BarCamp Waterloo (Sept 29, 2006)

After a quick ride to Kitchener on the VIA Train, Mark Zielinski and I arrived at the University of Waterloo. Mark was completely in his element as this was his alma mater - he directed both of us to the Tatham Co-Op building for the BarCamp Waterloo event (I'll get Mark's account of the event online very shortly). This BarCamp was organized differently from the BarCamp Earth held at the MSN Building in Toronto. First of all, there wasn't several rooms to choose from - everything was held in a single room, which made it more intimate. The audience ranged from students at the University of Waterloo to independent Web developers.

A BarCamp is an "unconference" where developers sit together and discuss topics ranging from Web 2.0, AJAX, usability, and so forth. Sometimes the topics veer away from development - you can also chat about social topics, documentation, networking, starting up a successful company, and so forth. At the BarCamp Earth Toronto on August 26, I initiated a discussion on internationalizing Web content alongside Ryan Coleman (the organizer). We had about 12 people in the room, and chatted on a range of subjects including the use of double-byte character sets, character encodings, javascript language detection, and translation.

At the BarCamp Waterloo, I stood up to the plate and delivered a demo on Microsoft's ASP.NET AJAX. I focused primarily on the client library, which is compatible on multiple platforms and browsers. Justin Lee (a student and C# MVP) provided an introduction to AJAX. I then gave a demo, showing off some of the Javascript source code (which is completely exposed and accessible to developers). I also demoed the control library. Overall, I think it was well received and I got a lot of questions.

Want to learn more? There is a DemoCamp that will be held in Toronto on October 23 (which I'll try to attend). Here is the link: https://barcamp.org/DemoCampToronto10