A poll at the beginning showed that most people in attendance had done some sort of web development, about a third had done ASP.NET development, and 2 people had worked with ASP.NET MVC. The most challenging thing was that almost everybody was unfamiliar with the MVC pattern. And yet again I learned the difference between a master and a wanna-be. A master can take complex principles and concepts and express them in a simple form that people can immediately understand. I, on the other hand, cannot. I seemed to struggle with getting the “core concepts” of ASP.NET MVC across in a way that was clear and unambiguous.

I’ve created a slideshare presentation with the slides. It’s an overview, and I only had time to cover a few aspects of it, but I’m still sure I was off on a few concepts – if you notice something, leave a comment so I can learn!

Here links to various MVC resources to get you started with ASP.NET MVC:

- Download ASP.NET MVC from Codeplex
- MVCContrib – community contributions/extensions to ASP.NET MVC
- CodeCampServer – a slightly-out-of-date-but-still-good reference implementation
- Official ASP.NET MVC site (lots of links to resources)
- ASP.NET MVC Forums – a lot of questions asked and answers given
- ScottGu’s MVC posts
- Phil Haack is the ASP.NET MVC Program Manager
- Stephen Walther has done many posts on ASP.NET MVC
- Blog posts tagged “aspnetmvc” on Technorati

Hope to see you there! The event sold out quickly, but in my experience you can still get in if you show up the morning of the event. If you’re there, come over and say hi!

Unfortunately, we’ve been without power at our home since 10PM last Friday night due to storms and tornados. Not only is the power out in our area of the city, but a big tree fell on our specific power lines, ripping everything away from the house. So the weekend has been spent calling utility companies, contractors, waiting, and reading. Our family lives far away, so we’ve really appreciated our friends who have welcomed us into their homes, shared their meals with us, and let us type blog posts from their laptops. (Thanks Shawn!)

If you’re going to TechEd and want to meet up, drop me an email at aaronlerch at gmail or tweet me on twitter. I’ll be at Party with Palermo on Monday night.

See you in Orlando!

I’ve put in a reservation with Champps for an after-party. We’ll be going Dutch, and would love to have everybody join us! We’ll be announcing the after-party at the event, so if you’re attending, please RSVP with me at that time so I can call ahead and make sure they can handle the frickin’ huge crowd that will be coming.

Also, I think we’re still in need of a few volunteers to help with registrations in the morning. If you’re willing and able to arrive bright and early at 7AM (-ish), leave a comment here.

See you on Saturday! If I haven’t met you and you’re coming, make sure to find me and say hi.

We’ve got room for a maximum of 250 people, and I can tell you that the registration list is filling up – so hurry up and register if you are even thinking about coming.

I’m also working to organize a fairly informal “after party” at the local sports bar – leave a comment here if you would be interested in coming. I need to gauge a general interest level.

See you there!

We’ve had a lot of good submissions already. This promises to be a good event full of great content. And don’t forget the door prizes!

Sign up to present, or just register to attend and support the local community of software developers! See you there.

• NCover
• VisualSVN
• NDepend
• Xceed Ultimate Suite
• Red Gate .NET Developer Bundle
• Telerik control suite
• Books, books, and more books

Keep in mind that we will be giving away multiple copies of nearly all of the items in that list. A rough estimate of the total value is $8800. Eight thousand dollars worth of software! Amazing.

In case you’re curious, each of our “door prize” donors get their name listed on the Indy Code Camp website, and get their product (or a license certificate) displayed on the door prize table. And that’s it. Other than that, they’re doing this out of the goodness of their hearts! Ahem, yeah, sure. Goodness of heart or marketing, it could be either.

Do you have a product that you’d like to see be given away at the event? Leave a comment here or contact me and let me know, and I’ll see what I can do.

It’s my pleasure to announce that the Indy Code Camp is officially scheduled for Saturday, April 26th, 2008.

I’m also happy to announce our call for speakers. We welcome all session proposals, for any technology or language. I know the local Ruby and Java user groups have expressed interest in participating. I’m hoping this will be a very well rounded, very deep technical event. No marketing fluff. Just code. Register to attend, and submit a session proposal!

