Boise Code Camp 2013 Recap

Last Saturday, we had the 7th annual Boise Code Camp which was held at Boise State University.  With over 60 sessions, 54 speakers from 5 different states, over 400 attendees, and 10.5 hours of community, this was one hell of an event.

 

It all started on Friday March 15th at the Fuddruckers in Boise with the speaker dinner.  This is where all the organizers, volunteers, and speakers get together to hang out and relax before the big show.  If you are involved in a code camp, you know all about stuffing the attendee bags.  Well, we put our speakers and volunteers to work by forming a line and stuffing the attendee bags with all the goodies.  All 475 of them.  It only took about 20 minutes to stuff them all.  The speaker dinner was awesome.  I got to meet old friends and make some new ones.  I always enjoy meeting first time speakers. 

 

The next day, Sat. March 16th, was the day of the big show.  I actually played three roles at Boise Code Camp.  I was an organizer, a speaker, and a sponsor.  I made sure to get there early, at around 7:00 am, so that I had time to setup the Infragistics booth.  I must say, my booth was freaking awesome!  If you like devices, touch screens, swag, free controls, and candy, then this was the booth for you.

I had the following devices for you to tinker with and check out our awesome Infragistics controls:

• Samsung BUILD tablet w/ Windows 8 Pro
• Microsoft Surface w/ Windows RT
• iPad 2
• Kindle Fire
• Nokia Lumia 800 (Windows Phone 7)
• Nokia Lumia 920 (Windows Phone 8)
• Lenovo W520 w/ Windows 8 Ent
• Planar 27” touchscreen monitor (connected to the Lenovo)

One of the most popular devices was the Planar 27” touchscreen monitor.  It really made the Infragistics control shine.  My Windows 8 controls looked amazing and the touch response was phenomenal.  My booth literally had a line starting at 7:30 am well before breakfast was served.  Luckily my beautiful wife volunteered to help me run the booth.  By then end of the day, I had given away over 100 licenses, 100 t-shirts, and 3 bags of candy.

As I mentioned earlier, I also presented a session called “Building Composite XAML Applications with Prism”.  This is by far the most popular talk I give and the most requested.  It is a level 300 talk and is one of the more advanced topics.  Here is the description in case you were wondering.

“In this session you will learn how to design and build Windows Phone, Silverlight, and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) desktop applications using loosely coupled components that can evolve independently but which can be easily and seamlessly integrated into the overall application. This is an introductory talk that concentrates on the basic concepts required to build a composite application with the Microsoft Patterns and Practices Prism framework which includes the boostrapper, regions, modules, view composition, and different techniques for communicating between loosely couple components.  Various development patterns and technologies will also be discussed including Inversion of Control (IoC), Dependency Injection (DI), Unity, MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework), commanding, event aggregation, and MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel).”

For those of you who attended and want the sample code, look no further.

Download the Live Demo source code
Download the Prism DelegateCommand sample
Download the Prism CompositeCommand sample
Download the Prism EventAggragator sample

There was one talk that was more popular than mine.  Actually, it was the most popular talk in the entire Boise Code Camp schedule.  The title is “A Kid’s Guide to Programming”.  We had three speakers ages 6 to 12 present on programming languages for kids.  Unfortunately, we underestimated the popularity of the talk and placed it in a 50 person room.  Little did we know that 90 people would show up.  Standing room only!  Well, some had to sit on the floor as well.  First up was 12 year old Lily who did a great job giving an introduction to Scratch.  Next up was 12 year old Javier who showed us how to write games in Scratch using PONG as an example.  Last, but not least, was my 6 year old daughter Brianna who showed everyone how to draw a butterfly using Terrapin LOGO.

This was an amazing Boise Code Camp.  I would like to thank all the organizers, volunteers, speakers, and attendees for taking the time to make this event happen.  I also would like to thank our sponsors for providing all the swag, licenses, giveaways, and financial donations to make this event possible.  Next year will be our eighth Boise Code Camp, and we will try to make it the best ever.  I hope I will see you there.

If you have any questions or would like to get involved with Boise Code Camp as an organizer, volunteer, speaker, or sponsor, please contact me through my blog, contact me on Twitter (@brianlagunas), or leave a comment below.