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One of the most important outcomes of showing what you are doing face to face is that you get immediate feedback. That was exactly what happened last Saturday at the Buenos Aires’ CodeCamp 2009 event where we gave talks about beWeeVee and Microsoft Surface.

We had a booth at the event, so feedback started to come pretty fast. Some of the developers there, had already heard about Google Wave; so the concept of co-operation aka “really real-time collaboration” was already understood. From 1500 attendees, only a few knew that there was a company in Argentina that had been pursuing a similar vision, so they were set for a surprise.

Furthermore, a vision where someone can author digital artifacts in co-operation with many peers, through software designed from the ground up to exploit those interactions; was simple to realize when they were able to play with the Notepad Tech Preview at the booth. Definitely it gave a hint of what was going to be expected from our talk about it.

We called the talk “Cocinando una aplicación Silverlight en una hora” (that in english would sounds like “Cooking a Silverlight Application in 1 hour”), that scored another very important point. We were set for a live coding session where we would start the application from the very beginning, aka “File->New Project” and we would end with a beWeeVee enabled application using Model-View-ViewModel in Silverlight 3.

Then we where set for a surprise, the session was scheduled to start after the lunch break at 3:00 PM. When we arrived there at 2:35PM to setup everything, the room was already full. With the help of the organization team, we took out from the room all the extra stuff (like some tables) to make more room; without much success at 2:45PM with the extra room already taken and people already sitting in the floor we had to close the door. To be true, that was a little shocking but it gave us an idea of the kind of feedback we were going to get.

We started from the design and moved through the implementation of the sketching application using MVVM, until we “faked” the synchronization using a single ViewModel in the same instance. It was the time to introduce beWeeVee, the why and how to achieve the co-operation goals. That part of the presentation was fast, but people was also excited. They wanted to know when we were going to release the bits we were using to achieve those results.

The questions regarding the SDK continued after the session at the booth, so we decided to build and release a Community Tech Preview of beWeeVee for everyone to try out. Those are the bits that we used for the CodeCamp demo and presentation with our own internal documentation that we know is a little bit too sketchy, but it shows the most important parts of the API.

In the SDK we had included: Download beWeeVee SDK Community Tech Preview

- beWeeVee API Binaries for .Net 3.5 and Silverlight 3.
- beWeeVee API Documentation in Compiled HTML (.chm).
- “How to write beWeeVee enabled applications in Word 2007 Format” also available on the blog.
- 2 WPF Notepad examples (Server based and P2P -wcf peer channel- based example).
- 3 “Silverlight 3″ examples (including point based sketching, stroke based sketching with server in the same form and stroke based sketching with server).
- 1 beginners very basic WinForm example on how to write your own control with the Low-Level API.

By using the SDK you are agreeing with the TECHNOLOGY PREVIEW LICENSE AGREEMENT found in the License.txt file.

As promised to those attending the session, you can also download in a separate bundle as academic support material from: Download CodeCamp Academic Material

- The CodeCamp MVVM example with “fake synchronization”.
- The CodeCamp MVVM example with real synchronization using beWeeVee.
- The PowerPoint we used at CodeCamp (the PowerPoint is in Spanish, but it has some interesting diagrams of how things look like).

Disclaimer: All background graphics had been used under what we considered academic fair use, with the aim to set the mood of the presentation (and because they allowed to show a more humane — and less technical — theme). If you are the owner and do not consider it fair use, send a mail to info@corvalius.com and we will remove it immediately.

We had setup a forum where you can leave and vote any idea, feedback, comment or bug report at http://beweevee.uservoice.com. For us your feedback is very important.

Happy Coding,
beWeeVee’s Team

Corvalius, Technology announcement, beweevee, codecamp, sdk