"User groups represent the spirit of the frontier, a community getting together to do things that no individual ought to have to do alone. The pioneers of the American west got together for barn raisings, cattle roundups, and the occasional party. The pioneers of new technology get together for installfests, new user training and support, and just plain fun. Being part of a user group is the best way to get more out of your computer, and lets you make friends while you're at it."

— Tim O'Reilly

(When I started writing this) I got home not too long ago from the Philly .NET Code Camp 2007.1 @ Microsoft Malvern. It was certainly a long day, but it was awesome! We had almost 30 speakers and sessions across 5 different tracks. And we had roughly 150 people turn out. Not bad.

My role for the event (among others J) was the official photographer. I snapped about 80-90 pictures, most of which will be up on the new Philly.NET site shortly.

I attended several sessions, including XNA Game Development with Mitch Ruebush, Visual Studio Managed Package Framework with Don Demsak (aka DonXML), and Intro to Link: Reinventing Visual Basic, also with Don. The rest of the time I was rather busy snapping pictures and helping out where needed. I'll blog about the individual sessions I attended later.

Among the other presenters were Mark Scott, Russ Basuira, Kevin Goff, Mark Magliocco, Sam Batterman, Jean Barmash, Bill Wolfe, David Laribee, Dan Clark, Sam Gentile, Travis Laborde, Peter Shire, David Hoerster, Rob Keiser, Sharon Dooley, Edwin Ames, and Chuck Miller. These are some REALLY great folks.

And I got great reviews from the attendees, who really enjoyed the event. Someone even suggested it should be a two-day event.

The coolest part for me though, was that I got invited by Microsoft to their Influencer's Dinner after the conference. There were Microsoft employees, our Microsoft DE, some MVPs, mainly people who influence the direction of the .NET Framework. Microsoft decides who is an influencer. It was quite an honor, and I got to rub shoulders with some of the brightest people in our industry.

Lastly, Andy Schwam did an awesome job of collection swag. Our event was sponsored by many different organizations, a big thanks to all of them:

Breakfast Sponsor: Perficient Technologies

Lunch Sponsor: RDA

Contributor Sponsors: