Snowball - The Blog

Community Day 2011 is over (sadly)… But since we had so much fun, that isn’t a problem: we have a great day of Belgian community at its very best! Judging from the feedback, this was the very best edition so far, so that’s good news :)

We had over 300 attendees seeing 32 sessions spread over 5 tracks. Most slides are already available from the agenda page.

I want to thank you all for being there. Of course, a big thank you to the team, the sponsors and the people from BBDO!

Here are some pictures of the event, the entire list can be seen here.

With the great weather we’re having, it’s even more obvious that summer is approaching. And we all know what that means, don’t we?

Indeed, Community Day 2011 is coming closer! This fifth edition will be the biggest one we ever did, with more sessions, the best food, great networking opportunities and the best speakers the Belgian (and who knows…) has to offer.

We’ve had a tremendous response from sponsors already and we’re proud to announce the following companies as our sponsors for this year’s edition:

Of course, Community Day 2011 is again a joint event of 13 Belgian user groups. The following user groups are part of this year’s edition:

We’re currently working hard on the agenda, which will be online in 2-3 weeks. At that point, you’ll be able to register as well. Just like previous editions, Community Day 2011 is still a free event.

At this point, I suggest you add the event to your calendar by opening this *.ics file.

To help spread the word about the event, use the following blog bling! Thanks for helping!

At Community Day 2010, together with Bart Wullems, I gave a session called Building an enterprise application with Silverlight and NHibernate. You can download the slide deck and demo below:

Slide deck

Demo

The day after… finally!

Although I look forward to Community day almost as much as Christmas every year, I’m always happy when it is over as well. The main reason for being happy is of course that everything went great! All sessions were of excellent quality, we had more attendees once again, no unforeseen things happened (apart from an empty microphone battery which is really nothing…) and the catering seemed to be really appreciated!

A quick search on Twitter for #ComDay2010 resulted in reactions such as the following:

maartenballiauw

Thanks for a great #comday2010 at @gillcleeren and all the other organisers! Great job! about 20 hours ago via HootSuite

pjadriaensens

had a blast at #comday2010 today! Great atmosphere, great food & sessions. CU next edition!

svenschelfaut

Had a great time at #comday2010 : great sessions and won an xna unleashed in the end. Seems I have to develop games in the future

iktjilp

On the way home after a verry interesting #comday2010

GroovBird

#comday2010 The food was much better than last year!

GroovBird

#comday2010 Props to the organisation! It's been great!

katriendg

Another great event, Community day 2010 is almmost finished. good work from all, congrats! #comday2010

Here are some pictures, more will be available soon:

Community Day 2010 is coming! Registration is now open.

No less than fourteen Microsoft user groups combine their efforts to organize this unique knowledge-sharing and networking event. With so many new Microsoft product and technology releases, the content of this Community Day will be focusing on Visual Studio 2010, SharePoint 2010, Silverlight 4, Office 2010, SQL Server 2008 R2, OCSR2, and many more!
So don’t miss out on the Community Day and join us on Thursday June 24th in Utopolis, Mechelen. We will bring together more than 300 IT Pro’s and developers.
The Community Day 2010 is brought to you by Azug, Besug, Biwug, IT-Talks Pro-Exchange, SCUG, SQLUG, VBIB, Visug, WinSec, XNA-BUG, CLUG, MyTIC and DotNetHub.

Register now for free at www.communityday.be !

After some behind-the-scenes work, I’m happy to announce that Community Day 2010 will take place on June 24th 2010 in Utopolis Mechelen.

This fourth installment of THE community event of the year will of course focus on all the new technologies that are coming out of Microsoft these months, including Visual Studio 2010, SharePoint 2010, Office 2010, Silverlight 4, .NET 4.0, SQL Server 2008 R2 etc.

New this year is that we have a dedicated track on one specific technology and that will be SharePoint 2010. This track will contain general SharePoint 2010 sessions as well as more specific ones, such as working with Silverlight and SharePoint.

The usergroups are working on the agenda now, I hope to announce the complete agenda around April 25th. Also around that time, we will open the registrations on the site.

For now, check out www.communityday.be. If you are part of a company that wants to join us as a sponsor in organizing this event, send a mail to gillcleeren@gmail.com. An event such as this one can of course only take place because of the ongoing support of sponsors and usergroups.

I hope to meet many of you on June 24th!

PS: we will NOT be serving French Fries again . We’re working on a great formula to have some really good food this year! More hopefully very soon!

Quite a lot of the sessions at Community Day 2009 were recorded, including the keynote with our trip to the kindergarten in Antwerp. The rest of the recorded sessions will be online soon.

Keynote: http://www.microsoft.com/belux/MSDN/nl/chopsticks/default.aspx?id=1293

What’s new in xna: http://www.microsoft.com/belux/MSDN/nl/chopsticks/default.aspx?id=1301

Silverlight 3: http://www.microsoft.com/belux/MSDN/nl/chopsticks/default.aspx?id=1303

JQuery: http://www.microsoft.com/belux/MSDN/nl/chopsticks/default.aspx?id=1305

We did it. We officially did it. Community Day 2009 was a great success.

Here are some facts and highlights:

• 300+ attendees
• 13 sponsors
• 11 usergroups
• 20 sessions
• Many french fries

After looking at the evaluations, we can conclude that all our guests really enjoyed the event! Mark June 24th 2010 already in your agenda, it will be the day Community Day 2010 will take place.

