While I was at the WCF Firestarter during the weekend of June 19th, my friend Peter Laudati (http://www.twitter.com/jrzyshr) asked if I would be willing to use my .NET web expertise and help out at the Microsoft Web Camps the following weekend.  And so I caught the 7:49 Ronkonkoma and arrived at the Microsoft Offices in Manhattan at 9:20am.  I was greeted immediately by Jon Galloway and spent the remainder of the day in the Palace conference room assisting people with tutorials and projects, mostly involving MVC.

I always enjoy these sort of experiences because its a chance to engage others in intelligent discussions about technology.  I dont get the raging Apple-fanboys, like my brother, who love their company but dont understand any empirical reasons for why they love it.  We talked about a lot of things, to addressing the debate between Web Forms and MVC to United States mass transit futures.  I also got the chance to help out some really awesome people play with Microsoft’s new technologies and practices.  My only regret, kind of, is that I didnt bring my laptop; though I didnt bring it because I am forced to bring a real keyboard with me, the absence of the ‘O’ key is a real nuisance.

But in the end I had a great time and the projects the teams created were pretty nice, given the time constraints. It also made me realize that at some point I need to do an actual production project in MVC; I clearly understand the theory well enough.  One of my personal projects uses MVC, but I currently have no client projects using it; something I need to rectify.