Last night we hosted our first “GeekNight” in the “Silverlight Developers in Denmark” group.
It turned out to be a big success. Well, I can’t talk for the others, but personally I think it was a big success and it seemed like the others at the event had the same experience as me.
So what is a GeekNight?
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Actually the concept of a GeekNight, at least how we define it, is very simple.
Put together some “geeks” (developers) in a room and let them code some Silverlight.
That’s basically it. All participants coded on their own stuff. Some knew what they would code on from the beginning and others started out by talking with others about ideas for something to look into.
What worked really well was the way you could just ask questions and have an answer or dialog about it right away. Guess we all know the feeling of having a problem which is either to minor to compensate for effort of creating a post on Stack Overflow or else where, or to complex to describe in such forum. Yesterday I ran into one of these and could right away as a person about how he usually solved that. Before that I didn’t knew if I were the only one with this problem or just to stupid to figure out how to solve it 
By talking to one of the other participants I found out that there weren’t any “easy” solution for this and we had a great chat about the problem.
That was really great!
Another great thing were the huge difference in level of experience with Silverlight. Some had no experience with Silverlight at all and were starting the event by installing the tools. Others were people making a living of doing only Silverlight development. So there were room for all kinds of questions
I’m looking forward to the next “GeekNight” and hope we will have some great coding hours together.
Sign up for the next event here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/1178036539
My GeekNight project
I personally had a plan from the beginning of the event. I wanted to convert my game “Balloon Mayhem” to an Windows Phone 7 game. It actually turned out pretty great with a semi working game, integrated with an online hiscore. Here is some of the screenshots I tweeted during the process.
The game didn’t get done at that night, but that’s ok. I learned a lot as I played around with some WP7 Silverlight controls like Pivot control and page navigation on the phone.
Hopefully I will get the game done one day and you can then find it in the marketplace, but I’ll let you know when that happen. Maybe after the next GeekNight? Who knows.
– Enjoy!
