Andrew Duthie, Microsoft, put on a great show. There are Code Camps being organized all over, and this one last Saturday was hosted at Microsoft's Reston offices. 

This wasn't a marketing session, it was about developers talking to developers. We had some top-flight folks presenting. Brian Noyes, Sahil Malik, Vishwas Lele, Julie Lerman, Jonathan Cogley, to name a few. We also had many local developers give presentations, so it was a good mix of top flight presenters/MVPs and local or first time presenters.

This whole event was free. Similar type conferences cost about $400 per day, so those that attended in the developer community really made out. There is talk of doing more of these, and also doing them in other locations (like Roanoke).

User group representatives were out in force, too. We had members and representatives from Roanoke, Richmond, Hampton, Baltimore, Vermont, and nearly every .NET group in the DC area (NovaSQL, CAPAREA.Net were well represented). We even had Cold Fusion folks attend. And INETA was well represented with Julie Lerman (congratulations on being named to the INETA board) and Scott Lock, Regional INETA director for the Mid-Atlantic region in attendance. 

I gave a presentation on XQuery for the Data track (we had 5 different tracks). Good group of presenters: Sreedhar Koganti, Carney Clegg, Julie Lerman, Sahil Malik, and Jeff Schoolcraft in our group. Carney and I should have switched the order of our presentations because he showed some good stuff on how to consume XML and make it show up in a grid. Using XQuery, I showed how to extract data out in an XML format. It would have really been interesting to show me pulling data from SQL Server 2005 in XQuery, and Carney's demonstration showing how it could be consumed and presented at the interface level.

I gave away a red-handled crescent wrench to an attendee that could name the two types of XQuery calls that can be made in SQL Server 2005 (XPath and FLOWR) similar to the one in my first blog entry.

Anyway, hats off to Andrew Duthie for putting on the Code Camp. I think he maxed out his expected attendance goals. Over 300 signed up and over 200 attended (not bad for the Saturday before Mother's Day).