Preconf at the Warm Crocodile Developer Conference

The Warm Crocodile Developer Conference (WCDC) is normally 2 days, but this year Microsoft held a preconf the day before, so 3 days of geeking, speaking and drinking beers at nørrebro brewery, pretty nice!

Before I go into more detail of the 3 days I will give a special thanks to Thomas Jespersen from spiir to crash at his hotel room after a lot of beers sponsored by my awesome consultant Stig from copenhagensoftware.

There were 3 sessions at the preconf

Visual Studio 2013 by Luke Hoban, Microsoft
He came allround the Visual Studio, he talked about the new era of Visual Studio has changed from being single developer focus to be more team based, by adding more client + developer services running in azure.
Then he demoed a lot of "new" stuff in VS 2013.

like:

• Created simple web project and showed the new way of choosing project type
• Showed async on the mvc controller
• Browser link and web essentials how use the browser as our designer.
• And deployed the website to azure and attach the debugger

F# Applications: From domain model to user interface by Tomas Petricek, PhD student, University of Cambridge

Tomas talked a lot of F#, and I was very curious about this because I never written a single line of F# code before.

He started by being really fundamental by showing a few sites (fsharp.org) to look at when you start out, he also mention that there is a local F# UserGroup starting up in copenhagen. Last he show how to make a Simple application checkout counter. I was pretty amazed by how few lines of code you needed to write in his demo.

ASP.NET MVC & WebAPI alongside AngularJS by Scott Allen, CTO at Medisolv

In the last session Scott showed us how to make a Single Page Application with WebAPI, Angular JS and the Entity Framework 6, and using the new standard MVC 5 template.

After the sessions there were free beers at nørrebro brewery. Henrik my boss, Stig from Copenhagen Software and I started enjoyed a few beers while talking about what presentations.

Stig to the left, Henrik to the right

After the free beer's ended, Henrik went home. Stig and I enjoyed the rest of the evening with a few other guy's with some more beer's, thanks for a great day everybody!

What does being an MVP means to me.

My MVP lead asked, if I would answer a few questions about being an MVP, and thought of sharing the answers on my blog.

So here it is.

Tell us a little about yourself.

My name is Ronnie, I am a senior .Net developer/Technical Lead and been working at Widex for almost 3 years now. I have played around with .NET since the betas; think it was called “asp.net webmatrix” 2000-2001. My passion for Microsoft technologies slowly grown since then.

What inspired you to be active in the community?

My “Microsoft” community activity started for about 8 years ago, thanks to the umbraco community. What inspired me was the feeling of being part of a family, and there always was a few people willing to help with your problems. The last few year’s motivation has been from TypeScript, Azure and ALM.

Being and MVP inspires me to be even more active spreading my passion of Microsoft Technologies.

It makes me proud to be a MVP, and acknowledge my work in different communities, it's an award I never thought was possible to achieve.

Brag! Tell us about something great you have been working on lately (either community-related or as a technical expert).

Since TypeScript was announced, I have had a lot of focus on that. Start writing a book, and in september I gave a talk “TypeScript kata: the TDD style” presented with Visual studio to Linux/php/opensource beer drinking geek user group (called brewww). We had some heavy discussions - they were not Microsoft fans! Nevertheless, in the end they actually began to see the potential of visual studio, and that it´s free J they will probably have an IDE bitch fight event later this year, I hope they will invite me, so I can convince them all to use visual studio!

The next cool thing that I want to do is making a visual studio extension like ncrunch, just for typescript.

What is, in your opinion, the greatest advantage of being a Microsoft MVP?

To know what the future of Microsoft brings to the table by being involved in the Microsoft product development process by attending the MVP PGI events and the MVP summit. Another great advantage is being part of a new community, and getting new friends that share some of your own passions.      

What would you recommend to people who aspire to be an MVP? 

To be an MVP the most important is to have passion for Microsoft technologies, and use a lot of time in the community by, answer questions, writing books, blogging, teaching, give talks at conferences/user groups or making some new cool products that make Microsoft technologies even better. In my opinion, a good blend of it all, but in the name of your passion to Microsoft Technologies.