Sunday, April 6, 2008 7:53 AM
And so the Twin Cities Code Camp came to an end yesterday, and Jason and his team did a phenomenal job once again. The turnout was even higher than last year, and the presentations and speakers were a who's-who of talent from Minnesota and the surrounding states.
I was able to connect with a few new faces, like Javier Lozano, Chris Sutton, Bryan Sampica, and Chris Johnson, among many others. It was a great community event.
My afternoon presentation on Developing ASP.NET with MVC without the MVC Framework went really good. I had a small group so we went discussion over power-point/code, and had more of a white-board talk around struggles, frustrations, and successes with developing with ASP.NET.
The main thing that kept coming out was this idea of how the Windows-style of development in ASP.NET has produced a generation of web developers that don't understand the underlying workings of web applications...which has contributed to apps that are unmaintainable, untestable, and bloated. The MVC Framework is *not* the solution to this, although it is a tool we can leverage. The bigger issues are around communicating best practices, educating on the pillars of the net (HTTP Protocol, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS), and teaching how ASP.NET actually works. Otherwise, we don't really have true web developers...we just have IDE developers who know how to drag and drop.
K, off my soapbox. Here are some pics:
Pic from my podium during my morning session.
The speaker lounge...
The prize givaways at the end of the day. This was just nuts. A quick rundown from what I remember: approx 10 APress books, approx 10 Wrox books, more books from a few other publishers, three backpacks, t-shirts, some Think Geek stuff, jump drives, about 10 free software bundles from companies like Infragistics and others, 22" flat panel LCD monitor, PSP, XBox 360 bundle with Rockband, another Rockband, 4 $50 GC's for Circuit City, and two VB 6.0 books that Jason wrote back in the day (he always gives something of himself ;) ). I'm sure I missed some stuff too...
The after-party at Major's...it was pretty busy...something about a college basketball game that was on or something...
D