For many the decision to attend the Microsoft organised two day event was a trivial one, the chance to learn the most up to date web technologies available in the Microsoft stack for FREE is not something to be sniffed at.

I on the other hand had some concerns. I would not have previously classed myself as a “Country Bumpkin” but since my visit last weekend to the Capital I would say that this is a reasonably accurate classification.

To say that I was worried about the commute would be an understatement, In my head the commute to London was a kill or be killed trample-fest, I do not know where I had gained this mental picture but none the less it was there.

A friend of mine gave me a list of rules to live by, which I did not understand until after my first commute experience, these rules follow in the hope they can help anyone else in the same situation:

• Stand on the right hand side of the escalator, walk FAST on the left.
• Morden is in the south, Hendon in the north.
• Don't eat the gum you find on the streets, it's not free candy.
• Buy a Big Issue, but don't pay panhandlers.
• Well known sandwich stores are over priced, look for taxi cafe's.
• Tube it, busses are too confusing, taxi's are too expensive.

I can honestly say though that my nightmare was not realised and I found the experience to be an overall pleasant one.

returning to the event, the WebCamps ethos is to “Learn” then “Build”, this method of teaching seemed to work extremely well especially catching the imagination of everyone who attended the second “Build” day. Some great applications were built along with some excellent friendships.

Day 1 – Learn

Day 2 – Build

Day 2 – Presenting

Our team chose to build an application that would be used to arrange and share journeys If you are ever stranded by let’s say for instance a large cloud of ash. You would use this application to enter your journey details which would then be matched to journeys entered by other users. At this point you could contact any matched user to hopefully share a car or bus.

The schematics for this project are here and the CodePlex site is here. The project was undertaken in ASP.Net MVC 2 using Entity Framework 4.

Technology Studio takes prototyping very seriously and an explanation on why and how we do this can be found here.

I would like to thank Jon Galloway and Christian Wenz for an excellent job presenting and support throughout the build. Also Saqib Shaikh from the Bing team who joined our build team and was an amazing person to code with.