User Group Meeting - 12th March 2011 - Kochi

Venue:

Orion India Systems Pvt Ltd, 103, 2nd floor, Tejomaya, Info park SEZ, Kakkanad, Kochin-682030  

Agenda                                           

                                 

09:30 - 09:40 Community updates

09:40 - 10:30 Introduction to Windows Azure

10:30 - 11:15 Pattern Oriented Software development using .NET

11:15 - 11:30 Tea Break (15 min)

11:30 - 12:15 Developing web apps with ASP.NET MVC 3 and EF Code First

12.15 - 01:00 Ask the experts

For registration, please visit K-MUG site @ www.k-mug.org

Speakers

	Saravana Kumar  is Working as a Senior Software Engineer in Orion India Systems Pvt. Ltd, cochin. He has 4 years of Experience in IT Industry,  Expertise in developing applications using   Microsoft Technologies and also in Interwoven. He writes programming articles in his website http://www.wcftutorial.net.

	Praseed Pai is a well known software architect from Kochi,Kerala. His areas of interest include Enterprise software development (using C#/.net) ,Engineering Software development(CAD/CAM/C++),Cross Platform C++ development (Windows/Linux/Mac), Computer Graphics, Computational Finance and Domain specific programming languages. At present, he is associated with Cabot solutions, Kochi. His blog can be accessed here.   His open source compiler SLANG4.net got many fans
	Shiju Varghese, Microsoft MVP in ASP.NET, is a Technical Architect on the Microsoft .Net technology stack with a focus on web application development and Domain-Driven Design. He has been working with .Net Technologies since beta version. Shiju focuses on C#, ASP.Net MVC, Entity Framework, Windows Azure, REST, WCF and Unity. Shiju holds number of Microsoft certifications including MCP, MCAD, MCTS, and MCPD: Web.  He blogs at http://weblogs.asp.net/shijuvarghese/

My End of Season Thoughts……

 

Another year is going to say good bye to us and its been an eventful year for me. For me, this year started off in the worst possible manner, in the causality of a hospital. Sitting there, I thought it was not a good omen and expected lot of worst things in the days ahead. But to my surprise it turned out to be one of the most interesting time in my life. I ventured in to many new things like blogging, got involved with a technical community, delivered a presentation on WP7 and so on. My blog was up and running this and got over a thousand visitors. A big thank you to all and expects a lot in the coming years also.

Also my long cherished dream of having an SLR was finally fulfilled this year by a friend of mine who bought it from overseas. Then there were a lot of weekend getaways with my friends from college and office. This year also helped me to network with many people from Vijay Raj, an active blogger widely known as msigeek, Janakiraman from MS, Sreeju, Anoop aka AmazedSaint, Jairam, Ramprasanna, again a MS guy who is very familiar these days with this adventures in robotics, Anuraj, Shalvin, Yanesh, Saravana Kumar, Bijith, Safil, Shiju, Satheesh, Saleem and the list goes on. Thanks a lot guys, loved every second spent with you.

Speaking of technology, we experienced an eventful year. We finally the saw the uprising of tablets and smartphones which are poised to dethrone PC’s and laptops in the coming decade.Its that time of year when we take a stock of the developments happened in the past year and here from my perspective the end of the season accolades goes to……

K-MUG UG Meet on Dec 11, 2010 @ Kochi

This month's usergroup meeting for Central Kerala region will be on Dec 11, 2010 at Mastermind Computer Institute, 2nd Floor, New Kochappilly Building,Near Federal Bank,Civil Line Road,Chembumukku. For event details, click here, and registration for the event can be done here.

Agenda                                                                           

09:30 - 09:40 Community updates

09:40 - 10:30 Introduction to WCF

10:30 - 11:15 Lambda - It's uses and abuses

11:15 - 11:30 Tea Break (15 min)

11:30 - 12:15 Introducing Razor – A new view engine for ASP.NET

12.15 - 01:00 Memory and Resource Leaks in .NET application

K-MUG UG Meet Nov 13 2010 - A Retro

During the Community Tech Days 2010 held at Kochi, K-MUG decided to conduct monthly user group meeting for Central Kerala region at Kochi. First meeting was conducted on Nov 13, 2010 and the venue was Mastermind Institute of Engineering,  Kakkanad, Kochi. I was given a chance by the K-MUG people to take a session on Windows Phone 7. 

Although I had started making slides and creating some demo applications, last minutes hiccups is unavoidable. The case is no different here, I didn’t wanted any issues to surface during the presentation coz of my unstable development machine, so I decided to demo the application inside a VM. For that I created a new one with Windows 7 64-bit as OS and then went on to install the Windows Phone Developer Toolkit which is a free download from MSDN. Even though I had 3GB memory and a dual core processor, it took a pretty decent time to install. But to my horror, I found out that the application is not loading in the emulator after a successful build. So after googling for a while I was able to get the problem behind that, Windows Phone Emulator will not work properly in a VM. The time was almost midnight and I had to catch the early morning train, so I decided to show it in my machine come what may. 

Next morning I got up early and reached the station in time. During  the journey I decided to go through the ppts and demo applications and made sure that everyone is working fine. I reached Eranakulam around 9.30 and thanks to ever present traffic blocks in Ernakulam, I was late by half an hour in reaching the venue. When I entered the hall, Yanesh was mid-way through his presentation on Test Driven Development and I was unable to listen to his talk coz I was busy with settling down and Safil was waiting for me to have my lap  to show his presentation. Although he had Praseed’s lap as a backup, I handed over mine to him to prepare for the session. By this time Yanesh wrapped his session and I was not able to pay attention. Really missed it, coz I had attended his last session on Generics at CTD Kochi and it was an excellent one.  In the meantime, if someone is wondering who Yanesh is, this is for them. He is a solutions architect with Millennium Consultants who has got 16+ years of experience in designing and developing application using Microsoft Technologies. Please visit the event page to know more about Yanesh .

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.

Community Tech Days Kochi, October 23, 2010

K-Mug organized the Kerala edition of the Community Tech Days at Kochi on 23^rd of October 2010. I arrived at Kochi a day before, on 22^nd 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.

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. 

Community Tech Day - 23rd Oct 2010 - Kochi

K-MUG,one of the most successful technical community in India, is organizing Community Tech Days(CTD) in Kochi on 23rd Oct, 2010

Where
IMA House,
J. N. International Stadium Road,
Palarivattom P.O.,
Cochin, Kerala 

Agenda             

08:45 - 09:15 Registration Confirmation

09:15 - 09:30 Welcome and Community update by Sreejumon & Vinod

09:30 - 10:00 Plunge into Mono by Praseed

10:00 - 11:00 Telerik Productivity Tools by Raj

11:00 - 11:15 Tea Break (15 min)

11.15 - 12:15 T-SQL Tips and Tricks with SQL Server by Vinod

12.15 - 01:00 Entity Framework 4 by Shalvin

01:00 - 01:45 Lunch Break (45 min)

01.45 - 02:45 Security Auditing and Accountability under Windows 2008 by Manu

02:45 - 03:30 NoSQL databases in .NET Apps by Shiju

03:30 - 03:45 Tea Break (15 min)

03:45 - 04:30 Generics - A Revisit by Yanesh

04:30 - 05:15 .NET Serialization And XML by Praseed

05.15 - 05:30 Closing Ceremony

For more details please visit the K-MUG events page .

For registrations, click here or 

if you have a Live ID, then go to Community Tech Days Site 

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/