What does that mean? In short:

becomes

 Now taking things seriously, I will do my best to present Microsoft technology to anyone who is willing to learn, especially at UTCN.

Thanks Salo and Tudor Vlad for your support, I won’t let you guys down.

 The purpose of these meetings is for all the Microsoft community in Romania to gather in one place where every member can get to know the other and learn from the experience of the pros. Most of the participants were from the academic domain – students from the universities of Romania, but there were also participants from Microsoft Romania and the MVP – Microsoft Most Valued Professional program.

Although the event lasted only 3 days, we got the best out of them because it was nicely organized. Each day was split in two parts: the presentations – 5 hours in the morning and the fun – 5 hours in the afternoon till evening.

Friday

The first presentations were held by members of the Developer and Platform Evangelism team from Microsoft Romania. Their targets were marketing and strategy.

As finishing touch on the first session of presentations, Todi talked about the status of the MAP – Microsoft Academic Program and MSP programs in Romania. His presentation I found to be most impressive since it made me feel as I was part of the community, although I was participating as a wannabe MSP and had a reduced activity in the MSP program.

That afternoon we had a paintball competition in a forest nearby. All the participants of the bootcamp were invited. As there were quite a lot of us, we were divided into two major parts, each having two hours for their game. Our major part was again divided into three teams: brown (that team that I was in), blue (the team that Cornel and Cretz were in) and grey. The equipment was nice: the guns seemed accurate enough to me, the camouflage clothes had just the right amount of thickness to (partially) shield you from the impact with the paint balls and let you move with ease, but my headgear got steamy because of my breathing during each game.

The game was nice but not exactly balanced because of the colors of the camouflage uniforms. The brown and grey teams were the most advantaged as they could easily camouflage on the ground in the rustling leaves (for brown) or behind trees (for grey) but the blue team could easily be spotted anywhere on the playground (hmmm maybe they were suppose to camouflage up in the trees as they would be hard to spot with a blue sky on their background).

Saturday

Saturday morning was reserved for the first edition of “Demo This!” which is a power demo competition. All the participants were students (MSP or wannabe MSP) with one exception: Marius Bancila which is an MVP. There were a total of 5 presentations:

• Gestural control computerinterface – Victor
• .NET secrets and inner workings – Tibi Chiorean
• Dependency explorer - Marius Bancila
• RLINQ – Cretz and Cornel
• MS Robotics Studio: architecture and coreography – Carlos

Of all the presentations, I knew the most about RLINQ as it was made by Cornel and Cretz. RLINQ is an acronym for Reflection-LINQ and has as purpose to permit the querying of .NET assemblies by using LINQ and LINQ syntax. Cornel and Cretz divided the task into two parts: Cornel handled the “querying .NET assemblies by reflection” part and Cretz provided a WPF interface for the project (actually two interface: a simple one and a more complex one that highlighted what WPF can do). Taking into account that they only started working on the demo about one week before the event and got 3-rd place, my opinion is that they did a nice job. Well done guys

 The afternoon was reserved for a visit to the city of Sibiu and the Bruckenthal museum which I missed.

Sunday

The last day of the bootcamp was “opportunity day”. There were three presentations of members of the MSP program (students or fresh graduates) that managed to make an entry in the IT industry. They were all impressive and certainly proved that it can be done even by a student or fresh graduate.

Sunday afternoon was reserved for going home.

All-in-all the Bootcamp really impressed me and I found out that it was easy to talk to the people of the community regardless of their titles and age which is really great. This is definitely a community that I would like to get more involved in.

For better quality pictures, you can find my whole Bootcamp album here.

I’ve started this blog as a result of Tudor Salomie and Tudor Vlad‘s encouragements and advice (thanks guys).

My name is Muresan Adrian and I’m currently a student at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca in the forth year of study and I work as a developer at a firm with a main focus in financial software. My hobbies that first come to mind are programming, technology, StarCraft (will always have a special place in my heart) and physics (I’ll seldom pass on reading/watching a good physics documentary).

The topics and categories of my future posts will be about the things I encounter and find interesting, about my hobbies and, more generally, about the things that make me who I am.

Without further delay, I’ll come out and say it: “Hello World! I’m in the blogosphere.”.