Official Code Camp Photographer

nolanzak         Friday, January 30 2009         No Comments

We are lucky enough to have an official photographer for this year’s code camp. My colleague Pia Gronqvist is a fantastic photographer, and she has agreed to spend the day wandering around the code camp with her trusty camera taking pictures of the festivities of the day.

Pia has started putting some of her photographs online, you can see samples here:

http://picasaweb.google.ca/pia.gronqvist

Coffee provider for the code camp

nolanzak         Tuesday, January 20 2009         No Comments

A local distributor of the “Barista Supremo Espresso Coffee machine”, a high-quality, gourmet, fresh ground and brewed Espresso style coffee and hot beverage vending machine, is going to sponsor the code camp by providing free espresso coffee and hot beverages during the day.

They have the following drinks/flavours:

- Americano

- Americano with milk

- Coffee Latte

- Cappuccino

- Mochaccino

- Hot Chocolate

- French Vanilla

 

This should go a long way in keeping us all caffeinated for the day. As usual there are also vending machines with water and pop in the ECS lobby.

First Day – 27 Registrations!

nolanzak         Tuesday, January 20 2009         No Comments

In the first 24 hours we’ve had 27 registrations for the code camp, great turnout so far.

Don’t forget to pass the word on to your friends and co-workers, registrations will be accepted up until the evening of Feb 6th.

Learning CRUD and Data Forms in Silverlight 2

kencox         Saturday, January 17 2009         No Comments

 

Not much stuck with me from years of Latin in high school, but the motto “Docendo discimus” has always served me well. “We learn by teaching” expresses one of my motivations for writing tutorials and creating presentations on the latest technologies. The best way for me to grasp Silverlight 2 was to commit to an article or talk and then jump in head first to start figuring it out.
 
The ‘sink or swim’ approach leads to another observation: when a product is new, and documentation is sparse, what you need to know before you can do something, you learn by doing it. In other words, you muddle through and end up with valuable knowledge that you can share.
I was fascinated by the possibility of using Silverlight 2 as an alternative to ASP.NET business applications. The examples I found were either incomplete (didn’t actually save data) or over-engineered to be incomprehensible (by me, at least). So, I decided to build my own prototype. That’s what I’m presenting at the Code Camp.
 
The demo is a small, but realistic example of how to create a CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) application against the familiar Northwind database. It uses the latest stuff from Microsoft including Windows Communication Foundation, ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria), and the Entity Framework. 
Note to language bigots: I wrote the sample and talk in Visual Basic. There were several reasons: I’m more comfortable in VB (although I write lots of C#); there’s a dearth of sample code in VB; and people who write only in C# don’t need beginner-level content because they already know everything. <grin>
 
Anyway, I hope you’ll attend my Code Camp session to judge for yourself whether Silverlight 2 is ready for a business application. I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts.
 
Ken
Microsoft MVP [ASP.NET]

RSS Feed for this site

nolanzak         Monday, January 05 2009         1 Comment

The RSS feed for this blog is located at:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/VictoriaCodeCamp

 

Please pass it along to anyone who may be interested!

First Post

nolanzak         Monday, January 05 2009         No Comments

Welcome to the 2009 version of the Victoria Camp Blog!