I have already uploaded several powerpoint presentations to the Community Day website. The missing ones will be uploaded soon. Some pictures are available as well already. The slideshow can be seen here. More pictures will be uploaded soon.

We hope to see you all next year again!

I have some good news: we have some extra seats available for Community Day 2009, which is taking place tomorrow, Thursday June 25th in Mechelen. So, if you haven’t registered, we have a few extra places left that you can book still!

And yes, even those last seats are free and come with food and beverages!

Head over to www.communityday.be for all info and registration.

Thanks to our sponsors, we have a great number of prizes we can give away at Community Day 2009. Here’s an overview (note that any of this can change still):

In the closing keynote, we will be giving away many, many prizes. Here's an overview:

• 1x MSDN Premium Subscription with Team Suite 2008 (1 year) (Sponsored by the Microsoft Regional Director Program)
• 1x Futjitsu-Siemens Windows Home Server (Sponsored by Microsoft Belgium). More info on the Windows Home Server can be found here and here. 
• 1x Touch HD (Sponsored by Microsoft Belgium) More info can be found here
• Bongo bons:
  Bongo Sterrenrestaurants 2009
  Bongo Charmeweekend 2009
  Bongo Weekend Ardennen
  Bongo Fietsweekend 2009
  (Thanks to all our sponsors)
• 1x Visual Studio Team Foundation Server NFR (Sponsored by Microsoft Belgium)
• 1x Visual Studio 2008 Professional NFR (Sponsored by Microsoft Belgium)
• 1x Visual Studio 2008 Standard (Sponsored by Microsoft Belgium)
• 1x Telerik Premium Collection developer license (Sponsored by Telerik)
• 6x Jetbrains .Net Productivity Packs (ReSharper & dotTrace) (Sponsored by Jetbrains)
• GFI licenses
• 1x TechNet Plus Subscription (Sponsored by Microsoft Belgium) More info on Technet Plus can be found here
• 6x MSPress - Windows Application Development (Self-Paced Training Kit) (Sponsored by Microsoft Belgium)
• Several Visual C# 2008 Step by Step (Sponsored by Microsoft Belgium)
• Several 25x Visual Basic 2008 Step by Step
• 2x lichtblauw hemd met MSDN/TechNet borduring

Additionaly, we'll have the following to give away, thanks to Microsoft:

• TechDays 2009 bags
• TechDays 2009 DVD sets
• Expression Studio stickers
• TechEd 2008 DVD sets
• Heroes Happen Here books

Finally, in each session, Het Computerwinkeltje will give away a free book!

Yet another reason NOT to miss THE community event of the year!

Important information for people who still want to register but can’t at this point because the event is fully booked: we expect some seats to become available after we send out reminders, which is due this Wednesday or Thursday. So check back regularly.

Today, we got some very good news from Microsoft. The Microsoft booth at Community Day in Mechelen will be a Windows 7 InstallFest! That means that Microsoft will install for free on your laptop Windows 7 RC in various options.

Bringing your laptop to Community Day is of course required but entirely on your own risk.

Here’s all the info you need:

Come to the Microsoft booth to get Windows 7 installed onto your computer. We are offering different installation options: 
• Wipe and load: This installation type will format your hard disk and put Windows 7 onto your machine. You will have to reinstall all applications, like Office, afterwards.
• Boot from VHD: If you are currently running Windows Vista SP1 or higher, you can run Windows 7 next to your current configuration (without impacting your Windows Vista installation). This installation type will change your boot loader and adds a Windows 7 VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) file to your hard disk. Once finished you can either choose to run you current OS or the freshly deployed Windows 7. Please note that you need to have Windows Vista with SP1 or SP2 installed for this to work.
• Dual Boot: This is a traditional dual boot installation where we will deploy Windows 7 next to your current OS.
There will be two different Windows 7 versions available: one is a demo-ready version that you can use to easily demonstrate the new features of Windows 7 towards your colleagues, customers or friends. The second version is the Windows 7 clean install.

Now that Community Day 2009 is coming closer, it’s time to start twittering about the event as well. For all your Community Day tweets, use #comday !

Again good news from the Community Day front: today, we topped 400 registrations! That means that we only have a few seats left for the event taking place in 4 weeks from now.

Meanwhile, we also have added a closing keynote, in which we will be giving away many prizes, including (probably) weekends, licenses and more.

Check www.communityday.be for all information as well as the last few open seats!

Last Monday, we sent out the invites for Community Day 2009. Little over a week later, we already have 300 registrations, which is of course great news.

That also means that if you really want to be there, you should register as soon as possible!

Another new is that we will be giving away a lot of prizes at the end of the day, thanks to our sponsors. Prizes include licenses for several software products and probably also some weekend-away vouchers will be given away!

As announced earlier, Community Day 2009 is coming! Mark Thursday 25th June in your calendar, as it’s the day you can get a full day of free training and sessions, all courtesy of the Belgian User Groups.

This third edition is a big step for us. For the first time, we are doing an entire day (whereas the 2 previous editions were half a day). We also moved to a new location, as the previous one became too small: we are now in Utopolis in Mechelen.

Since yesterday evening, I finished the website, it’s now live at www.communityday.be . Registration is again free, including food and drinks, BUT seats are limited, so register in time if you want to be sure you can be there!

Please blog/twitter/Facebook about the event. Below is some “blog bling” you can use for that!

I hope to see you all on June 25th!