Last week was a great week for my user group FutureDEV – instead of a regular meeting, we have organized a small event on development for Windows Phone. At first we planned to do just another meeting, with me redelivering my NFC talk from WinDays…

But no – I’ve mentioned that to our Nokia Developer Champion team, and they have offered to support the event with some sweepstakes prizes, and the local Microsoft DPE team has suggested that we do two sessions in parallel, covering both beginners and advanced topics. We added a roundtable discussion featuring local Windows Phone developers – and the Windows Phone Dev Event was born!

We have offered 150 free tickets and around 2/3 of them were taken in less than 24 hours. A few days later they were all gone and we asked people to let us know if they cannot make it, so we can invite others. Out of 150 people, around 100 showed up. That’s just the average for the free events – around 2/3 of registered folks show up, and that’s exactly how many people our venue (Microsoft Croatia office) can accommodate. Perfect

We had two sessions – Andrej Radinger was in charge of the jumpstart to Windows Phone development, and I was (again) talking about NFC, playing with NFC tags and showing some NFC related code. Fun as usual.

After sessions, we had a small chat with local Windows Phone developers: Ante Marić, Hrvoje Stanišić, Igor Ralić, Petar Paar and Zvonimir Dimovski, presenting their published applications and their overall experience with WP development and WP Store.

Last, but not the least – the sweepstakes: Tino Petrina, student developer that loves Windows Phone won the Lumia 820 developer device, and there were prizes sponsored by FFWD.PRO conference, Pluralsight and Mindscape. And we had T-shirts for everyone, sponsored by Microsoft, with the following text: “I attended mscommunity.hr and I almost won Lumia 820”

More photos from the event can be found here and here (at the bottom).

And last, but not the least: thanks to Microsoft DPE Croatia and Nokia Developer Champion Program, Mario and Vedran for the photos; and MS student partners Andrej, Mislav, Ana and Ivan for welcoming people at the entrance.