It was great fun driving down to Pune for the launch of the Pune User Group meeting.
The first time we were having a physical meeting besides just meeting online.
It took me only 2 hours to get to Pune from Mumbai and then strangely a good 45 minutes just navigating the Pune city traffic :-(
Well there were a bunch of 25 Puneites waiting to get the session kicked off...
I dived right into a session on the SmartPhone 2003, it's kind of my favorite device as of now.
Really cool features...
I showcased the key features of the phone and then started off with discussing how one can develop using VS.Net for the SmartPhone 2003. Calling a web service, creating menu's, using ActiveSynch, then setting up Remote Display to project the phone's screen onto my projection system...
The audience was excited I could feel it revebrating through the room...
New technology thats what keeps us on a high...
You could read my online article on the SmartPhone at Devx http://www.devx.com/wireless/Article/17968
SMARTPHONE Rocks!!!
Monday, December 15, 2003
TechEd Blues...
The last TechEd event was in Mumbai...
Kind of felt nostalgic about it...
But look forward to many more such days.
As usual it was great fun... Raj, Sanjay Vyas the rest of the guys...
The evening ended with a party basically to felicitate the speakers and the rest of the crew who had made it a great event...
Kind of felt nostalgic about it...
But look forward to many more such days.
As usual it was great fun... Raj, Sanjay Vyas the rest of the guys...
The evening ended with a party basically to felicitate the speakers and the rest of the crew who had made it a great event...
Saturday, October 11, 2003
TechEd 2003 Mumbai, Day1
Day 1 Part 1
Tring Tring........
Cell Phone ringing cause me to wake up, It was Raj, urging me to get up and get out of bed, he was on his way to the event.
A quick wash, change of clothes, and I was driving down the highway to the venue.
The first session I had was on Office 2003 for developers.
I reached while the keynote was beginning, LongHorn the video was cool.
Touchbased with Raj and off we were to the Speakers Loung. We re-discussed our presentation. A good half hour later, we had to rush to our session. I started off and Raj chipped in. I did the demo's and let him do most of the talking. I was tired. Needed more sleep ( aah! my bed, couldn't stop thinking about it).
We had a small audience. I guess developers haven't realised the new Office System, is a whole new world for developers. I'm sure the audience sizes would increase as people realised the potential. I certainly am amazed at what developers can do with the new Office System. Its a gold mine in terms of potential. I'll probably explore some of it's features on my blog.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Day 1 Mumbai Session 2 on Windows Form Controls: Tips and Tricks
The second session which I did was a repeat of what I had done at Bangalore. But in Bangalore I had my friend Raj helping me out, here I had to do this session all alone.
The difficult part was time. It was virtually impossible to do all the demos, they just wouldn't finish 8 demos in all.
After my first session, ran straight to the Speaker's Lounge.
My buddies Raj and Sriram from Microsoft were there, doing what he he preparing for their sessions :-)
I think we're the same kind, last minute runners :-)
Well I began setting up the demo's one after the other oop's my last demo wasn't functioning, this was on using the PropertyGrid control in your windows forms applications.
15 minutes later got it all setup, just in time to run for the session.
Raj and Sriram finished wrapping up their preparation at the same time.
I ran down towards my session hall, had to locate the room :-)
It was in the main session hall in the developer tools track. Got on stage and off I was.
The audience no. was kind of low, so wasn't too happy. But we soon started off with a number of laughs.
I just didn't realise how time flies, I was off to begin my second last demo, when one of the helpers but up a banner of 5 minutes remaining to indicate the end of the session time.
Wrapped up the demos, the audience clapped and I got of stage. Finishing all the demos in time. I really wonder how I did that. I don't think I could do it again :-)
Well that wrapped up day 1 across all 3 cities. Day 2 is happening around the 3 cities in October. But I had to rush off, had to catch some sleep, tomorrow was going to help colleagues from INETA who would be doing 2 sessions, one presentation and a hands on lab on C# for students. More later...
Tring Tring........
Cell Phone ringing cause me to wake up, It was Raj, urging me to get up and get out of bed, he was on his way to the event.
A quick wash, change of clothes, and I was driving down the highway to the venue.
The first session I had was on Office 2003 for developers.
I reached while the keynote was beginning, LongHorn the video was cool.
Touchbased with Raj and off we were to the Speakers Loung. We re-discussed our presentation. A good half hour later, we had to rush to our session. I started off and Raj chipped in. I did the demo's and let him do most of the talking. I was tired. Needed more sleep ( aah! my bed, couldn't stop thinking about it).
We had a small audience. I guess developers haven't realised the new Office System, is a whole new world for developers. I'm sure the audience sizes would increase as people realised the potential. I certainly am amazed at what developers can do with the new Office System. Its a gold mine in terms of potential. I'll probably explore some of it's features on my blog.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Day 1 Mumbai Session 2 on Windows Form Controls: Tips and Tricks
The second session which I did was a repeat of what I had done at Bangalore. But in Bangalore I had my friend Raj helping me out, here I had to do this session all alone.
The difficult part was time. It was virtually impossible to do all the demos, they just wouldn't finish 8 demos in all.
After my first session, ran straight to the Speaker's Lounge.
My buddies Raj and Sriram from Microsoft were there, doing what he he preparing for their sessions :-)
I think we're the same kind, last minute runners :-)
Well I began setting up the demo's one after the other oop's my last demo wasn't functioning, this was on using the PropertyGrid control in your windows forms applications.
15 minutes later got it all setup, just in time to run for the session.
Raj and Sriram finished wrapping up their preparation at the same time.
