Community Day 2008 – 12 sessions by 9 user groups

Yesterday the second Belgian Community Day took place in Keerbergen. I joined in a bit later due to some meetings at the office but it was still more than worth it. Nine Belgian User Groups joined in this year to organize a day “For the Community, By the Community”. I would like to thank all the people involved into getting this organized, I know it was a lot of work these last months. Special thanks to Ilse and Gill as they really made sure eveything was running.

When I got there, halfway during the event, 4 sessions were underway. I decided to join in Riemer Grootjans’ session on XNA game development. It was a great session going over the most important elements to start doing game development. Not (yet) having done any game development myself I was amazed to learn how everything built in 3D is done by drawing triangles! Check out Riemer’s fantastic tutorials Riemer has on his website. This will get you started in no time.

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What’s more, Riemer is releasing his first book on XNA development on the 30th of June 2008 and showed us lots of samples from the book. The book is titled “XNA 2.0 Game Programming Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach” and is being released by Apress.

Congratulations on this Riemer, I’m going to get one as soon as possible!

If you want to join other game developers or just game lovers in Belgium, be sure to keep an eye on the new XNA User Group (XNABUG) meetings.

After Riemer’s session I actually tried to check out more than one session so I saw some new stuff on SQL Server 2008, a debate between Joris and Ilse on Exchange Public Folders and Sharepoit (can’t wait to see the full video of that one :-), and Gill’s Deep Dive on Silverlight 2. Several sessions were recorded so you can expect them online on Chopsticks anytime soon.
I’m sorry I missed out Kurt Claeys’ session on ADO.NET Entity Framework, I heard it was very good.

It was nice talking to all of you during dinner. Great work and already looking forward with next year. I hear you have some new ideas…