Philly .NET Code Camp 2010.2 (post-trip report)

It was an absolute beautiful day in Philadelphia last Saturday, so I was afraid people would decide to to do other things other than come to the free .NET code camp. I was wrong. With just shy of 500 attendees, the Code Camp this year was successful. 63 sessions over 13 different tracks proved to be just right for the event. Everything from ALT.NET to Silverlight to BI to Mobile Phone were popular tracks for the attendees.

GrapeCity, one of the many Gold partners for the event was represented by myself. We set up a exhibitor booth and talked with many of the attendees and gave many demos on our Active Reports, Active Analysis and Spread products. Many were familiar with these products, but not the name of the company, GrapeCity, that recently acquired these products. So as I was educating attendees on the company acquisitions and the product lines, they were educating me on technologies they are using and what they may be looking for.

I was a little surprised by the number of attendees using SharePoint (MOSS and WSS), but was glad to show them how to create a WebPart from our product to use in SharePoint. Also, there was a lot of buzz around Silverlight and MVC. And this is not the first time I have heard for people looking for a jQuery version of a spreadsheet. This is not something we provide, but I want to ask the readership of this blog if this is indeed something wanted by the masses. Any comments welcome.

Thank you to the group from the Philly .NET users group for hosting a great event and providing many opportunities for attendees to be in the room with the exhibitors to give us plenty of time for the sponsors to talk with them.

Scott Shorter
GrapeCity, Inc.