K-Mug organized the Kerala edition of the Community Tech Days at Kochi on 23rd of October 2010. I arrived at Kochi a day before, on 22nd and stayed at my friend’s place. I started my journey to the venue by boarding a bus bound to Kaloor from Kakkanad and the heavens opened up when I was about to get down from the bus. So I took an auto from the bus stop to the venue, which was behind the international stadium where the cricket match between India and Australia got cancelled recently and in my mind I was little bit worried about these conditions affecting the crowd participation .
I reached the venue around 8.40 AM, welcomed by Sathish, who like me landed at Kochi a day before at the registration desk. Sreeju was busy with finalizing the last minute arrangements and Vinod, Raj, Shalvin and Praseed were doing a last minute check on their presentation. So without wasting much time, I joined Sathish in the registration desk, which was getting busier by each minute. Although rain had played a spoilsport in the morning, it didn’t damaged the participants spirit as they turned up in huge numbers.
I reached the venue around 8.40 AM, welcomed by Sathish, who like me landed at Kochi a day before at the registration desk. Sreeju was busy with finalizing the last minute arrangements and Vinod, Raj, Shalvin and Praseed were doing a last minute check on their presentation. So without wasting much time, I joined Sathish in the registration desk, which was getting busier by each minute. Although rain had played a spoilsport in the morning, it didn’t damaged the participants spirit as they turned up in huge numbers.
Although it was planned to start the event by 09.30 AM, but delay in completing the registrations meant that the inauguration ceremony started only by 09.45 AM. Sreeju welcomed all the speakers and participants on behalf of K-Mug and then intimated us about the sad demise of Raj, passed away on .. due to an heart attack. He was looking after the academic activities of K-Mug and ever present face in all the activities of K-Mug. So as a mark of respect Sreeju requested all to observe a minute silence in memory of fallen comrade. After that Sreeju went on to give a brief talk about K-Mug and its activities to the audience and then called Vinod on to stage. Vinod, a developer evangelist works with Microsoft Corporation is an expert in SQL Server. He thanked all the participants for making the community a big hit and an active one, which in turn has helped K-Mug to bag the Best Community Impact Award for the year 2010. Vinod then went on to present the trophy on behalf of Microsoft to K-Mug office bearers, led by Sreejumon.
After the presentation, Praseed was on the stage to give his session in MONO, aptly titled PLUNJ into MONO. Praseed, working with Cabbot Solutions, Kochi as a practice manager for mobile applications is not a stranger to the community in Kerala. He is a regular speaker in most of technology events happening in Kerala. He gave an introduction about the MONO project and how it is trying to bring platform independence for .NET applications. This man always amuses me with his knowledge in various areas and his presentation style. He always tries to keep it as simple as possible so that even a novice can understand it and it was no different here. Although he intended to use macbook for showing the demo, insufficient battery backup caused him to change the plans and used his windows machine for the demo. He then introduced an accounting package, SPAM4.net, which he developed for educational purpose and it was written way back in .NET1.1 and has got 7000 odd lines of code. By changing the backend to SQLite and recompiling using MONO, without much difficulty he was able to run it on Windows, Linux and Mac . For the next demo he compiled his already well publicized SLANG4.NET compiler using MONO and without a single change to the code, he ran it using the MONO runtime. While summing up his presentation, he hoped that success of MONO will be a major factor in achieving platform independence for applications developed using C# and will also help to make up ground of Java.
Next up was Raj Choudhary to give his talk on productivity tools offered by Telerik. But due to the corruption of original VM, his talk was delayed coz of the time needed for the restoration of his backup VM. So in the meantime, he talked about the MONO project and its support for running applications developed in ASP.NET. He also pointed out that there is no IDE like the Visual Studio for MONO, so one will need to use third party tools or need to manually compile and run an application in MONO runtime. By this time his VM got up and running and without wasting much he started his session. I was attending a session by Raj for the first time and very much impressed by his way of doing the presentation. This guy has got a very good vocal cord, as he didn’t use the microphone for addressing 100 odd people and believe me it was very much audible for the persons sitting in the last row.
To introduce the controls, he narrated a previous experience from his earlier part of his career, a customer needed to develop an CRM like application which resembles outlook in functionality and needs it to be a web based application. With much difficulty and hard work, Raj was able to sign off the project, with the help of the controls provided by the Telerik Productivity Suite. He then showed demo for various rad tools such as Time Picker, Scheduler, Editor etc and also showed us that how easy is to implement it in our applications. He rounded of his presentation by offering a 20% discount to event participants for an outright purchase of Telerik Productivity suite.
Read Part 2 here
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