Good Job Code Camp
A few weeks ago, I attended 2 sessions of the SoCal Rock & Roll Code Camp at the USCD Extension campus. This is an event I’ve attended before and always enjoyed. This year was no exception, as the event was well organized, the schedule was well communicated and the two presenters I saw were good.
The two sessions I attended were Integrating Silverlight 2.0 into an Existing Web Application and Using ASP.NET MVC to Build a Blogging Engine in 60 Minutes or Less. The Silverlight presentation covered some general ideas on how to take an web application you already have and add Silverlight content to it. In particular, I appreciated that the presenter, Robert Atland, emphasized thinking carefully about where to use Silverlight so it is not just a gimmick, but actually enhances the user experience.
The ASP.NET MVC presentation was more of a mixed bag. I didn’t start my programming career in .NET, instead I started in Java where MVC is a much more common paradigm. So MVC as a concept is not new or difficult for me, especially after spending some time recently with Ruby and Python web frameworks. For ASP.NET MVC, Scott Gu provides a brief overview here.
However, a lot of the attendees were new to MVC and used to .NET’s postback model. I think this tripped up Adnan Masood, the presenter, and he spent most of the session valiantly trying to explain the Model View Controller architecture, as well as defend the idea that anything could be better than the postback model. Nevertheless, I thought he did a good job and the ASP.NET MVC framework is worth checking out.
More recently, somewhat inspired by this positive experience, I attended a user group meeting for a non .NET language and had quite a different experience. There is no point in me going into great detail, but the group, although full of what seemed to be very nice people, was incredibly disjointed and vague in it is direction. Almost no content was presented and no particular agenda was followed.
I was more excited about the content I thought would be presented at that user group than the content at the code camp, but the code camp was a far more satisfying experience. So kudos to the folks at the SoCal code camp; it is tough to carve out time outside of work for activities like this and they made me feel like my effort was more than reciprocated.