XNA Essentials

If you are near the Raleigh, NC area on September 19th, 2009 you should really drop by the free Code Camp. If you have never been to a code camp, it is an event put on by a local user group. The events are free to the folks that attend. The folks that give their time to run the user groups and organize the code camps find sponsors who pay for the food, swag and everything else that goes into putting on these events.

If you aren’t in this area, you should definitely check around to see if there is a .NET User Group in your area. I attend one locally here in Greensboro, NC where we meet the first Tuesday of every month. We will be meeting tomorrow night, September 1st at the usual place.  The talk tomorrow night is on “Mashing up MVC, Bing, Maps and Flickr”. It should be good.

Again, it is really beneficial to get plugged into your local developer community. What better way than through events like User Groups and Code Camps?

The session list for the Raleigh Code Camp promises to have some excellent content. If you are interested in XNA you can hear me talk, but there are tons of other subjects that are interesting as well. There are talks on jQuery by Rachel Appel and Kevin Griffin, Database Design by Andy Leonard, Blend for Developers by Diane Wilson, LOB Apps with Silverlight 3 with Jim Duffy, general guidance on making high quality .NET applications with Chris Love, TDD with Steve Andrews, Dynamic Language Performance with Kevin Hazzard, UX in Silverlight with Rob Zelt and many others. The quality of speakers for this event is really great. I’m privileged to be speaking at the same event as these folks.

Again, to better ourselves as Software Engineers it is crucial for us to continue to learn. A great way to do that is to get with like minded people and User Groups and Code Camps provide an extremely cheap (FREE) way for us to connect with others.

Happy Networking and Learning!

Chad