"We Are Microsoft Charity Challenge".Equals("Awesome Geeking weekend")
I was one of the participants last week at the We Are
Microsoft Charity Challenge Weekend here in Dallas. The event was organized
very well by Toi
Wright with support from MS Developer Evangelist Chris
Koening . The idea was to build or enhance a charity's Website (chosen by
MS) within the weekend and give a 5 minute presentation on Sunday about the work
done.
Our team was called 4 Devs, a Designer and a non-profit. The
developers were Reza,
Tuan, Tim and
myself. We were lucky to work with Hillyer, a designer whose input really
improved the look and feel of our work. And finally, the charity we worked for
was The Child Abuse Prevention
Center. Here's a team picture minus Tuan who fell ill on the last day.
(L to R) Hillyer, Chris, Reza, myself and Tim
Our goal was to completely redo the Website to give it a Web 2.0 look and
feel and add some new features such as users and membership roles as well as a
calendar module on the side. The overall task seemed too big to manage within a
weekend, but I think we did pretty OK. Here's
our final output that we demoed at the presentation.
We were pretty much
feature complete on sunday, and had some really cool features going for us
including built in multi-language support and on the fly translation
capabilities using Rick Strahl's awesome Localization Resource Provider.
Even though we didn't grab
a place in the top 3 teams (there were a total of 20), I got to meet some great
people, do some networking, eat great food and load up on caffeine. I also
landed a Visual Studo 2008 Pro license as a door prize, and my teammate Tim
nominated me for a cool "Coding Machine" award for staying up and coding through
Saturday night. We still have some improvements to do on the site, and a lot of
refactoring. We are going keep on working together till our client is happy with
the output and gets all his features. If you get a chance to participate in an
event like this, I highly recommend it. Check out http://givecamp.org/ for more information.