James Senior's Blog

"This was the best training I've ever had, this was even more useful than TechEd" – Gabriel Cruz

Last Friday, Phil Haack, Jon Galloway and I ventured to Los Angeles to deliver a Web Camp at the downtown Microsoft office. 

Photo – “What do you mean you drive on the other side of the road in the USA?”

Agenda and Content

After we got to the venue safely, we delivered an agenda on the following topics:

• ASP.NET MVC 2 Fundamentals
• Entity Framework (including a sneak peak of code-first)
• Validation, Localization
• ASP.NET MVC + jQuery, jQuery Templating, jQuery Globalization
• ASP.NET MVC 3 and Razor

NEWS – You can now get the Web Camps Training Kit – September Edition!  This includes much of the content we covered at the event.  (note – we don’t have jQuery Glob or MVC 3 content, yet – that’s coming in November).

Feedback and areas for Improvement

Feedback from the event was great with average scores really high:

• Overall Eval Score: 8 out of 9
• Overall Instructor Score: 8.8 out of 9

This is what people told us about the event:

• “Love the flexible agenda”
• “One big advantage of the training is to learn first hand the trends in the industry and be able to direct appropriate amount of resources toward training and tools.”
• “The course was great. As a web forms developer, I was particularly interested in learning more about MVC 2 and 3 and this course provided a huge amount of information. Not only was I able to see how sites can be created using MVC, but just by watching the instructors write code in Visual Studio I was able to learn tips and coding shortcuts that I didn't know about before, and that will help me work more efficiently in the future.”
• Great course. Even better that the price was free.
• “Were the presenters good? It was friggen Phil Haack, Jon Galloway, and James Senior. They were great.”

There’s always areas for improvement, from what you said we need to work on some things for next time:

• Make sure we have time for labs
  • Yes – we overran slightly due to questions but next time we’ll try and leave more time for hands-on building instead of doing the extra ASP.NET MVC 3 session
• Get the wifi working
  • We hear you.  It’s always hard because we can’t control the venue and piping in dedicated broadband is super expensive.
• Make sure the content is available at the event or on the website
  • Yes – due to timing the Web Camps Training Kit September Edition wasn’t available, that shouldn’t be an issue moving forward

We are on the cusp of releasing more dates for even more Web Camps, around the world. I’m very excited about this and I’ll have more news on this very soon! For all the information make sure you follow @jsenior or @webcamps on Twitter and check the www.webcamps.ms website.

On the 1st of June I had the pleasure of giving a talk at the Remix conference in Melbourne, Australia on the Microsoft/jQuery contribution story and the new Templating engine that were announced at Mix10 in Las Vegas earlier this year. This conference punctuated the Web Camps world tour that I’ve been on and was a welcome break to enjoy someone else running a big event :-)  I loved the widescreen, colorful slide template they gave me to use and the “love the web” theme for the conference was definitely running high through the attendees.  I overheard someone say that half the attendees were non-microsoft developers which was great to see as many of the talks were on open source, geo-location, HTML5 and other topics that were useful for all developers. 

One of the things I try to stress in my talk is the contribution model that Microsoft are using when making contributions to jQuery.  It’s the same as everyone else.  We are behaving as any other member of the jQuery community does – i.e. propose a new feature, spec it out and then build a prototype – all out in the open on jQuery’s forums and Github.  The community have been brilliant to work with. There is no shortage of enthusiasm, feedback, suggestions, code branches and more – it’s been great to see.  Here is the slide that I use to describe the contribution model, where examples of cool stuff are templating, data-linking and Cool Stuff ++ are features that the core team library deem essential enough to include in the jQuery core library – in the future.

Below are the slides for the talk and you’ll see the code from the demo in my next post.  They will also be releasing the video of the talk soon – I’ll let you know when that’s out too. Cheers and enjoy!