Kerala Microsoft Users Group organized the Microsoft Community Tech Day in Technopark Park Canter, Trivandrum on 24th Oct 2009. I reached Park Canter by 8.25am and the registration started at 8.30. I was so excited because I am attending a MS Community Tech Day or a program conducted by K-MUG for the first time. I was little worried because I do not have much experience in .Net or other MS technologies. I have done my B.Tech mini project and main project in .Net but in my company, I work in PHP and I am not in touch with .Net for last 2yrs. Now I want to learn MS Technologies and this is a part of it. The registration completed by 9.30 and the program started.
The first session was by Rama (Ramaprasanna Chellamuthu). He works with Microsoft as a Developer Evangelist. His topic was “Windows Azure & Clouds”. He started with “Clouds”, what is cloud technology and its importance. After discussing about Cloud Computing, he moved to Windows Azure.
Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web applications on the internet through Microsoft datacenters.
Windows Azure is an open platform that supports Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments. To build applications and services on Windows Azure, developers can use their existing Microsoft Visual Studio expertise. In addition, Windows Azure supports popular standards and protocols including SOAP, REST, XML, and PHP.
I had only a small idea about Cloud Computing and Windows Azure but after that session I got a good knowledge. The session was very interactive, audience asked many doubts during his session. He showed a sample program using Windows Azure.
Mr. Vinod Kumar came to stage to give “SQL Server – Tips and Tricks”. He works as a Technology Evangelist (Databases and BI) with Microsoft India specializing primarily on SQL Server. He said he has 45minutes and he will give 45 tips and tricks. The first tip was how we can open SQL Server Management studio using windows authentication in a single click, then SQL commands to save our production time etc. I do not understand some advanced tips since I have only a small experience in MSSQL but I am sure all the tips were very useful and if you know those tips, you can save a lot of time.
You can get more tips and information from his website: http://extremeexperts.com/
Tea Break : Had Coffee and Cookies 
After a 10minut break, program resumed with Shobhan on stage. Shoban Kumar is a Microsoft MVP working as a Senior Software Engineer for Allianz Cornhill, Technopark. I know him before from his tweets and blogs. Yes, we are twitter friend and meeting for the first time. He actively writes .net articles in his blog www.codegeeks.net and www.dotnetcurry.com. His topic was “Coding for fun”. He explained how we can communicate with famous WEB 2.0 applications like Twitter, Facebook, Gmail etc. He showed some sample demos also. One was a GTalk chat responder and the other one was his famous TweetMy PC. Yes, we had fun. 
He also gave a lot of Visyal Studio tips and tricks and information about useful VS utilities.
Shobhan has also published many open source applications which can be found in CodePlex : http://www.codeplex.com/site/users/view/shobankr
Next session was by Uday M. Shankar about “Rapid Prototyping”. He is a Principal Engineer in Yahoo User Experience team. He has been into UI development and Ux activities for around 10 years. Prior to Yahoo, he was with Nokia R&D Center. He started with “What is prototyping”. I had no much idea about prototyping and its use. He explained all those basic things.
Prototyping is the process of building a model of a system. In terms of an information system, prototypes are employed to help system designers build an information system that intuitive and easy to manipulate for end users. Prototyping is an iterative process that is part of the analysis phase of the systems development life cycle.
Then he talked about Microsoft Expression Blend
Microsoft Expression Blend is a user interface design tool developed and sold by Microsoft for creating graphical interfaces for web and desktop applications that blend the features of these two types of applications. It is an interactive, WYSIWYG front-end for designing XAML-based interfaces for Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight applications. It is one of the applications in the Microsoft Expression Studio suite.
He showed us how a designer can create a prototype very easily with MS Expression Blend. That was a nice demo and he showed us a tutorial video also.
After Uday’s session. we had lunch break. We got lunch coupon to use in Rangoli restaurant for South Indian meals.
After lunch, the 1st session was about Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) by Praseed Pai. He is a .net consultant and a solutions architect associated with Envestnet ,Trivandrum.
LINQ is a set of extensions to the .NET Framework that encompass language-integrated query, set, and transform operations. It extends C# and Visual Basic with native language syntax for queries and provides class libraries to take advantage of these capabilities.
I had attend his session before about “Compilers” in BarCamp, so I was expecting another wonderful session. Yes, his session was really interesting and we all got a better idea bout LINQ.
After Pai’s session, Renuka Alex came to stage to talk about “WPF Customization and Interoperability”. She is working as a Technical Evangelist at Infosys, Trivandrum. She has around 10 years of varied training experiences ranging from colleges to management schools and IT industry. Her session was like teaching us something, started from the basic and I am sure everybody understand what is WPF, its uses and how we can create a WPF based application. I liked that session because I am studying Adobe AIR and WPF is like Adobe AIR. She also created a small demo application from the scratch and so we get a better idea.
The Windows Presentation Foundation (or WPF) is a graphical subsystem for rendering user interfaces in Windows-based applications. WPF was initially released as part of .NET Framework 3.0. Designed to remove dependencies on the aging GDI subsystem, WPF is built on DirectX, which provides hardware acceleration and enables modern UI features like transparency, gradients and transforms. WPF provides a consistent programming model for building applications and provides a clear separation between the user interface and the business logic.
WPF also offers a new markup language, known as XAML which is an alternative means for defining UI elements and relationships with other UI elements. A WPF application can be deployed on the desktop or hosted in a web browser. It also enables rich control, design, and development of the visual aspects of Windows programs. It aims to unify a number of application services: user interface, 2D and 3D drawing, fixed and adaptive documents, advanced typography, vector graphics, raster graphics, animation, data binding, audio and video.
Last session was “Writing Secure Code” by Jairam Ramesh, Security Research Consultant with Microsoft Corporation for the last 2 years. He talked about Desktop application security, Network security and Web application security. “Writing Secure Code”, the name itself is interesting. First he described Desktop application security. He showed an example of small C program, which demonstrates Buffer-overflow attacks. Since that was the last session, he got only a less time and it was not enough 
. He mentioned some hacking tools like Poision, Tamper data, Blue Pill, Fiddler etc to try. His session was very interesting and I felt sad because we didn’t get enough time.
At last they gave some cool gifts like Thumb Drive and CD/DVD’s to few lucky audiences and I thought I will get one, but I didn’t get any gift- unlucky .
I really liked all the sessions, met a lot of great developers and I learned a lot from them. The CTD 09 was really inspiring and I will try my level best to attend upcoming CTD’s or the events like this.
Thanks to Microsoft and K-MUG.
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One Response to “Microsoft Community Tech Day”
ajith
10 months ago
Good description.. You must hav secured the Vista ultimate..