Sunday, June 21, 2009

TechEd2009 Bangalore

I am just back from the Bangalore TechEd2009 and forced to write on this. This event was organized by BDotNET and BITPro, India's largest communities for .NET and IT respectively and backed by Culminis, INETA (Asia Pacific) and PASS along with the great sponsors Infragistics, Telerik and SymIndia.


The Bangalore community has already conducted TechEd for many times and this one was showing the maturity level and professionalism they have achieved. It has all started with a mail from BITPro addressed by Kaliyan S. Just after getting the mail the mad rush for securing a seat for TechEd2009 started and was houseful by the afternoon. Luckily I forwarded the invitation mail to my colleagues and friends within time and they could manage themseleves to be there in the event.

It was a two full day event and was scheduled on June 20-21, 2009. I would like to recount all the sessions which were very involving and could prove a turning point in creating interest for upcoming Microsoft technologies which are promising and productive at the same time. Where it helped me to get better into my understanding of Silverlight, WCF and WF, it has given much insight to get aware of the buzzwords Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Hyper V and Location Sensors of Windows 7. I was privileged to see the cool demos of Windows 7, ASP.NET 4, Silverlight 3, Microsoft Azure Service Platform, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Virtualization. Thanks to the speakers who were just perfect in showing the possibilities with the above mentioned technologies/platforms, which are either in Beta or available for CTP release.

Day 1 (June 20, 2009 Saturday)


TechEd2009 Bangalore started off on time with the Keynote presented by Ramkumar Krishnaswamy (Director, Microsoft Technolgoy Center). He has spoken on the strategies vendors should follow while deciding to design their Data Centers and choose their locations considering the carbon foot print they leave behind. His focus on Green IT was the effective guidelines for the vendors to follow and a proven stuff already Microsoft has implemented. Check The Architecure Journal #18 for more on Green IT and its importance some year down the line from now.


Next came the duo Vijay (Texas Instruments) and Kalpesh Vic (Infragistics), who shown the kernel enhancements Windows 7 has embodied. It was great to know that Windows 7 would be great in performance than Windows Vista due to various changes at kernel level which includes starting a particular service based on the demand. Vic shown the cool new features of Windows 7 and a mesmerizing demo of Sensor and Location Platform. With this new feature we can expect a lot new developments which will be motion aware, location aware, light aware and may be a combination of two or more.

After this great session, Chaitra (Intel) came up with a capturing session of ASP.NET 4.o. She explored many great features which will make the next release of ASP.NET 4.0 a sure sought after stuff for developers. I liked the added code snippets even for html tags and asp.net server controls. Just great features and sure to save a lot coding time. Many would complain that Visual Studio would make us totally dependent and we will forget in coming days to write a piece of code for a basic TextBox :). After all, Visual Studio is for rapid development and even after complaining this they would sure to like and use this.

Kashi (Co-Founder of BDOTNET and Technical Architect, Infosys) came next, and he needs no introduction. He went smooth in showing how BizTalk Server can come with a helping hand when an architechture needs to integrate with different protocols and diverse technologies. I must admit that I missed the intent of this session and would like to go through the slides once more after reading a bit more on BizTalk Server.

Enough learning, it's been four hours since morning and I was badly feeling hungry. Sorry Kashi, this was also one of the reasons I felt bit dowsy in your session. It was 1:00PM now and the next agenda was to have lunch without any delay. It is worth mentioning that the lunch served was more than welcome and was of good standard considering TechEd2009 Bangalore a free event. This was also the time to get together with friends while eating and extending the professional network by meeting other attendees.

Be it a regular Saturday, it would be a time for going into deep sleep after lunch. Unfortunately K. Meena (SymIndia) didn't allow me to do so by her superb session on comparison of BizTalk and WCF. She was at ease while delivering the complex architectural difference on WCF and BizTalk Server. She made it very clear, where and how we should decide to go for a particular platform or to choose both together. Hope to get the slides uploaded soon by BDOTNET, which will help me to do a recap of this session.

