codegeeks

After so many Yes and No, I finally decided to attend TechED India in Hyderabad. Thanks to TweetMyPC for getting me a free pass and my company for sponsoring my Travel and accomodation . It was a two and a half hour flight journey from Trivandrum to Hyderabad. I had to take a plane from Trivandrum to Chennai and there to Hyderabad (Next time I will think about choosing Air India. They are worse than our Government buses). The travel was at night and I couldn’t sleep the whole night and reached hyderabad at 9:00 AM on 13th May 2009. It was a 45 min drive from Airport to the Venue. I reached the venue one hour late so missed Steve Ballmer’s keynote address.

Venue was filled with thousands of IT professionals, Developers and Techies and I waited for some time to meet Sreejumon and Binoy. I had a feeling that being alone might be boring but all the sessions kept me busy all the three days.

Day 1 started with Keynote address by Steve Ballmer and followed by lots of Sessions. I attended the folowing sessions which were for Web Developers.

1. Welcome to ASP.net 4.0 – Developing next gen web applications by Stephen Walther. As expected this session was about the new .net 4.0 and visual studio 2010 and its new features. This session was very informative. Stephen also promised that he will give us some surprise about the new version of AJAX Control Toolkit in his next session on Day 2.
2. Developing MVC based web apps using ASP.net

There are lots of changes in asp.net 4.0 and I am sure all the developers will love it. In the afternoon I met Suprotim Agarwal of dotnetcurry. I am one of the authors for dotnetcurry and Iam meeting him first time (Personally). I also met few other MVPs like Vikram and Sathish Kumar.

I attended Windows 7 lab in the evening and attended the session about the changes in Windows 7. It was a very informative session. I have used Windows Vista only for a week and but Windows 7 looks more promising an has better features. I am sure Windows 7 will be like Windows XP which is still the favorite Operating system for Millions of users.

Only 1 hour of sleep left me tired and I went to sleep early on 13th May.

Day 2 started with keynote address by Resul Pookutty. You must be wondering what this guy is doing in a Techie’s session . I had the same feeling when I entered the hall but Resul talked about Music and how he uses technology to bring perfection, Originality to his editing.

Day 2 (for Web developers) started with a session about Microsoft Web platform and the session was by a person from irctc. Yes you read it right the session was about IRCTC – Online Passenger Reservation system. This was one of the best session. I was not aware that irctc was the largest e commerce website in Asia. The speaker talked about how he uses MS technologies for IRCTC and their challenges. My friends used to complain how slow the site is sometimes but I know the reason for this. The system books ticket using a 1985 model PRS. This was one of the most interesting sessions. He also talked about their future plans about the website, Revenue and some stats.

This was followed by ASP.net AJAX 4.0 as promised Stephen started this session by introducing(Inaugurating) 3 new controls in AJAX control toolkit. HTML Editor, Combo box and Color Picker are the 3 new controls. I am planning to write articles about these 3 new controls soon in codegeeks and dotnetcurry.

Afternoon session was about ASP.net deployment in 2010 and this was not as informative as previous sessions but I attended the session because I felt the VS 2010 would solve some of the release issues we face in the company I work for.

One of the 2 main attractions in TechED was Microsoft SAM (not to mention about his new company, Kingfisher Air hostesses ) and Microsoft Surface.

Day 3 was all about Silverlight.

1. What’s new in Silverlight 3
2. Silverlight and .net RIA services
3. IIS media pack and Silverlight 3 – Redefining online multimedia applications
4. Advanced Silverlight : Doing more with Silverlight

Overall TechEd was a very new experience for me. Met lots Experts, made new friends and came back home with lots of knowledge.

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