David has been working in the IT industry for a long time and has a very impressive history with DotNetNuke as well. He started the presentation with a history of DotNetNuke and a sort of state of the union type coverage of what DotNetNuke is and can do at a high level. He discussed some of the other DotNetNuke subprojects available as open source or for sale on www.SnowCovered.com.
David started out his first demo with SQL Profiler watching the database calls as he added a new module to the DNN site home page. We followed David through a whirlwind tour through DotNetNuke’s functionality and use. We saw how to skin modules and create custom site templates. The presentation was really great but a little bit disjointed. I’m looking forward to downloading his slide deck from his website – www.box160.com.
Part of the reason it was difficult to pay attention to the final presentation was the huge number of people who took it upon themselves to “liberate” some of the books which had been reserved for giveaways. It was shocking. The announcement was made up front that the books were the end of the code camp and that everyone would get one book because the number of people almost exactly matched the number of books. Despite this, people would walk up and take several books. I watched one person take two books from the table and go outside to put them in her car. They came back in and took two more books! Once these were also safely stowed in the car, this person felt no shame in taking two more books at the end of the event. If there was only one person doing this I’d have chalked it up to one moron. Instead it seemed like dozens of people did this. It probably started when the people who left at lunch decided to help themselves to the book they wanted before they left. Since they were taking all the “good” books, some other people decided they had better help themselves before everything was gone. OK – fine. But how do you go from “Everyone should get a book” to “I deserve the 3 or 4 I want to take”. This wasn’t my code camp to run, but it seemed like no one was watching or cared until I informed one of the folks from Charlotte what was happening and they got Doug to make an announcement. Of course, Doug caught one guy taking 3 books and sticking them in his bag – this guy got a quick talking to and the books were back on the table. Highly aggravating and highly tacky.
— Matt Ranlett