Web Camp is a Microsoft hosted web development coding camp with presentations on current Microsoft technologies and coding practices. They offer one and two day camps which cover different topics from HTML5 to WebMatrix. The topics for the web camp I attended were ASP.NET MVC3, and the jQuery javascript library. You can check for locations and topics for upcoming web camps here.
Preperation – After registering for the event, there are several things you can do prior to the actual camp in preperation. The first thing to do is install Visual Studio Web Dev Express, and Web Matrix from the Web Platform Installer found here. Don't forget to check that you also have the .NET and MVC3 libraries installed as well. Next, if you are unfamiliar with MVC, you can download the Web Camp Training Kit and walk through some of the introductory labs to get a loose grasp of the fundamental concepts.
ASP.NET MVC3 Fundamentals – Walking into the conference room with my limited web development experience compared to all the other working professionals in the room was pretty intimidating, but then we had the ASP.NET MVC3 Fundamentals presentation! Michael Palermo's presentation on MVC3 Fundamentals brought me up to speed on MVC as a programming model, as well as Visual Studio's own implementation of the MVC3 framework. Building his registration application on stage really showed how these introductory concepts are used in practice.
HTML Helpers and Validation – After going over some of the fundamentals, Dan Waters took over to cover some more advanced topics such as HTML helpers and Validation. Dan walked us through the creation of his own example project, an account management system, while explaining more advanced data access and modeling techniques.
jQuery Fundementals – This talk was a nice short introduction to most of the great element selection and manipulation features of jQuery. As a veteran jQuery user, I was pleasantly surprised to learn about a few new features of jQuery that are currently in Beta. The first new feature is called Templating, a feature similar to creating templates in XAML, for those of you who're more familiar with the .NET framework. The second feature is Data Linking, a Javascript implementation of binding fields of one object to fields of another object, also known as data binding in the .NET world.
jQuery, Odata & MVC – This presentation featured a walk through of a very cool Netflix project by Doris Chen. She goes over how to leverage Netlix's Odata service in order to grab movie and television data, template the data in a nice layout using jQuery, and even how to get developer codes from Netflix allowing you to play the movie right there from your own application!
Labs – The above presentations last until a little past lunch, the rest of the time is used for hands on lab work. You can pick and choose between beginner labs (mvc3, mvc3 with razor), and advanced labs (mvc and jquery), or even work on your own projects. They have plenty of staff there to give hints and answer questions.
Summary – Overall Web Camp was really fun and a great experience. I would definitely recommend this for anyone who's tired of hacking their projects together (like me), and wants to make that move to a consistent programming pattern. It's a great opportunity to work, and make friends with other professionals in your area.
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