TechEd 2008: Be part of the experience!

INETA is glad to announce that Surfray is preparing some training resources in the form of online sessions and/or webcasts, being dedicated to the SharePoint platform and how to expand its search capabilities, based on its Ontolica Search Solution.

These sessions will be celebrated through Europe by specialists and also SharePoint MVP's.

Dutch Codecam is ready to go: don't miss this event!

The Dutch Code Camp 2008 is scheduled for September 6. This Code Camp is a joint effort of the three .NET user groups in the Netherlands:

• SDN
• dotNed
• VBCentral

The day will be filled with 15 sessions on various topics like WPF, Spec#, Rosario and software architecture. In addition, hands-on labs are available so anyone can be in the driver's seat and have a go at Domain Specific Languages, Workflow Foundation or the new features of .NET 3.5.

If you are using either C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET, DotNetNuke or Delphi, you cannot miss this event.

Not only are these topics suggested by the community, it's the members of the community that will host these sessions. Naturally, the event is free to attend. More information (in Dutch) can be found at www.codecamp.nl.

CODECAMP 2008 is a opportunity for every developer / User Group member to participate and learn from the real life examples presented by "people from the Community, for the Community".

The basic idea in the background of the event is to organize a one day event through which people of various profiles (developers, students and others) in our IT Community would meet and share experiences and knowledge in a pleasant atmosphere of a weekend day.

The event will be structured according to the manifesto of well known CodeCamp events, which are based on 6 principles:

• By and For the Developer Community.
• Always Free.
• Community Developed Material.
• No Fluff only Code.
• Community Ownership.
• Never occur during work hours.

Sander Gerz,
Vice President Technology INETA Europe

A Challenge

It would be a shame not to thank everybody who supported this initiative, that was the past European Silverlight challenge, held during the last few months of 2007 and the start of 2008. The entire marketing effort was a grass roots campaign organized by a relatively small group of INETA volunteers and the community altogether (that means us). The contest did not have a marketing budget or the structure in place that an experienced marketing organization would have. The overriding incentive for participation was the prizes, being its main prizes three tickets to the Mix'08 conference, and the possibility of talking at the MIX.

I have to say, that as INETA being a volunteer organization, the contest was only possible due to dedicated personal effort, being estimated in 100 hours per participating country and around 400 hours of central coordination. That makes a total of 2,100 hours!!! As for prizes we get $240.000 (mostly in products, market price) from different INETA sponsors who provided the different prizes. I can't just have been able to say many times thanks for these time dedicated, so I take the opportunity to do exactly that on this newsletter: thanks for your dedication, your time and also thanks to the ones that participated. you made this possible and are engaging us into doing even greater things.

Some Statistics..

As for the main site, we had over 100.000 Page Views, for the country sites, we had 467.000 page views during the contest duration.
Search engine stats returned approximately:

• One million (or 1,010,000 exactly) results for the term "Silverlight Challenge",
• 1,110 direct references linking to the websites of the contest.
• 160 Blog entries

So many thanks again to those who helped us communicate and throw the word about the contest.

Jose Luis Latorre
Vice President Sponsorship & Contest manager INETA Europe

Upcoming events... 

• Dutch Code Camp, http://www.codecamp.nl, September 6th, 2008, Barneveld, Nederland (language: English and Dutch)
• MobilityDay, http://www.mobilitydays.com, September 9th, 2008, Zagreb, Croatia (language: English and Croatian)
• DevReach, http://www.devreach.com/, October 13-16 Bulgaria (language: English and Bulgarian).
• .NET Open Space, http://www.www.com, Germany 18-19 October (language: English and German).
• PDC, http://www.microsoftpdc.com/, Los Angeles, US, October 27-30
• TechEd Europe, http://www.microsoft.com/emea/teched2008, Barcelona (Spain) November 3-7 (IT Professionals), 10-14 (Developers)