Workshop with Sara Ford

The Free C# Virtual Workshop – from Basics to Experts

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It’s no secret:  I’m really enjoying my Live Coding Stream.  There’s something invigorating about spending time with friends and writing code together.  I’ve had guests on the show to teach about various topics, and show us how to improve our code.  But every now and again, I get the itch to REALLY teach.. and I plan a full-day workshop.

On Friday, May 18th I hosted our second workshop on the stream.  This C# Workshop covered items for beginners, intermediate developers, and even an advanced topic or two.  I originally planned the event for 8 hours with 8 different guest pair-programmers, but we hit a milestone of 1,000 subscribers on YouTube and I had a ninth speaker asking to join the event.  How could I refuse Scott Hanselman asking to join and show how to apply your C# skills to a Raspberry Pi device?

All told:  nine hours and 26 minutes of non-stop training, laughing, and learning together.  We’ve put together a link collection and some of the sample source code from the event in the stream GitHub repository (csharpfritz/Fritz.LiveStream) I’ve also created a YouTube playlist so that you can review any content that you may have missed:

We had a complete blast sharing this day with you, and I want to thank all of our pair-programmers for participating in the event:

  • Maria Naggaga
  • Sarah Dutkiewicz
  • Steve Smith
  • Bill Wagner
  • Sara Ford
  • Mads Torgersen
  • Phil Japikse
  • Immo Landwerth
  • Scott Hanselman

The Numbers

When you host an event like this, the inevitable question from management folks is: how did you do?  What was attendance like?  I’ll share this report from my Twitch dashboard, in the name of transparency, so that you can see how we did with attendance during the event:

May C# Workshop attendance

May C# Workshop attendance

I cannot tell you how thrilled I am that we had 167 pair-programmers (or viewers you may call them) join us at once during the event.  An average of 141 viewers throughout the day is pretty amazing as well, as I know it was a LONG event and it ran very late in the evening for the European time zones.  192 of you were able to ask questions of our instructors, and I’m very happy with that level of engagement.

What’s Next?

I think this workshop format is amazing, and want to continue pushing the live stream format with more of this content.  I’m in planning now for an Azure Serverless workshop in June with my friends on the Microsoft CDA (Cloud Developer Advocate) team.  Since we hit my goal of 2,000 followers on Twitch, I am also starting planning for an Architecture Workshop to be hosted in July.  The folks at Xamarin and Xamarin University are very interested in helping with a workshop, and I will attempt to slot them for an August event.  In September, we have DotNetConf and I have something SPECIAL planned to coincide with that event.

I hope you enjoy this format, and tune in for the stream either live or on a replay on my YouTube channel.  I’m always available there to answer your questions and write some code with you.  Is there something that I could improve about the workshop or live stream?  Let me know in the comments below.