Hartford area developers are holding their first Code Camp on Saturday, August 16th from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the New Horizons Computer Learning Center (Bloomfield CT).

They are accepting abstracts for presentations from all .NET developers. Each session should be about 90mins in duration and the content should be on developer topics that would be of interest to attending developers. Just about anything in .NET and other Microsoft technologies.

Choose a .NET topic of interest and send a brief abstract or outline, your developer experience, expected audience level, etc or any other questions to ctdotnet@gmail.com

The New Hampshire .NET User Group (www.nhdn.com) is hosting renowned speaker and author John Papa for LINQ, Entities and a touch of SilverLight on July 24th at Daniel Webster College, Nashua NH.

Save the dates of September 20-21, 2008 for Code Camp 10 at the Microsoft Offices in Waltham, MA. It's hard to believe this will be the 10th Code Camp since Thom Robbins et. al. started the Code Camp concept in 2004.

This will be a special edition of Code Camp with a few new items in addition to the popular presentations by community members. Details on submitting speaker abstracts and registration available in the next few weeks. Check back.

Chris Bowen, Developer Evangelist for the Microsoft Northeast District will be speaking on Introduction to Game Development with XNA at the Wednesday, July 9th meeting of the Boston .NET User Group in Waltham, MA. Details are available at http://www.bostondotnet.org/.

This year at TechEd Developers 2008 I helped organize the Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) community led discussions for INETA with my colleagues Bob Goodearl and Stuart Celarier. Each session has a volunteer moderator from the community to lead the discussion and a volunteer host for logistics. Session topics are submitted prior to the conference and voted on by the community at large as a basis for selection and scheduling.

There were 39 sessions throughout the 4-day conference including a BOF Event Night on Wed 6/4 with 18 sessions and a nice buffet dinner and open-bar sponsored by Microsoft. Throughout the seessions there was some great dicussions and the feedback has been postive.

Now back to "real" work after an enjoyable week in Orlando, and some recovery from the long days...