presented speakers and topics and Ivan Pavlović presented driving ideas behind CodeCamp and past activities of MS Community in Serbia.

Contributors

Gold contributors are Microsoft Serbia, INETA Europe and Microsoft User Group Support Services

Bronze contributors are jetBrains (2 x ReSharper i 2 x dotTrace), Red Gate (shirts, usb’s, pencils), LLBL Gen (2 x LLBL Gen Pro), Nevron (10x Nevron Chart for .NET Lite), NCover (2 x Pro), Telerik (1 x Telerik Premium Collection), Sampro (a lot of nice hardware), Ekobit(5 x TeamCompanion-a 5 x TeamCompanion shirts) and EUNet (web site hosting)

People

There were a lot of people who made this CodeCamp possible. We would like to thank to

• Zlatko Knežević from Microsoft and Tomislav Bronzin from INETA Europe for financial and organizational support
• Vladan Strigo, Dean Vitner, Bernardin Katić, Jerislav Bobić, Ivan Šaškor and all others from Croatian Microsoft Community for huge support and transfer of User Group and Code Camp how-tos :)
• contributors from jetBrains, Red Gate, LLBL Gen, Nevron, NCover, Telerik, Sampro, Ekobit and EUNet
• Nela, Bojana and Miloš from InVitto for great logistic support

The last but not the least, to all the MS Forgers how woke up early in the Saturday morning to take part in this event!

It would not be possible to make such a great event without all of you! Thank you!!!

Changes for the next CodeCamp

We carefully reviewed all survey and learned a lot from it:

- Content must be community-driven. It means that we will post ‘available’ topics and community members will vote for those topics. Topics with the highest score will make it to the CodeCamp

- All session will be limited to exactly 60 minutes. Another 15 minutes after each session will be scheduled for discussion only.

- Organize at least two Flipchart sessions – no slides, no projector , only talk

- We will prepare all speakers to

• Present live code in Visual Studio whenever possible
• Use ZoomIt / Win+ when showing code

- Increase media coverage and announce event in all major computer related media at lease one month in advance

- Change the way swag’s are drawn at the end of the event in order to deliver serials quicker

If you have any more comments feel free to send comments to http://msforge.net/forums/30.aspx

Pictures

Some of the pictures are posted on Facebook. You do NOT need Facebook account to view it

Marks

We had a event survey with marks ranged from 1 (bad) to 5 (excellent). So , here are the results

Final Mark is 4,66 out of 5 :)

Next time we will try to make it just a little bit better :)

The most common suggestions for the next CodeCamp are

• More practical and code examples
• Stick to the timetable
• Increase session time
• Use larger canvas for projector
• Workshops
• Organize it again

Thanks!

See you on the MSForge CodeCamp 2010