Vic was always fantastic and full of energy. His demo of Silverlight 3 was just great. Where he explained a lot new features of Silverlight3 like Search Engine friendliness (Deep Linking), 3D projection and pixel shading effects, his demo on Out of Browser capability and Element to Element Binding needs special mention. Liked and eagerly waiting to get this out from Beta so that I can easily solve lot of current problems of Silverlight 2 developments.

To end the day one, management session by Sanath (SymIndia) was inspiring. Some of his video collection was just great and I am sure to contact him to get a few of them from his repository.


Day 2 (June 21, 2009 Sunday)



I was pleased by the great show on Day 1 and was excited about the Day 2 which enlisted some of the great speakers with hot new topics and pre-release demo of many upcoming platforms from Microsoft.


Day 2 started a few minutes late and I guess agenda for the day altered a bit.

Gayathri (SymIndia) started the day with her session on creating Custom Activities in WF. She elaborated the topic and gave a nice details about the inner working of a Custom Activity of WF and clearly showed in her demo about the different scenarios of WorkFlow services. Being a beginner on WF, I liked this session which widened my imagination.


Gayathri's session was followed by another great session by Janakiram (Bell Labs) and Niraj Bhatt on Microsoft Azure Platform. I was hearing the Cloud Computing buzzword for a while and read a few on websites. I was eager to know more about this when I came to know that the architect of my previous project (Prabu Vontlin), now started offering consultancy on cloud computing through his newly formed company Cloud Funnel. Having all this, I was not having sufficient idea to get the ground. Today I must thank the duo Janakiram and Niraj for giving simple and sweet explanation of cloud computing and get me going ahead with this.



Vic was again in view with his keynote on Infragistics controls. Shown many cool controls in action for coming Silverlight 3 and introduced us with their new UX pattern platform Quince. He made clear the importance of 3rd party tools in development and saving lot of time while exactly meeting the customers' expectations.


Praveen Srivastava (AsthraSoft) took the session to another level up when he explained the SQL Server 2008's capability of managing unstructured and semi-structured data. His demo on Sparse columns and Heirarichal Data was quite involving.


Later came Mohammed Ismail (Unisys) with his information packed PowerPoint slides and discussed in detail about the new features of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, which gives administrators more control and ease in implementation. It was interesting to know Outlook Live, using which administrators can now manage Exchange Server on the move upto a certain extent. Active Directory recycle bin saves the headache of retrieving the mistakingly deleted user back, which now needs to get back from the backup (if only created).


Kaliyan S (Co-Founder of BITPro) and Ravikanth (Dell) came up with a session on new features of Windows Server 2008 R2. IIS 7.5 with .NET Core, Branch Cache, Built-In Virtualization, improved PowerShell and lot more making it a worthy candidate to watch for.


Praveen Srivatsava was again in his great form while taking the session on Virtualization. This was a never to forget session where he gave in depth detail on why and how of Virtualization with supporting demos. Gave a fair idea of licensing model for Virtualization and described performance trade-off between guest and host system. Application virtualization was amazing to know about where an application over guest acted as if it was a native host application. Just great. If we go by the immense power and capability of Virtualization, I guess companies would sure to give this a heed. What a great session to end TechEd2009!


At last vote of thanks from the organizers of TechEd2009 Bangalore to the attendees and speakers along with the give aways for this session. I managed to get an INETA T-Shirt on anwering a question on Windows 7 by Vic. Got a DVD of Windows Server 2008 R2 as give away but sadly missed the much expected Windows 7 DVD, which ran short soon. No issue, we can always have it download and get first hand experience from Microsoft website for testing and review purposes.


On a final note, a job well done by BDOTNET and BITPro and thanks to the sponsors for their helping hand in elevating the skills of professionals.

3 comments:

Vijay Raj said...

Fantastic Write-up dude..!!!

We really appreciate your interest and zeal in blogging about our event.
We also hope, you keep supporting our community like this.

Look forward for the DevCon..!!!!

Cheers'
Vijay
www.msigeek.com

Joseph J said...

Blog is awsome... please let me know such events.. I missed the very good opportunity and forward the invitations next time..

Viswanadh said...

Blog is awesome.. But the Event is not. It's just good.

We have to wait how DevCon would be!