Chicago Code Camp 2014 Recap

Today, I went to the Chicago Code Camp in Grayslake, IL. It was a good time. I attended four (out of five) sessions as Dave Girard was kind enough to get me started on a BizSpark subscription.

Daniel Laughlan had a great session on blending web servers with local services using OWIN and Katana. I’ve had the references for OWIN in my Visual Studio projects (it comes with by default in MVC5) and I had not investigated further on what value it provides.  I’ll have to explore OWIN further on my own.
David Girard presented building a game in Windows 8 using Construct 2 and quickly build a cross-platform for Windows 8 and Windows Phone. Got some nice GitHub projects to refer to for Windows Phone 8 development.
Angela Dugan presented agile testing in a waterfall world. This presentation had a lot of developers, testers and even managers talking about their own experiences. I think it’s one of the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) debates that really gets people going. I even spoke up about some of my agile/waterfall experiences. I’m looking forward to presenting at the Chicago ALM group next month on Octopus Deploy!

Jim Szubryt, my manager at Accenture, had a presentation about on premises TFS 2013 but unfortunately it was at the same time Angela’s presentation.
All-in-all, a great camp. I’ll definitely be attending next year. Thanks to all the sponsors!