The number of sessions will depend on the number of proposals we receive, but we have the capacity to handle up to about 4×6 == 24 sessions, each 70-minutes long. That’s room for a ton of great content.

I’ve been working on the CodeCampServer open source ASP.NET MVC project with hopes we’d have something functional ready, but alas it didn’t materialize in time. Next year… I’d like to give a shout out to Dave Leininger for getting the current site up and running quickly. And also to the Indy .NET Developer’s Association folks for being willing to work with me to make this event a reality.

See you on April 26th!

Technorati Tags: codecamp, indianapolis, events

XO is built from free and open-source software. Our commitment to software freedom gives children the opportunity to use their laptops on their own terms. While we do not expect every child to become a programmer, we do not want any ceiling imposed on those children who choose to modify their machines. We are using open-document formats for much the same reason: transparency is empowering. The children—and their teachers—will have the freedom to reshape, reinvent, and reapply their software, hardware, and content.

Look at the software and tools they’re exposing on the laptop. It’s a smorgasbord of modern languages (Python and Javascript) and applications (RSS reader, VOIP client). And it includes the kitchen sink: a debugger.

We are using components from Red Hat’s Fedora Core 6 version of the Linux operating system; we are tracking the main kernel fairly closely.

We will support five programming environments on the laptop: (1) Python, from which we have built our user interface and our activity model; (2) Javascript for browser-based scripting; (3) Csound, a programmable music and audio environment; (4) Squeak, a version of Smalltalk embedded into a media-rich authoring environment; and (5) Logo. We will also provide some support for Java and Flash.

Applications will include a web browser built on Xulrunner, the run-time environment used by the Firefox browser; a simple document viewer based upon Evince; the AbiWord wordprocessor, an RSS reader, an email client, chat client, VOIP client; a journal; a multimedia authoring and playback environment; a music composition toolkit, graphics toolkits, games, a shell, and a debugger.

Libraries and plugins used by OLPC include Xul, GTK+, Matchbox, Sugar, Pango, ATK, Cairo, X Window System, Avahi, and gstreamer.

I’m impressed by the capabilities of the little green machine, but I’m skeptical as to how much of its capabilities a 3rd world student will actually make use of. But really it doesn’t matter. Getting this in the hands of impoverished children (and their families and parents!) will give them books, encyclopedias, a video camera, drawing pads, etc. Stuff that will both educate and inspire creativity. It’s already having a positive impact in Peru. Maybe a small percentage of them will delve deeper into the guts of the machine itself (you can pull up a linux shell ), but that’s not the main intent.

Here’s the best news: you have until December 31st to buy one of these for an underprivileged child in another country with the Give One Get One program. And, as the name implies, you buy one for yourself also. We purchased one when the program started, and received it fairly quickly. We’re giving ours to some friends with small children who live in a poor part of Angola (Africa), so we were able to have both laptops used for a good cause (and we got to play with one before we sent it off ).

But you (like most folk) will probably keep the one you get – and good for you! My daughter Hannah played with the XO nearly the entire time we had it out of the packaging, and I was amazed at how quickly she picked up using it, and how it captivated her attention so thoroughly. I wish we could’ve kept one. There’s already a growing body of enthusiasts here in the US. (Chat with them on your XO via Jabber.)

The XO (and more specifically the One Laptop Per Child program) got a 9-year old’s seal of approval, and it gets mine as well. Do a good thing and send one to someone who needs it today! Considering how relatively cheap it is to us compared to how valuable (and out of reach) it is to them, how can you not?

If you do anything with web services you should check out REST and the WCF web programming model. Check out my article on developer.com (using the Beta 2 bits) on just that!

Good times…

Oh, and here’s a fuzzy image of me playing Dan Rigsby in Guitar Hero.

Update: Jeremy Mann posted a detailed visual overview of the event – it really gives you a feel for what it was like. Thanks Jeremy!