John,

Code Camps are cool but they are not meant to be full conferences. I've participated and spoken at several .NET Code Camps and while they are free they are meant to provide a much different experience than full blown conferences. For one the CodeCamp agenda is focused on 'fun' or 'off-topic' content rather than typical conference content which is more business and professional development oriented.

Personally I don't think that this is necessarily a good thing either because SOMEBODY is paying for facilities, food, swag, organization and most of all time. Mostly Microsoft and you will get something for free as long as Microsoft decides it's in their interest to provide the funding for these events. In the meantime other conferences that are bringing top notch speakers from all over the world are getting hurt by this trend because it's pretty tough to compete with free.

You can see this in Europe were most smaller .NET conferences are now dead because Microsoft provided so much free training (some of which was not of high quality nor balanced)...

The Code Camp mentality will last as long as speakers decide they're willing to pay to speak at a conference - especially if it's not local to them. It's that same misplaced 'open source' concept commoditizes content and fails to recognize the value that goes into creating that content and knowledge.

Having run many conferences in my day I can tell you that it's freaking expensive to put on a conference and most conferences are lucky if they are breaking even or turn a small profit, so those that put on conferences are certainly not doing it for making it big. Especially not in the Fox market...

The Code Camps I've been to both attending and speaking are fun, but they are nothing like a full conference that I've ever been at. Totally different experience... both have their place.