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Won 4th prize in Community Credit October 2008 Contest

Szymon Kobalczyk — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 12:38:37 GMT

Yesterday I was pleasantly surprised by receiving email from David Silverlight that I had won 4th prize in Community Credit October 2008 Contest. The prize I won is the awesome Electronic Drum-Kit T-Shirt that you can hit with your finder to play drum sounds. I think it would totally rock combined with the Equalizer T-Shirt I got from my lovely wife some time ago.

The Community Credit awards are presented for community related activities that you submit during a month. For each activity you receive a certain amount of points. I knew about the contest for about a year, but I assumed it is only for uber-geeks and far above my reach. Only recently I was encouraged by Karl Shifflet and started adding my points. This award proves, I was totally wrong. The best part is that you are probably already doing the activities that could earn you credit like blogging, speaking, answering forum questions, and helping your user group. So why not give yourself some credit and win these cool prizes, huh?

Here is what I did last month:

From October 8th to 9th I was at the MTS 2008 Conference in Warsaw, where I did a session about “Building Line Of Business Applications in WPF” (you can find the slides here). I was also manning the user groups booth for few hours. That’s 12,000 points.

This month our group had very special guests: Tim Huckaby & Carl Franklin stopped for two days in Cracow on their way from SDC in Amsterdam to DevReach in Sophia. They made a fantastic performance for our group on October 10th. That’s 17,250 points for organizing this event and inviting top speakers.

We also had two regular UG meetings (on October 1st and October 29th). I’m usually in charge of scheduling speakers, making announcements and doing raffles (there are no points only for being the UG leader – you need to actually do something). That’s another 17,000 points total.

(During October 1st meeting we celebrated Marcin Celej’s MVP nomination)

Last Thursday (October 30th) I traveled to UG in Poznań to speak about “Composite Application Guidance for WPF” and other stuff (get the slides here). I really enjoyed this meeting, and I’m glad I finally got there despite the long travel (7 hours by train). From the feedback I reckon my friends liked it too. That’s 6,300 points.
I wasn’t very active online this month, but I published a code sample of using the Touchless SDK in WPF (and I will be contributing more to this project very soon). That’s 8,000 points.

I ended up with 60,550 total but October was pretty busy for me anyway. But even if I did only a half of the stuff above, it would secure me one of the prizes (the lowest winning score was 30,000 points). Congratulations to other current and past winners.

So don’t wait anymore: go check the cool prizes for this month and start adding your points now!

Speaking of community awards, I also like to mention the idea of the Most Valuable Member Awards invented by James Johnson from Inland Empire .NET UG. This program gives recognition to most active user group members, with the goal to increase member’s participation and involvement. I plan to introduce this to our .NET user group in Cracow, so if any sponsors are reading this and would like to help please contact me.

Now let’s see: Writing a blog posts is worth 500 points, plus 5000 for linking to Community Credit, that’s already 5,500 points closer to this month’s Handpresso Portable Espresso Maker :-)

Registration is open for first Code Camp in Kraków

Szymon Kobalczyk — Thu, 22 May 2008 20:14:25 GMT

Some time ago I wrote that there is a wave of HCL events sweeping through Poland. Today I'm happy to announce that we opened registration for the Code Camp in Kraków. This is the first such conference organized by the members of KGD UG for the .NET developer community.

We will meet on June 7th for the chance to listen to sessions from five great speakers:

The world has changed… What are the dilemmas of designing software solutions in the year 2008? - Tadeusz Golonka
Reach End-Users With Next Generation Web Applications - Chris Koenig
Addressing non-functional requirements with PostSharp - Gael Fraiteur
SQL Server 2008 Integration Services - Grzegorz Stolecki
Developer's role in an agile project - Bartosz Pampuch

Follow this link to register. The conference is free but the number of seats is limited so make sure to register early.

Along the conference we organized a little programming contest. The first round is over but you still have a chance to win one of the cool prizes (including XBox 360) in the second round. It's quite simple - you just need to implement a single method. More details on this page.

Hope to see you soon at CodeCamp.pl

Visual Studio 2008 InstallFest in Krakow

Szymon Kobalczyk — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 08:36:36 GMT

Early this month I've read Scott Hanselman's invitation to Visual Studio 2008 InstallFest in Portland. If found the idea to get lots of people to install Visual Studio together quite interesting. I started looking around and quickly learned that this is a huge event for all .NET user groups in United States. However it turned out these meetings are not being held anywhere in Europe. What a bummer!

But I liked the idea so much that I though we should organize this in our user group ourselves. We asked for help our friends at local Microsoft office and although we didn't get free VS licenses we got two boxes of other gifts. We also got support from two local .NET shops: JCommerce, and Making Waves.

The meeting was held on Wendsday, 19th December at the nice pub called Cafe Szafe. We started by distributing copies of the VS Install DVD to everyone who wanted to install. Later Bartek Pampuch (MVP) did a great live demo of new features found in Visual Studio 2008. But we also had a fun part with two contests: a turnament in "Dead or Alive 4" on XBox360 and in Powerball spinning. The two winners got a special prizes, but we got plenty of other gifts so nobody left with empty hands. We also did a raffle for one license of ASP.NET RadControl provided by our friends at Telerik.

Overall 40 people showed at the meeting, and 33 of them got their laptops ready for installing VS. Among them we counted at least 25 successful installations.

You can find more photos here and here.

Thanks to everyone who helped me organize this. We got a lot of positive feedback from our group members so I think we should organize more of such events in future. We already have few ideas.

We have a new MVP in Kraków!

Szymon Kobalczyk — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 06:48:06 GMT

I'm really happy to announce that last week our good friend Bartosz Pampuch received the MVP award in Visual Developer - Team System category. I think this is a well deserved nomination.

I've met Bartek few years ago at one of our first .NET user group meetings (KGD). From the outset he was a very active member and throughout the years delivered many outstanding presentations.

Bartek is currently leading the RND team for one of the largest software houses in Poland, where he researches new technologies and software factories for other development teams. He is expert in Visual Studio Team System and MSF software process. Last year he was leading excellent workshops on VSTS and MSF, that I was fortunate to attend. Another area of his interest that we both share is Smart Client architecture, and Bartek is Microsoft's P&P Smart Client Software Factory adviser. He is also well known editor on the CodeGuru.pl portal (and soon on ITCore.pl).

Bartek is also a very funny person to talk with, so if you wish to meet him in person join us on the KGD.NET or Geek Lunch event. You can read more about Bartek and his many activities on his personal web page.

Congratulations!