Liam McLennan

November 2010 Entries

Code Camp Oz 2010

Each year for the last seven Wagga Wagga hosts the annual Code Camp Oz. It is the largest community .NET conference in Australia.

For reasons I don’t understand the organisers choose to hold ccoz in Wagga; a location that is inconvenient to everyone. My preferred technique to get there is to fly to Canberra and drive a hire car to Wagga. This year I took advantage of some time in Canberra to catch up with a friend and then work on my presentation, before heading to Wagga Friday night.

IMG_7131 Aaron Powell kicked things off Saturday morning with a flying tour of .NET open source CMS platforms. The day was dominated by marathon efforts from Omar Besiso and Steven Nagy.

First Sunday morning was Alex Mackey. The presentation was enjoyable, but the message was depressing. HTML 5 is not going to make my job easier.

Pizza arrived early, bumping my session to 1pm. I had already determined that I had to leave at 2pm to get the hire car back in time so the new schedule didn’t leave a lot of margin. I spoke about BDD with Story Q. There were a lot of good questions and discussion so hopefully some people might get some ideas from it.

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Windows Phone 7 Startup Camp

IMAG0049 I have mentioned before that I own an Android phone. But I can drive a car and still be interested in motor bikes – and so it was that I spend my weekend at the Brisbane Windows Phone 7 Startup Camp.

The event schizophrenically mixed the startup camp idea (create a new business in a weekend) with the new Windows Phone 7 technology. Over the weekend 7 teams built 7 apps, forming the basis of 7 new businesses. It doesn’t get much more biblical than that.

IMAG0050 Things began on Friday, with an optional training day delivered by Nick Randolph. Since I’m a web guy with no phone or silverlight experience I made sure to attend the training and try to learn something. Nick did his best to try and teach us web guys, who don’t know our StackPanel from our xaml.

Saturday was focused on choosing an idea and building something. My team, Paul Mckee, Tod Thomson and me, built a TV Guide application for the Windows Phone 7. We laughed, we cried, we coded long into the afternoon. Then we went to the pub.

Sunday morning the teams started with renewed enthusiasm and redoubled efforts. We finished our applications and then turned our attention to crafting sophisticated presentations to pitch our products to the judging panel. After the pitches the judges chose a worthy winner – then we went to the pub.

THE TV GUIDE