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:
- Web Camps Training Kit – we’ll be giving you all the content from the Web Camps in just a couple of weeks from now
- 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!
- Web Camps and content for Web Matrix
- 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!