B-DotNet Bangalore TechEd 2009

Its been some time that the actual event has been over.But there were a few topics that remain fresh in the mind.Some like Windows 7,Azure and Cloud Computing have been in the news for some time now,so it was natural that these topics be discussed in BDot-Net 2009.So on Saturday 20th when I woke up,(actually nish woke me up..I was still enjoying my sat morn sleep)I awaited with bated excitement about the topics that were going to be discussed in the community meet.As i awaited Nish to pick me up that morning ,i checked out the place and found it to be RV Dental College,JP Nagar.Landing at the gate i saw the organizers removing the BdotNet poster from the gate, and we got to know that the event was on. As we entered the auditorium, we were worried if we would get the right seats.But once we registered ourselves,we found the hall to be relatively empty, a stark contrast to the anticipation as the tickets for the event were sold out pretty early.
As I sat in the 4th row from the front, I saw a tall lanky guy going around with a lap top.Only later did i realise that the guy was Mr Ramkumar, our first speaker.He gave us an intro into Cloud and he technologies surrounding itAlso about how companies were building up their data centers in Iceland so that they could have natural cooling and save energy.He also touched upon how companies were using their own power plants near to their data centers as this would lead to lesser wastage of energy,which would otherwise occur if the data center and the power plants to power them were away.But the way did i say that it started half an hour late?Ok anyways poor Mr Ramkumar had to wind up by 10,thats half an hour less .But the next topic Windows 7 by Vijay and Vic had us up in our seats in eagerness.After all it was supposedly the saviour of OS for MS having badly screwed up Vista.Though Vic said that he liked Vista,i had no doubts what so ever that very few in crowd would have given it even a ** rating,provided they would have given us a Survey, like the many they bombarded us with(I don't know whats with sponsors and surveys)!There were more than a couple of surveys which we had nothing to do with.Vijay and Vic gave a quick intro into how useful the new OS was.While Vijay gave a quick intro into Kernel Enhancements, Vic showed us a live demo on Location Sensors .Though Vic said that Windows 7 were a lot better that Vista,we wouldnt believe him until he said that he could run it on 700 Mhz CPUs.Thats a cool number given that the resources(read Memory,Hard disk space as well as Processing speeds)required to run an MS OS goes up exponentially whenever they release a new one.Well they had enough features to come up with a new OS!
Next on cards,Chaitra started the talk on ASP.Net 4.0.Though the features were nice,I was looking forward to tea that would be served next!But Chaitra made sure that we worked hard for it, as she went through all the features in the Gen Next of ASP.NET(you would have guessed it by now that i am not a ASP developer by now!).After a long time i got the break and nish and myself grabbed some .We rushed back again into the hall after 10 min, though we would be first to come back .So much so for thinking we would be late!!After some 15 min the talk on BizTalk started.Now this was unknown territory to me,but Kashi(speaker) was prety much a la Saurav Ganguly,in the sense that he would take his own time in explaining everything(thats so uncommon and so non techie!) that he made it a childs play.But i could already feel people getting fidgety(I think my stomach also gave raised the concern about food having given breakfast a miss) .So finaly we had some good lunch from some caterer's ,and yeah it was free.I should admit these Bdotnet(well i am missing.BitPro guys were also involved in the event.Kalyan,the founder would be really angry) guys really spent some effort into that.Thanks guys.
After lunch we had "Birds of the same feather - BizTalk Server and WCF" by Meena.I thought the speaker would be pretty young or atleast in their mid thirties,but here was Meena who would be IMHO in her forties or more and teaching us a thing or two about being a techie!But the session was mighty interesting about how the two technologies would overcome each others limitations.Hats off Meena.After that we had a Session on Silverlight too before we could wind up.Vic was always there for another entertaining session.Well he showed us how easy presentation layer could be now,we all were dazzled by graphics as well as UI of Silverlight.Meanwhile vijay and co made sure all the speakers had their share of limelight by clicking away at them with an SLR (i presume which was Vic's).Also there were goodies to be given away for guys who raised questions,basically any question.(why am i here?!!)But one fella from the front always had his hands up and for no reason he would always be handed over the mike and at the end of the day he had enough goodies to setup his own shop!I didnt understand why they wouldnt give everyone a chance,But only later did i realize that guys who helped them organise were some college fellas, who had no idea about event mgmt.We had a great mgmt talk from Sampath who instilled some confidence in us showing us some great videos and som great slides which all talked about how we can get our act together and go ahead bang on!(i wish i sould bring some of my office mates here!)
Anyways, day one over and i was mightly pleased that one more saturday of my life didnt go waste!Next day we were early again,so we went across the RV play ground and had a nice cuppa and watched the young kids playing cricket with their coaches in toe.Once we landed back,Janakiram and Niraj, showed us the power of Microsoft Azure.They showed us a demo on how we could actually deploy our app in the Cloud!!Wow ,this was bloody good technology for all new entrepreneurs ,who couldnt afford all the infrastructure needed for office. Having held us in rapt attention for an hour Gayatri gave us a session on Building custom activities in WF.I must admit i was new to WF and was aready ready to doze off ,had it not been for the tea which woke me up till lunch.But after tea we had a lovely session in Beyond Relational SQL Server 2008: Managing unstructured and semi structured Data by Praveen who taught us how we could manage unstructured data and as well as gave us an insight into spacial datatypes and hierarchy ids.After lunch it was "Introduction to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010" from M.Ismail.Though i must say i am pretty much naiveto admin talks like these,he showed me precisely why we shouldn't as admin could very much filter what we received via mail.It was followed up by Windows Server 2008 R2 Overview by Kalyan and Ravikanth who showed us the power of blade servers(courtesy Dell) and why not!He showed us the features of Server 2008 R2 which we could lay our hands on ,only to realise later that it would run only only on 64bit processors. Finally before tea they gave us a session on Virtualization 360 - Technical Overview by praveen,I would say he was awesome so much as the session was.
To wind it up we had a demo on Infragistics by Vic on the new controls that they had developed.
I have always been a fan of their controls having used them a couple of years back,they are cool guys and trust me they offer you a lot more features than anybody out there.No wonder they are the leaders in the market in their space(Click here to know more).Finally we had the speakers to thank everyone and a dumb quiz just to check if we were still awake!But the event came to an end as we awaited our cd's ,which we were told we would get only at the end of it all ,we got to know that the cd's for Win 7 were over.We back with our Win Server 2008 rc2 cd's hoping we would get some day a 64bit processor to deploy.But great effort from the Bdotnet guys.Cheers!!
Here are some links that i picked up from the event
Bdotnet Downloads
http://bdotnet.in/files/
teched2009
http://www.microsoft.com/india/teched2009/
Live Services
http://dev.live.com/