What better way to kick-start my blog than with a roundup of CodeGarden 10? Ok, maybe it’s a little late, but still, I’ve got to start somewhere =)

CodeGarden 10 was in fact my first CodeGarden, so I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. Of course, I’d read some old blog posts on CodeGarden 09 and the Wiki writeups of some of the open sessions, but this was my first real experience of the 2 day conference (3 days if you count the MVC pre-conference day).

Now, I must start by giving out a HUGE thanks to the big dog himself, Niels, for his awesome gift of the final ticket, free of charge. I can’t say how grateful I truly was. With generosity like that, how could I not go?

MVC Pre-Conference
The 3 day event kicked off with a day of MVC sessions hosted by some of the hottest devs on the scene (I say that from a purely technical point of view, I don’t fancy them or anything) Simone Chiaretta, Jon Galloway and Steven Sanderson. The sessions were broken into beginner and advanced sessions, which having done a little MVC dev previously, I opted for the advanced sessions.

The guys gave some great incites into the new features in MVC 2, which if you are not aware, will be what the new Umbraco v5 will be developed in. I must admit, some of it did go over my head a little, but thankfully, Umbraco HQ were recording everything and will be putting videos from days 1 & 2 online some time soon (Man, they really did think of everything).

Day 1 – Sessions
Day 1 kicked off, like most conferences, with the keynote speech, and first up was Alexander Kjerulf who is the Chief Happiness Officer of Positive Sharing. It was an unexpected, but awesome start to the day, with Alex speaking about the importance of being happy at work, and how to foster a happy workplace. Needless to say audience participation was mandatory, but was a great way of getting to know everybody. Alex’s talk was also the catalyst of the new “High Five, You Rock!” movement sweeping through the community as a way show real appreciation for people efforts (which has now found its way on to twitter with the #h5yr tag, and, thanks to Morten Christensen and Matt Williams, has even got its own T-Shirt).

Next on stage was Niels himself who went through some almost unbelievable stats of Umbracos growth over the last year (thats over 1000 downloads a day baby!), swiftly followed by Per who demoed some of the latest updates to the our.umbraco.org community portal, including changes made to the look and feel, and updates to the new package repository which will now be accessible directly from the packages tree in every Umbraco install.

Following on, Niels went on to announce this years MVPs as voted for by the community (fingers crossed I’ll be up there next year) who were Dirk de Grave, Lee Kelleher, Warren Buckley, Richard Soetemen and Doug Robar. Well done guys.

The keynote was then taken over by Aaron Powell and Shannon Deminick for a series of quick appetizer presentations on Linq to Umbraco and Examine (some of the bigger contributions made to Umbraco from the guys at The FARM), with Shannon also being presented with the honor of being the Core dev of the year in the shape of an engraved espresso machine for all his hard work.

The keynote was wound up by Niels with the announcement that Umbraco v4.5 (formally 4.1) was released that very day. Sweet!

With hardly any time to recover from such an awesome start, the first day of sessions kicked off, which for me meant Shannon’s session on Examine followed by Aaron’s  Unit Testing with Umbraco, Thomas Kjær Nielsen’s User friendly integration with legacy systems and finally Morten Christensen’s Integrating a 3rd party service with the Umbraco back-end, which all rocked.

Day 1 came to a close with a lovely meal, and a head-to-head battle between Aaron and Warren to see which technology was better, Linq to Umbraco or XSLT. Obviously, neither was a clear winner, with it finally coming down to user preference.

Day 2 – Open Spaces
Day 2 started as all open spaces start with everyone in a circle coming up with ideas for open sessions. Jumping in whole heartedly, I proposed and ran 2 sessions on ”Ongoing deployment strategies” and “How to collaborate” which I’ll be writing up soon, but just spent the rest of the day jumping between other sessions, and discussing Umbraco with anyone and everyone.

After a spot of lunch, the rest of the afternoon was pretty much taken up by the impromptu challenge by Per for Lee and myself to develop an Umbraco comparison tool to enter in the package competition later that evening. Unfortunately we weren’t able to finish it in time, but look out for more on uCompare in the near future.

The final day wound down with the package and skins competitions. I did enter the package competition with my AutoExportToDotNet package for auto exporting Linq to Umbraco classes, but unfortunately I didn’t place, with 3rd place going to Sebastiaan Janssen with his Image Meta Data package, 2nd place going to Aaron with his Media Link Checker, and 1st place going to Shannon with a multi-tree picker which he wrote that morning for an open-space session. To be honest, it’s probably best I didn’t win, as I wouldn’t have had room to get the prizes home anyway.

In the skin contest, Warren took 1st place with his awesome retro theme, skinning Umbraco to look like a 1990′s GeoCities website.

Proceddings ended with another lovely meal, and the traditional Umbraco bingo, which again I didn’t win (I really wanted that biker vest).

Conclusion
All in all, CodeGarden 10 was my first real get-together with the broader Umbraco community, and I can honestly say, I’ve never met such an awesome bunch of people. The event had some amazing sessions, but for me, it was the people who really made it.

I think this is pretty much summed up by the fact that next year, Niels will be dropping the term “conference” in favour of  the term “festival”, which I think explains it all.

(All photos by Doug Robar & Jesper Hauge)