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.

The Web Camp in Los Angeles was a great success last Friday with Phil Haack, Jon Galloway and myself imparting a raft of knowledge on ASP.NET MVC 2, jQuery, Entity Framework Code-first, ASP.NET MVC 3 and Razor.  However, there’s little time to pat ourselves on the back – because this week marks the launch of the September Edition of the Web Camps Training Kit! 

Online and available as a download

The previous version of the Web Camps Training Kit was only available as a download, but we listened to your feedback and are now publishing it online too!  Choose your flavor below:

 Browse the content online

 Download it Now

What’s new in the Web Camps Training Kit - September edition?

The goal for Web Camps is to provide great training events and an accompanying Training Kit so that web developers have thing they can rely to build websites and apps on the Microsoft Web Platform.  To be a complete web developer, you have to understand many different types of technology, not just the server side.  You also need to know technologies like jQuery, OData and when/how to leverage Web Apps like Umbraco, Kentico, DotNetNuke and more.  As things move so fast, you’ll also need to keep in touch with the latest developments in HTML 5 and how to take advantage of them in the websites you build.

So, in the September edition we are starting to introduce some new technologies areas that help you to keep on the cutting edge.  This is only the beginning and in future editions we will be constantly adding to future versions of the Training Kit.  Here are some new things I would like to highlight:

1. jQuery
   
   Working with the .appendTo() team we’ve put together 3 jQuery sessions with presentations, demo scripts and source code.  This content covers some of the fundamentals of jQuery and then extends using Ajax as well as jQuery Templates and jQuery UI.
   
2. IE 9 & HTML 5
   
   With the IE9 Beta just out the door, we’ve provided you some presentations on how to develop on IE9 as well as some of the enhancements the team have made on performance.  This is useful background material and we’ll be following this up with more content in the next release.
   
3. ASP.NET MVC 2
   
   The ASP.NET MVC 2 content has been refreshed and we’re now basing all the content off the MVC Music Store.  There are presentations, labs and demo scripts that walk you through build the site and we’ve also provided a bonus lab on how to start adding Tests to the project.
   
4. Web Apps
   
   The beauty of Web Apps are that they install really easily and they get you to 80% of a completed solution with little effort.  You can customize and tweak them the rest of the way for your own requirements to build complete solutions for customers is no time at all.  In this release we’ve teamed up with Umbraco, Kentico and DotNetNuke to provide presentations, videos and labs for you to get started building solutions.
   
5. OData
   
   OData is the new standards-based web protocol for querying and updating data.  If you are writing an API for your website, it’s worth seeing how you can leverage OData to give developers a clean and familiar way to access your data.  Or, if you are interested in consuming one of the many OData services out there then there are a bunch of SDKs out there to get started in your language.  We provide an intro presentation into OData with more content coming soon to help you learn the programming syntax.

Phew – there’s lots of new content in this release and it’s been fun pulling it all together.  We’ll continue to add more as well as update existing pieces as they become out of date.  Of course, if you have feedback we’d love to here it – please get in contact here.

Don’t forget about the events – you can get expert training by registering for a Web Camp here.  We will be releasing a raft of new event dates very soon.  We are going large – stay tuned!

Today, we are releasing the Web Camps Training Kit: July 2010 Edition – Download it here.

The kit includes all the content we presented around the world at the recent Web Camps events; presentations, demos, labs and more.  Inside the new kit you’ll find content that covers the following technologies:

• ASP.NET MVC 2
• ASP.NET 4 Web Forms
• jQuery
• Entity Framework
• Visual Studio 2010
• Deployment

We’ve also included the agenda so if you want to run your own Web Camp with some of our content, you can do that. Let the team know if you are planning to run your own – we’ll help get the word out (webcamps [at] microsoft.com).

As a bonus we’ve also included scenario based content which comes in the form of complimentary slides, demos, demo scripts and hands-on-labs.  These scenarios show you how to take your own web application from an idea and prototype all the way to getting more visitors and optimizing for performance using the Microsoft Web Platform and other technologies from Microsoft.

• Prototyping Your Web App
• Building Your Web App
• Enhancing Your Web App
• Getting More Visitors to your Web App
• Optimizing Your Web App for High Performance

We are going to be adding new scenarios as well as fresh content covering the latest on WebMatrix, ASP.NET MVC, Entity Framework, jQuery and more as well as brand new Web Camps!  Stay tuned!  Again, we’re open to hearing your feedback and requests – if there is anything you would like to see in the next version of the training kit, let us know (webcamps [at] microsoft.com).

Download the Web Camps Training Kit!

Over the past 3 months we’ve visited 12 cities across the world delivering free training and fun on the Microsoft Web Platform.  It’s been an awesome experience to see so many talented and passionate developers, from universities, startups, large businesses across the globe – all learning to build cool web apps on the Microsoft Web Platform. 

On Day 1, everyone got to hear about the latest developments in ASP.NET including a tour of ASP.NET 4 Web Forms, ASP.NET MVC 2, Entity Framework, Visual Studio 2010, Deployment and jQuery.  There was a lot to cover in one day and we’ll be looking at how we can slim the content down a little bit so we can drill into more details on the most popular sections.

On Day 2, the building day, people have been building some really cool applications in teams – it’s amazing to see what you can build in one day with a group of people that you have never met before!  Some of the applications that stood out for me were:

• Shopaholic (Redmond Web Camp) – these guys knew how to leverage existing code! They used all the components of the Microsoft Web Platform including MVC 2 and EF nicely.  They also worked really efficiently in their team and got a hell of a lot accomplished
• Ontario Fast Ball (Toronto Web Camp) – father and daughter put together a website for their local softball league using Web PI and DotNetNuke. Great to see how they put this together with no prior programming experience. 
• Online Chat Room (Shanghai Web Camp) – created by a group of three this was entirely based in jQuery and used the new templating engine that Microsoft has been working on with the jQuery core team – impressive having chats across the network with other Web Campers!
• Calendaring (Mountain View Web Camp) – the team put together a really nice web app based in MVC that integrated lots of social networking APIs, iCal and Bing Maps.
• Noisy Neighbor (Sydney Web Camp) – a web app to register pesky neighbors. This app made great use of ASP.NET MVC 2, Bing Maps with drag and drop pins, WCF and a Script Manager for generating proxy classes (from Telerik)

In all there were around 80 applications built at the Web Camps and the list above is just a small sample of the cool stuff people were building!

Some things to look out for in the coming weeks:

1. Web Camps Training Kit – we’ll be giving you all the content from the Web Camps in just a couple of weeks from now
2. More Web Camps! We’ll be announcing new dates for Web Camps very soon – we’re just planning where we should go first!  Sneaky hint – we are going BIG!
3. Web Camps and content for Web Matrix
4. New Web Camps website – time for a remodel, we’ll be launching in a couple of weeks

If you would like Web Camps to come to your city then leave me a comment on this post – we are listening!