Microsoft uses (boot)camps to promote new products. The website devcamps.ms contains the curriculum. At the writing of this post there is Windows Phone, Windows Azure, Web and Windows. It’s free so I registered for the Web Camp and signed up for the accessibility and Webmatrix hands-on-labs. Turns out I wasn’t alone.

The keynote was done by Kris van der Mast, a Microsoft MVP and Azug.be board member. He talked about Webmatrix, Web API and HTML5. He gave some usefull tips and demo’s and even shed some light on SignalR.

• buildmypinnedsite.com, for making pinned sites
• programmableweb.com, find Web API’s
• websockets.org, demo’s of HTML5 Websockets

After the lunch the hands-on-laps started.

My first lab was about accessibility. Turned out Jeroen Hulscher gave the same presentation as on Devdays 2011. But he updated the “undress-my-site” bookmarklet and someone in the audience gave the tip of using Fangs when developing for the screenreader.

The last lab was with Webmatrix. Never used it before, but the demo looked promising. Marcel Nieuwpoort created a WordPress site from scratch and changed the theme. Updating sites like WordPress could be difficult when using plugins and the data in the database will be erased, be sure to backup before you go there! The hands-on-lab failed with the message “This type of page is not served”. At the end I figured it out: open the folder containing the index.html, not the topmost with all the demos in subfolders. I my case I had to open “C:\WebCampsTrainingKit\Demos\WebMatrix – Part 1\Source\Code\DatabaseWithData”. Just a small tip 🙂
The razor syntax is very nice for quick website developement. Go check it out!

Download WebMatrix
Browse or Download trainingskit.