TechED 2003 Mumbai, before Day1 - behind the scenes...

I had two sessions for the TechEd in Mumbai, two intense ones I must add.

The first was on Office 2003 for developers. This was tough. Why? Well I had to demonstrate all the new things for developers in Office and at the same time not show enough, basically build the excitement and lead them onto other sessions which were in-depth.

Raj my buddy from Microsoft was there as usual to help. We had a lot of issues I had Beta 2 Technical Refresh on my system, Raj had the RTM on his machine, and the dev tools on msdn worked with Beta 2 only. Not everything worked on my system. Raj pitched in, we ganged up at my home a day before the event and went cracking at the system. Some of the new features for developers are so cool in the new Office system, yeah office system is what it is now. It rocks. I'm just waiting to get the final bits in my hand... maybe I'll write an article about it. We finished working on some new code finally at 12:30 A.M. in the morning. Raj also had to back up for another TechEd Speaker Sanjay Vyas, who's on my links, sadly Sanjay could not make it to TechEd due to some urgent family needs. Raj worked on his demos, InfoPath was his session in addition to another session on Building Office Solutions with Visual Studio.Net.
12:30 in the morning, I went off to drop him at a friends place where he was staying. We both crashed out promising to wake each other up in the morning...
I almost forgot about my second session, but luckily it was a repeat session of the Windows Form Controls: Tips & Tricks Session which I had done in Bangalore...

More on what happened at Day 1 in Mumbai later...

TechEd 2003 Academia, 30th Sept 2003

TechEd 2003 Academia was quite different this time. Instead of just having Microsoft give lectures, there were students who presented to students also.

3 Students from Mumbai, Tejas, Abhishek and Yash, were the second runner up in the international competition for students. They had built a neat .Net application, which was showcased.

There were close to about 800 students and faculty who attended the event.

I introduced INETA and encouraged students to form student communities/user groups to encourage learning amongst themselves. They are the future they better realise it now :-)

TechEd Day 1 in Mumbai was the next day... so I had to rush of to prepare for the same.
More on that later.