Behind the scenes Windows Forms Control session @ TechEd 2003, Bangalore India

Was I exhausted!!! I was to conduct the Windows Forms controls: Tips and Tricks Session along with a friend from Microsoft, Raj Chaudhuri. I didn't realise how dead beat he was, we planned to meet a day before the event to decide what all we would cover in the session....

2:00 A.M.(the morning, early morning of TechED Bangalore) I realised he's not coming... I started preparing the demos, creating startup directories etc. finally...

4:00 A.M. was thru with the demos' I had 8 demos in this session. Pretty intense.

9:00 A.M. I wake up with a phone call from the reception at the hotel. Glad they called... rushed to the venue, my session was around 3:00 P.M. which kind of gave me a breather.

1:00 P.M.
In the lunch break, finally caught up with Raj in the speaker lounge. We ran thru the demos decided what to talk about, what not to. Tried including one more demo about a custom datagrid column which could be set to a dropdown via the designer. Unfortunately time was the enemy.

1:30 P.M.
I heard someone else from Microsoft was going to do my session due to some mix-up... 3 frantic phone calls and then speaking to Tarun Anand, the chief co-ordinator organiser from Microsoft, confirmed that I was speaking ... ahhhh...

3:00 P.M.
We rushed to our session, oops my laptop would just not project... hastily started off with Raj's display on the projection screen while I tried various settings. Finally after about 3 minutes got mine started off. We had a number of laughs in the session. I throughly enjoyed it...

4:30 P.M.
15 minutes left.... thats what the young man with the huge board signalled... We still had 2 demos to go... we did them as fast as we could. We overshot our time by about 10 minutes but just had to show all the demos.

4:50 or was it 4:55 P.M.
Finally the session ended, a very happy and ethusiastic crowd surged forward with questions... but we just had 5 minutes to run across to the other seminar hall to begin our next session on ADOc to ADO.Net... more on that later.

TechED India 2003 Bangalore

TechEd 2003 kicked off in Bangalore yesterday. Its a unique format being tried out for the first time in any country.
TechEd is split into 3 days over a period of 3 months in 3 cities, Bangalore, Mumbai and Chennai. Each city would have over the next three months have one day of TechEd. The objective being that after one full day of 5 tracks, each person can interact with the speakers via chats web casts etc. till the next month when the one day TechEd is held again.
This is an interesting twist, giving people enough time to actually gain from the knowledge try it out, get questions answered both at the venue and online and then come back for two more rounds.
I spoke on two sessions Windows Forms controls: Tips and tricks and then on Morphing from ADOc to ADO.Net. Next post will detail out more, right now exhausted :-)