This weekend marks the Seattle Code Camp, which I'm lucky enough to be being sent to by my employer. I've talked about Code Camp last year when we went to Boise, which was a fun trip, but this time we're going to be at the DigiPen campus in Redmond, WA, which is practically in the heart of the Microsoft Campus.
What I love about Code Camps, is that they are designed to be completely vendor agnostic. Admittedly, every code camp I've been to so far (read: almost two), has been centered heavily around Microsoft technologies, and Microsoft tends to sponsor these events, they are open to almost anything. There was a fair amount of Java stuff in Boise, there is a presentation on git in Seattle. I would love to see more Open Source stuff, but I'm not presenting, so my complaints aren't quite as loud as they could be. Hopefully next year, my work schedule will be more conducive to preparing something like this (ie, not working 12+ hour days), but no luck this year.
Since I do work mostly with MS technologies, the way Code Camps are currently structured is much more relevant to my current line of work, which is nice, but I rarely derive a ton of enjoyment from using most Microsoft platforms. I'm growing to love ASP.NET MVC, but I tend to attribute that more to how unlike MVC is from most Microsoft frameworks.
Still, there is much to learn, and hopefully much to share. We'll be recording the sessions we attend, so we'll have video, which I'll try to get some of posted. And I'll just continue reminding myself, .NET is a platform with a rich Open Source tradition these days, I'll just have to take solace in the .NET ;)