Thursday, November 06, 2008

Innovation Days Again At Kochi

It was just 5 months back we had an Innovation Days event at Kochi from Microsoft. Seeing the great response from the IT enthusiasts at Kochi, Microsoft has come back today with yet another session packed event. This time the location was at Taj Residency at Marine Drive.  Kochi techies showed their interest by turning up in large numbers, making it a house-full event.

The day started with a keynote address from Vikram Rajkondawar, Architect Advisor at Microsoft (India). He spoke in detail about the Software + Services mantra Microsoft is transitioning to, and clarified myths around Cloud computing and briefly explained Windows Azure and other latest technologies. There was a Live Mesh demo that showed connected devices (two laptops and a mobile) synchronizing files between them.

The session on SQL Server performance issues by Praveen was in-depth as he discussed internals of SQL Server and how a query is parsed, algebrized and optimized before execution. He did mention that from SQL Server 2005 onwards it doesn’t matter if you are using stored procedures or inline SQL queries as both gives similar results on a performance point of view.

Nahas Mohammed did a short session on Internet Explorer 8 and demonstrated its new features like Accelerators and Web Slices.

Chandrashekar’s session on .NET debugging tools helped in understanding some of those rarely used, but highly useful debugging tools like Fusion Log Viewer (fuslogvw.exe), NGen, SoS.dll, ILDAsm, ILAsm, and Managed Debugging Assistance (MDA).

Praveen concluded the event with a session on Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and spoke about ASP.NET MVC, AJAX, jQuery integration and Silverlight.

Between the technical tracks, there was a short session on Innovate On partnership program that Microsoft launched last time. A guy from TIE (The IndUs Entrepreneurs) spoke about their institution and inspired us to think on entrepreneurship.

There were lots of goodies (T-Shirts, books) given out besides a great lunch. I enjoyed the overall event and could meet many friends/ex-colleagues as well as some new people from the Kochi developer community. As I had registered for the Innovate On program last time, I received my first kit containing a T-Shirt, Technology Specialist certificates, and CDs containing technical resources.

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