C# Bootcamp and Beyond!

It’s been a while since i have posted anything. In short i’m busy. Mike Seeber and I have been trying a great deal to organize some great events for Grand Valley this semester, the first of which was the C# Bootcamp. For this event we planned on having David Smith, who is the awsome Lead SA for the region and a C# MVP, come and give a fairly in depth talk on C#, followed by lab time.

C# Bootcamp:
In short, today went very well. The bootcamp was laid out into three sections:

[11:00am-12:00pm] VS 2005/C#/.NET Intro
[12:30pm-2:45pm] In depth C# Coverage*
[3:00pm-4:30pm] Lab Time working w/ C#

*During the in depth section David covered many C# features which are important to know understand, and use C#. David covered:

Delegates
Events
File I/O
Interfaces
.NET Reflector (DLLS)
Networking
Data Access
Loads of VS Tips & Tricks

David also made a “fully working web browser” in only 8 minutes!

I think i’m working on about three projects now. Today definitly helped me out. David surely got me thinking in many aspects as to what i can do. He did a great job of challenging the coding styles of people who came

If you code, code explicitly…or i will find you, and i wont be happy.

David also did a good job of emphasizing that if you plan on taking on a project, do NOT reinvent the wheel, however take what’s given to you and run with it. Several times he mentioned the worst thing that could happen is you succeed in making an impact on the world.

The event seemed to go over rather well, I counted 25 students present during the middle of the presentation. I’m happy with that for a first presentation, but will also serve as our starting point from which to improve ourselves.

and Beyond:
Mike and I have also got a few things coming up in the near future; All of the SA’s are fortunate enough to have MS fly us all out to Redmond on Oct.1st for the SA Summit. That is something which i’m really looking forward to. It’s quite a feeling to know that Microsoft takes such an effort in its Student Ambassador program to provide an event of this magnitude to its SA’s.

Also, GVINPC or the Grand Valley Intercollegiate .NET Programming Competition. GVINPC will be a day long event promoting the use of .NET technology to solve problems using the .NET framework and its languages. Students will form teams consisting of up to four (4) people and will be asked to tackle a series of business minded programming problems which have been created by professionals. Judges will consist of local business professionals as well as Microsoft Employees. Judges will determine how many points problems earn based on completed tasks while extra points can be awarded for extra features. Mike and I have the framework for the event ironed out, now we’ve just got to get the wheels turning and put it into action. We are hoping the event takes place in late October.

Well, i guess that all for now.

-MP