DevCon 2010

DevCon 2010 was organized by K-MUG in association with Microsoft, Nokia, eSoft, KelNet. It was expected to be the largest gathering of software engineers in Kerala who are working on Microsoft technologies and it pretty much matched the pre-event euphoria.

As a volunteer my day started very early by setting up the registration desk,  last minute tweaks in the dais and setting up camera for live streaming. At first we were unable to do live streaming  due to unavailability of the internet connection, but by the time Anoop's started taking his session we solved the problems and was streaming live from then on.

As clocked ticked to 9.30, Sreejumon opened the event by welcoming the speakers and delegates to the function. We got a mixed response and the hall was more than half filled with audience ranging from budding young students to seasoned veterans. 

The Sessions were kick started by Janakiram MSV, a Technical Architect with Microsoft Technologies and whose focus is on cloud computing offerings from Microsoft, including the Windows Azure platform. His blog can be found at http://www.janakiramm.net. He started his session, "Cloud – The Meta Platform" by explaining what actually is cloud and how it got the name and then on to its underlying architecture and then to the Windows Azure architecture. He then went on to explain how Windows Azure works and it's pay per usage business structure and  in his second session, which occured later in the day, he gave a live demo of building and hosting an web application in Azure platform.  For More details on Windows Azure click here.

Jani talking about Windows Azure

Next man on the dais was Anoop Madhusoodhanan aka "amazedsaint", a Solution Architect and a Microsoft MVP in Client App Development. His talk was on the latest features in .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. He went on to show the new features in VS 2010 such as intellitrace, parallel programming capablities, pinning the quick watch window etc. Then he explained the new features in .NET 4.0 such as Managed Extensibility Framework, dynamic programming capablities etc. For more these please visit his blog @ http://amazedsaint.blogspot.com/

Then we had a small tea break and after that it was time for Ramaprasanna Chellamuthu, who works with Microsoft as a Developer Evangelist and works on Windows Azure, Windows Mobile and Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio(RDS). He gave us an insight into Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio, which many of the people in the audience including me, never heard off. He quickly created a small sample in RDS, a joystick to drive a car and demoed it the audience. Then he went on to show the video of his buddy home project which he developed to his day to day activities in home such as cooking, cleaning  etc and ended the session by showing us the video of his robot dancing to the tune of  "Humma Humma". from the film Bombay. For more www.microsoft.com/robotics

Ram's Session on Robotics.

After Rama's session, it was time for Manu Zacharia, an Information Security evangelist with more than 16 years of professional experience and MVP in Enterprise Security to give his session on "Web Security and Security Auditing". He showed us, what happens behind the scenes between a request and response and also gave some statistics for vulnerabilities occurring worldwide. By now the time was 1.30 pm and everyone headed to the restaurant for the lunch provided by K-MUG. For more details, please visit Manu's blog at http://manuzacharia.blogspot.com/

Manu's Session on Security

Session resumed by 2.00 pm and first up was Vijay Raj popularly known as "msigeek", who works for Texas Instruments and a MVP. He is also a popular blogger and writes articles on various technologies in his site, www.msigeek.com. His session was on "Managing Application Compatibility in Windows 7". His talk was centered on the various application compatibility options available in Windows 7 and about the latest version of Application Compatablity Toolkit which is available for download from Microsoft .

Vijay's Session

After this session, Jani demonstrated the hosting in the cloud by creating a Twitter like application , which had a windows and web interface and using SQL Azure as the data store. When Jani finished with his presentation, it was almost time for tea break and everyone headed outside to take a break.

When everyone came back, Jeen Shene Stanislaus, a Technical Evangelist with Education & Research, Infosys, Trivandrum was ready for her talk on "Tuning Tools in SQL Server 2008". She gave sneak preview about the various tool available for optimization in SQL such as SQL Profiles, Query Execution Plans, Database Tuning Advisor etc and also gave some idea about the best practices to be followed while writing queries.

After Jeen's session, Praseed Pai, a well known software architect from Kochi, Kerala and regular speaker at UG events and Bar Camps, was on the dais. His session was on "Mixed Mode Windows development using C# and C++", in which he demonstrated how to create a library in C++ and then to import it in our C# code. His session was really cool and show us how much fun is there to fiddle with the various command line tools. Also his presentation was really interesting with comments such as "Exceptions can never be examples !!!! ". Praseed's blog can be found here.

Praseed's Session

And the best was reserved for the last and it was the Office 2010 launch by Vijay. Very few people knew that he got very little time to prep for this session and he did an outstanding job at the end of it. His idea of showing the new features around Fifa World Cup storyline had gone well among the audience. 

The features he showed us include,

•  Using OneNote to take down notes and synchronizing with mobile phones.
• Taking screen shots inside word rather than using other third party tools.
• Text animations
• Image editing capabilities.
• New charting capabilities.
• Adding/Editing videos inside PowerPoint.
• Importing videos from external site such as YouTube in PowerPoint
• And finally Office Web Apps 

 Vijay talking about the new image editing features in Office 2010

It was almost 6.30 in the evening and it was time for winding up. Once again Sreeju came up on dais to deliver vote of thanks and the speakers give away the prizes for the lucky winners and T-Shirts for the volunteers. To sum it up it was great experience for me to mingle with various people from the technology field and it was great learning curve for me. Will be back with more news from K-MUG, till then happy blogging...... !!!!!!!

Event Snaps Courtesy Vijay Raj