First off it rocked...Special thanks to Lee Brandt, Blake Thiess, Joe Loux, Timothy Wright, and John Alexander. These guys were my teammates and what I would consider some of my new friends. They are some of the best band-mates a girl could ask for in Rockband also. So here is a little bit of my experience in general:
I was looking forward to this event for a month. I was incredibly excited, because I love helping a good cause and felt like I had not done enough to give back to the community. I love hanging out with developers. I feel like I sit in a cubicle coding by myself a lot and the only person I see is my project lead on a daily basis. It was nice to mix it up and see people. So socially this was a geek's paradise. All the people were enthusiastic and loved code like I do. We sort of played shuffle with our charity at the beginning, because the first charity wanted to sell our source code. In the end we were paired with Boyscout Troop 813 of Blue Springs, Missouri. The guy in charge was very knowledgeable with infrastructure and networking, so he was a geek like us. You could see his face light up when he talked about his job. When Doug sent me the e-mail about the solution I'm thinking this would be great in SharePoint. There was a bit of a debate at the beginning about SharePoint vs. DotNetNuke. SharePoint's free version inevitably won out and what we ended up with was the product (I will post a link when John gets the site public facing). It was fun teaching people about SharePoint and I learned a new trick. I also realize that I hate Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint web parts. I spent half of Saturday trying to get the media viewer web part to work and wanting to destroy the code by the end of the day. John Alexander spent about the other half of the day trying to recompile the source and search around the net for a solution on how to fix the web part. At the end of the weekend we created a content editor web part using Javascript and XAML that pointed to an ASPX Page pulling the pictures from the SharePoint Object Model.
The setup was great, because each project had a room. You had the charity coordinators show up on the first day, so you could gather requirements. The rest of the time you sat in your room and worked within your teams. There were books and software trials that we could use for development. Food was provided at the proper intervals, so we were well nourished. There was a fridge stocked full of caffeine, water, and other liquids. There were two rooms with Rockband, so that we could take breaks when we were frustrated (this helped so much after that ordeal with the Silverlight Blueprint web part failed). Overall this event made me come out with a ton of self esteem points and a lot of developer/geeky happiness. John Alexander, Jeff Julian, and Doug Butscher should get a big gold star for planning such an awesome event. If St. Louis ends up owning up to the challenge and putting together an event I would definitely attend.
In the end my team took home the prize (Guitar Hero Portable and VS 2008) with the most applause and loudest cheers. I would say that I just gained about 500 self esteem points this weekend a ton of self confidence. I hope that everyone else had as great a time as I did this weekend. Now time to watch BSG...