I plan to live forever. So far, so good.

Even though this comes with a slight delay, I’m just writing to say I’m very excited about our recent tour of events covered by the ITSpark and CodeCamp communities.

To keep things short, the end of November had both our communities covering events in 5 cities – Timișoara, Oradea, Cluj, Iași and Bucharest – and speaking to a total of about 400 attendees.

Among the speakers, we’ve had 6 Microsoft MVPs, and we’ve covered topics ranging from new technologies coming out in 2012 (Windows 8, SQL Server “Denali”, .NET Framework 4.5, the System Center 2012 suite and Hyper-V 3.0), to technologies already in use today (HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, EF, Unit Testing, MVC, WCF streaming and Office 365).

The feedback we’ve got was extremely positive, so we’ll definitely do this again in the future. Until then, I’ll leave you with a few other links (impressions, photos and some session slides):

• Adrian Stoian writes about the experiences in Timișoara and Oradea on his blog
• Our CodeCamp friends in Iași posted some pictures from their event as well
• Mihai Tătăran’s session on building Windows 8 apps with HTML5 and JavaScript
• Radu Vunvulea’s slides on Windows Phone multitasking and local database (a session which unfortunately he didn’t get to present in Bucharest, as his flight from Cluj was cancelled)
• Andrei Ignat session on MVC/EF is here
• Andrei Rinea’s WCF streaming slides and code are here
• All the sessions in Iasi are gathered in a post on the CodeCamp.ro blog
• My slides on Hyper-V 3.0 overview
• …and a couple of photos from the event in Cluj:

If you want more resources on Windows 8, I definitely recommend you check out the Build conference website, where you’ll find 275 recorded sessions on technologies coming in W8.

Also, for those of you who haven’t had a chance to get to the events, I just wanted to point out a thing we also mentioned to the attendees, which is that we’ve published all the video recordings from the ITCamp conference earlier this year. If you weren’t there or just wish to view some of the sessions again, head on to our ITCamp channel on Vimeo.

I don’t want to end this without sending our thanks to all our sponsors and partners for these events: Microsoft Romania, Yonder, Ullink, Small Footprint, Endava, Pras Consulting, OradeaDevs, Avaelgo and Transcent.

A huge thank you to all the speakers and attendees as well – we couldn’t have done all this without you!

I haven’t written anything on my blog lately, mostly because I’ve been busy organizing what seems to be one of the largest IT community events in the country: ITCamp 2011

We’ve received an amazing response from both the speakers we’ve invited, the sponsors we’ve contacted, and from all of you out there who have registered for the event (we’re way past the 200 people mark).

Quoting from the event website:

ITCamp 2011 in numbers:

• 2 conference days, with 2 parallel tracks each day (Dev and ITPro)
• 19 speakers (among whom we have 10 Microsoft MVPs and 4 international speakers)
• 21 technical sessions and over 5 hours of networking/discussion breaks

Don’t miss ITCamp if:

• You want to be up to date with the latest IT technologies
• You appreciate the chance to interact with highly skilled professionals in your area of expertise
• You are an IT manager, team lead, programmer, database or systems administrator and you work with the Microsoft Application Platform
• You want to find out more about useful stuff meant to improve your existing skillset
• You enjoy presentations held by experienced speakers, who are well known across the country or even across the world
• You wish to attend trainings that are both cost-efficient and packed with useful infoYou intend to expand your customer or collaborator/partner portfolio

The event starts tomorrow, and will take 2 whole days. You can follow what’s happening there on Twitter  (@itcampro or #itcampro) and Facebook (facebook.com/ITCamp.ro).

With the help of an amazing team, we’ve recently launched a new Romanian entry/mid-level ITPro community, called ITSpark. Under the tagline “Your IT adventure!“, the community wants to become one of the top resources for the IT professionals in the country (both beginners and experts alike).

Even if the community is still at the beginning, I can assure you that the people behind it aren’t. It did take us a little while, but with the help we got from our partners, we’ve managed to get to where we are now.

So, what next? Well, for one, we’ll be hosting our first offline community event on November 27th, in Cluj-Napoca. And until then, I’m going to hold a security awareness / White Hat Hacking course starting this Saturday.

Beyond that, we’ll also be expanding the content on the website via webcasts, podcasts, screencasts, articles and the like. So stay tuned, good things are coming!