We Are Microsoft 2009 - Done and Done Great
The "We Are Microsoft Charity Challenge 2009" event was a great success this year. So many dedicated, community-spirited people contributed their time. The biggest thank you goes out to Toi Wright from the Dallas ASP.Net User Group. She literally put her life into it. She put her husband in the volunteer group also. Now that's thinking. Chris Koenig dedicated some serious time to the event and a portion of Microsoft's funds. Much of that time just might have been spent using twitter with Peter DeBetta, solving the Rubik's cube in minutes, and playing with the Duncan YoYos. It's a tough job...
The TFS portion of the event went great thanks to the footwork of John Burns from Notion Solutions and Paul Hacker from SaaS Made Easy with Chris Koenig doing some team project admin work. The business analyst team spent plenty of time reviewing and entering the requirements in TFS before developers arrived.
Then the weekend started!!
After all of the charities were introduced and the teams gathered, I gave a 45 minute demonstration to some of the group members on everything that was needed to use TFS work items and source control. Others that gave training were Gabe with Telerik for Sitefinity, Matt with Verio for hosting, and Scott Dockendorf from Telligent for Graffiti. All of the teams were ready to create and deploy truly RAD applications at this point. Teams from several consulting companies showed up such as Sogeti, Telligent, Match, and 3 teams from Pariveda.
There were about 20 charities that were given a two day turn-around from design to delivery. Some of the sites were great because they leveraged content management systems such as Graffiti, Sitefinity, DotNetNuke, and Mojo Portal. There were a few that hand rolled the ASP.NET site because it best fit the requirements.
The Highlights:
- The Mountain Dew went dry on the first night. It birthed a new development framework, the MDF - Mountain Dew Framework - the amount of Mt. Dew to get from Design to DAL to Delivery or similar.
- The chocolate covered coffee beans needed pennies to get them out of the dispenser so we took the top off and ate them anyway. (What's in your wallet? Not pennies - I'm sure)
- The bowl of Hershey's kisses took all weekend to drain. We were all eating healthy...Right.
- The Dickey's Barbeque didn't last even with a second delivery.
- Some great "We Are Microsoft" blankets were distributed to the true Night Owls, but they were really a batman costume for some.
- Some found out that they couldn't deploy at the 11th hour - but hip-hip-hurray for PowerPoint.
- A chicken (foam mascot) came before the egg - so that debate is FINALLY over and solved. (See the "proof" on Facebook)
- The value of a User Experience / Design professional was felt by all teams. Some brought their own from places like Arkansas. There will be more UX pros at next year's event.
- Awards were given to memorable people and their "special" talents. I was awarded the "Best TFS Ninja". Thanks everyone - I did my share of work - TFS style.
- Charities were overjoyed to get feature-rich web applications that they can maintain themselves for years to come.
- Fun was had my all !!!
To get the real-deal-feel for what the atmosphere was like, there are at least 187 photos and 18 videos located at: http://www.facebook.com/groups/edit.php?members&gid=25590171916#/event.php?eid=44676024865
-Vince