Over the last few months I’ve been spending just about every available hour working with the Orlando .NET User Group board and development team to build our Orlando Code Camp event for 2011. It’s an annual event that draws a few hundred Microsoft .NET Developers to our great city. We feed our minds, bellies, and idea factories with great stuff for the upcoming year.

This year we had the distinct pleasure of having our code camp begin with a plug from a Senior VP at Microsoft on video, it was the kick-off to an awesome day. We also had the distinct pleasure of being the 2nd largest code camp in the United States – next year we are going to grab that #1 slot for sure.  We have lots of ideas for the upcoming year, and the community has been blogging and tweeting like crazy (#OrlandoCC) about the event as well.

This year had a lot of great speakers, tracks, sponsors, and attendees – yes the attendees are what pushed into that #2 slot I just mentioned, and especially those folks in the bright green shirts – the volunteers!.  We were delighted they all gave up their weekend to spend it at our event.  They came from different parts of the US, and I know that one attendee hales from the UK – should’ve given him the furthest drive award.  Most of the sessions were full, and I heard great feedback from many attendees throughout the day.

We had John Papa (@John_Papa) in attendance as our featured speaker for the event.  He gave us a huge taste of what Silverlight 5 has up it’s sleeve – very cool stuff.  If you’ve never seen Scott Gu w/o his shirt, well you missed out – it was great demo.   We also had two up and coming speakers from our own user group, John Wang and Jay Hill, they nailed their own talks.  We’ll have some video from the event later on in April once post-production is finished showcasing some of the speakers in attendance.

The leader of our user group Esteban Garcia (@EstebanFGarcia) blogged about the event and put on a great talk as well, he also put a huge effort to get this event off the ground – he definitely has a vision for the community.  His blog post has all of the stats for how many, how much, etc., so I won’t spoil it for you.  I’m was (and still am) absolutely amazed at how many plates this guy can keep spinning at once.  He’s also an awesome .NET developer in his own right, there’s not too much stuff stumps Esteban – the community is very lucky to have a great leader like this.

We are going to ride this wave and keep the community rolling with some really cool stuff this year as well.  If you didn’t make it this year, don’t worry we’ve got you covered for next year. And if you did make to the event this year, thank you!