Community Tech Days Kochi, October 23, 2010 - Part 2

 

For first part, click here

After the session by Raj we had a small tea break, which I normalize utilize to network with similar minded ones. Here, I met a couple of guys who were working on environments as diverse as from Linux to windows to mobile devices. When we were back, Vinod was back on the dais for his presentation on T-SQL tips and tricks. I had attended his session once and his knowledge on sql has amazed me. This time he started with a simple declaration and initialization statement, a new feature in SQL 2008 and showed us the various ways to fine tune it. 

Then he went on to demonstrate the common errors we may make while creating indexes, usage of ISNULL & COALESCE and also the options we may overlook while creating databases. But the one I like the most is the tip to use HIERARCHY_ID to use for sorting the a list of IP addresses. It was a wonderful session, which caused many seasoned people like us in the crowd to take  extra care while playing around with databases and while writing T-SQL scripts. As always time was a constraint here, so he has to cut short his session and invited Shalvin for his session ADO.NET Entity Framework.

Shalvin, a .NET Corporate Trainer and Consultant is regular speaker a K-MUG events. His session was like an hands on session and I felt the need for a laptop, so that I can try it there itself. He started with explaining the advantages an ORM has over the relational model. Then he went to demo a small contact management application which was created using WPF and ADO.NET EF. He showed us how to create a data source, generate ORM mapping and then binding and displaying data in controls such as combo box and datagrid using LINQ. 

He wrapped the session by showing how easy is to maintain a data centric application developed using ADO.NET Entity Framework as it decreases the amount of code needed for CRUD operations and also it is loosely-coupled with the underlying schema, which makes it less error prone to changes made in the database. When Shalvin wounded up the session, everyone went to have lunch, which was a buffet arranged in the back section of the auditorium and the food served matched the expectation of many.

Manu Zachariah was all geared up and raring to go, as we were taking seats after lunch. He is an security expert and also an active speaker in events all across India.

He started his presentation with showing the screenshots of attacks by Pakistani and Indian hackers during the Independence Day week. After that he explained the logon and auditing events that occurs when we logon to a machine running on Windows. He started off with NTLM and SAM concepts which were predominantly used in earlier versions of windows and also pointed out the fact that these two are now deprecated in the newer versions because it’s using older encryption algorithms. Then he explained about Kerberos authentication and its 3 step process for authentications and various event id generated during the process.

 After Manu concluded his talk, Shiju an MVP in Microsoft.NET MVC came up for an interesting session on NoSQL Databases. I was actually looking forward to this session coz a lot of being said about the same with many social networking site are using it for managing their huge data. First Shiju clarified that NoSQL databases are not a replacement for its counterpart, but provide another option for storing data and also removed the doubts with its name too(NoSQL means 

Not Only SQL, many of us thought that it contains No Sql). After a brief intro, he went on to speak about RavenDB, a NoSQL database completely written using  .NET Framework. He also demo ed a small application which can display, add and update data in a NoSQL database and also explained to us that its retrieval operations are extremely fast and huge handle huge amounts of data (to be precise upto 16 TB of data in a single machine) and also about the various licensing options available for RavenDB.

 

Then we had a small tea break and after that Yanesh Tyagi, works for a consulting company and has got 16 years of experience in IT field came up for his talk on Generics – A Revisit. 

He started off by going back in time to those days when there was no generics. He talked about issue that came up so often, such as type conversions errors happening because of the delayed binding and showed us how we were able to solve these issues by using Generics. Some people among audience also shared their experience with us while doing development without using Generics. We did not feel out of place coz he showed as a lot small, neatly written programs that explained the cause and also about various types Action, Predicate.

The last session of the day was by Praseed, again on .NET Serialization and XML. He opened the session by talking about various types of serialization available in .NET such as Binary Serialization and XML Serialization. He used his current working experience, that is sending data between an iPhone application and .NET server for explaining in serialization in detail and its advantages.

With this the event came to close and the K-MUG members posed for some snaps with the trophies and then had a small meeting to discuss about future activities and it was decided to conduct a monthly local usergroup  meeting for Kochites starting Novemeber and then everyone started their long/short journery to their respective places….