Windows Azure Camp at Trivandrum on 30th April

 

Microsoft is organizing the Windows Azure camps in various cities across India.

As part of it, K-MUG in association with Microsoft is conducting a day long event on Windows Azure at Thiruvananthapuram on April 30, 2011.

If you are interested in learning more about cloud computing and Microsoft's offerings for that environment, come and join me and my fellow speakers on 30th

Venue

Zenith Hall, UST Global, Bhavani,Technopark, Thiruvananthapuram

 

Agenda

• Cloud Computing and Azure Overview
• Azure Architecture
• Azure Management Portal
• Services and Tools Needed
• Create and debug Azure Application
• Deploy application in Azure
• Lunch Break
• Moving ASP.NET application to Azure
• Moving SQL Express database to Azure
• SQL Windows Azure App Fabric Cache

Speakers  

Amal Dev works as a Senior Software Engineer with Gemini Software Solutions, Technopark. An avid techie who constantly articles in his blog, http://inquisitive-instincts.blogspot.com/ .He has been working with .NET technologies since its inception and his area of interests include C#, ASP.NET, WP7, Silverlight.

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/

   

Yanesh Tyagi is a technical architect with Millennium Consultants. He has extensive 16 years of experience working on different technologies, specially Microsoft Technologies. He has been with .NET since it's early days. Yanesh has worked in many domains inclusing BFSI, Travel, Education, Manufacturing, eCommerce etc. Yanesh is also involved in some open source projects.

                                                                                   

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 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 .

Usergroup meeting @ Kochi on Nov 7, 2010

 

K-MUG has decided to conduct monthly user group meetings across Kerala. So on 7th of November, Kochi will be hosting the meeting for central Kerala region. And, I will be giving a session on Windows Phone 7, also there are couple more people giving sessions on very interesting topics. 

Venue

Mastermind Computer Institute, 

2nd Floor, New Kochappilly Building, 

Near Federal Bank, 

Civil Line Road, 

Chembumukku, 

Cochin-682030

09:15 - 09:30 Community updates
09:30 - 10:30 Test Driven Development
10:30 - 11:15 Microsoft Surface
11:15 - 11:30 Tea Break (15 min)
11:30 - 12:15 Windows Phone 7
12.15 - 01:00 Introduction to WCF 4.0

For more details and info about the speakers, please visit the event page in K-MUG site and registration can be done here.

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.