I finally got some spare time to write a short review of the Umbraco Codegarden 2008 in Copenhagen.

The core developer and MVP retreat started out with a boat trip where we got a nice view of Copenhagen from the sea- and canal side. In the afternoon we drove to the country house in Marielyst where we would spend the two coming days and was really surprised by how awesome the house actually was. It was really huge and had a cool gaming room, pool, wifi, plasmas ... you name it!!

It was really nice to meet the team and get to know each one through good food, soccer games, gaming, hacking, chats and so on. I belive this aspect of the retreat was the most important one but the Open Space session was also interesting. For the most part I attended sessions covering project organisation, commercial aspects, regional presence and more technical sessions covering architecture of v5 and more.

We headed back to Copenhagen Sunday afternoon and after a good italian pizza most of us headed back to the hotel to relax and let the brain work overtime organising all the impressions from the retreat. Monday was all about preparations for the conference and exploring the city as the weather was perfect! In the afternoon some of us headed for Tivoli and spent the rest of the night on rollercoasters. Great fun!

First day of Codegarden 2008 included keynote, two tracks of presentations (intermediate and advanced), package coding contest, bingo, mingling, demoing, hacking and last but not least Guitar Hero 3 which was also a blast (had to get one of those when I got back, hehe)!

Second day of Codegarden 2008 was Open Space day and the conference format worked really well this year. All sessions (20+?) was defined in less than half an hour (!). "Minutes" (notes) from the sessions are in the Umbraco Books section. However, quite a few are missing but will hopefully find their way there soon! I attended the package coding contest with a Google Translation Nitro and ended up second place and won some books (.NET 3.5, LINQ and Silverlight 2.0 - Niels wanted the latter one so badly that I gave it to him ;). I'll blog about this Nitro later. Winners of the Umbraco Awards '08 was also announced at the end of the day. I believe the results will show up on umbraco.org in near future.

Unfortunately I had to rush to the airport to catch my flight and missed the opportunity to thank people for making the retreat and codegarden such a success, so here goes: THANK YOU ALL! =)

Photos can be found at Flickr - a big thanks to Doug for loads of great shots from both the retreat and conference!