I ran down towards my session hall, had to locate the room :-)
It was in the main session hall in the developer tools track. Got on stage and off I was.
The audience no. was kind of low, so wasn't too happy. But we soon started off with a number of laughs.
I just didn't realise how time flies, I was off to begin my second last demo, when one of the helpers but up a banner of 5 minutes remaining to indicate the end of the session time.
Wrapped up the demos, the audience clapped and I got of stage. Finishing all the demos in time. I really wonder how I did that. I don't think I could do it again :-)
Well that wrapped up day 1 across all 3 cities. Day 2 is happening around the 3 cities in October. But I had to rush off, had to catch some sleep, tomorrow was going to help colleagues from INETA who would be doing 2 sessions, one presentation and a hands on lab on C# for students. More later...
Saturday, October 04, 2003
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...
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.
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.
Friday, September 19, 2003
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.
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.
Wednesday, September 17, 2003
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 :-)
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 :-)
Tuesday, August 26, 2003
Bomb blasts in Mumbai
I know this is meant to be a technology blog, but can't help but think of the crazy nature of terrorists across the world. Today Mumbai, my home city was the target of bomb attacks by terrorists. I wonder what will make it stop, if it ever will. What's to be gained by attacking innocent citizens. Who's to gain?
Monday, August 18, 2003
TabletPC
Well it's strange, I've been sick for the past few days and popping up Tablets and up comes my friend from Microsoft Raj Chaudhri requesting I work on a session based on the Tablet PC :-)
Strange and funny I find it. Well he ran me thru some of the important things he wanted to get covered and it was a healthy introduction for me to the world of tablets. We explored the Tablet PC SDK. The transition to it was pretty easy. I'm getting my hands dirty with it, will post more on it as I play around with it further.
Strange and funny I find it. Well he ran me thru some of the important things he wanted to get covered and it was a healthy introduction for me to the world of tablets. We explored the Tablet PC SDK. The transition to it was pretty easy. I'm getting my hands dirty with it, will post more on it as I play around with it further.
Tuesday, July 22, 2003
More on Word
One more thing which my friend(Dr. Nitin Paranjpe) taught me was to pay attention to what I type in word.
Whenever you type anything in word. Click anywhere in the text don't select anything then choose the "Tools" menu and in it "Spelling and Grammar". A dialog box called Readability Statistics pops up. In it check the readability section. The reading ease number indicates how easy it is to read this document and the grade level tells you how high a person in terms of grade is easily able to read this document. The higher the reading ease figure(highest is 100) and lower the grade level, the more readable is your document. Now is this a wow feature or what ? I was quite amazed at the little nuggets the word developers have put into word. Btw these features are supposedly there in MS Word since Word 97. It's just most of us don't event know about it. Sad but true.
One more thing which my friend(Dr. Nitin Paranjpe) taught me was to pay attention to what I type in word.
Whenever you type anything in word. Click anywhere in the text don't select anything then choose the "Tools" menu and in it "Spelling and Grammar". A dialog box called Readability Statistics pops up. In it check the readability section. The reading ease number indicates how easy it is to read this document and the grade level tells you how high a person in terms of grade is easily able to read this document. The higher the reading ease figure(highest is 100) and lower the grade level, the more readable is your document. Now is this a wow feature or what ? I was quite amazed at the little nuggets the word developers have put into word. Btw these features are supposedly there in MS Word since Word 97. It's just most of us don't event know about it. Sad but true.
Word the wonder tool
I was speaking to a friend of mine, a prominent expert(Dr. Nitin Paranjpe) on various tech topics, he'd come down home to down a few drinks and it was amazing, the number of tricks he showed me. One could teach an old dog like me :-)
One of them I just couldn't forget. Type the following statement and hit enter at the end of it in word.
=rand()
You get a statement which is "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
The default is you will get 3 paragraphs of 5 sentances each. Incidentally these cover all the letters in the english alphabet
play around with the numbers
=rand(1) gives you one paragraph of 5 sentances.
=rand(1,4) gives you one paragraph of 4 sentances.
now who would want a function like this is what you're thinking, well in the old days you wanted to test if you old printer is capable of printing all characters then this was a quick way of testing all the alphabets see if they are working fine.
Also for instructors they could get a page full for demo purposes right away to showcase formatting etc. etc. basically to enable them to teach better... I'm sure there are many more such gems lying around not just in word but in each and every tool which one uses.
I was speaking to a friend of mine, a prominent expert(Dr. Nitin Paranjpe) on various tech topics, he'd come down home to down a few drinks and it was amazing, the number of tricks he showed me. One could teach an old dog like me :-)
One of them I just couldn't forget. Type the following statement and hit enter at the end of it in word.
=rand()
You get a statement which is "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
The default is you will get 3 paragraphs of 5 sentances each. Incidentally these cover all the letters in the english alphabet
play around with the numbers
=rand(1) gives you one paragraph of 5 sentances.
=rand(1,4) gives you one paragraph of 4 sentances.
now who would want a function like this is what you're thinking, well in the old days you wanted to test if you old printer is capable of printing all characters then this was a quick way of testing all the alphabets see if they are working fine.
Also for instructors they could get a page full for demo purposes right away to showcase formatting etc. etc. basically to enable them to teach better... I'm sure there are many more such gems lying around not just in word but in each and every tool which one uses.
Friday, June 27, 2003
Connection String
First there was the connection then came the data. The string to many an application
I went back to the basics on this one...
the connection string is the very first things I decided I should play with.
connection strings come in so many flavors it is amazing.
In any connection string you need to specify a couple of things, the source place where the database resides, the database name itself, authorization credentials. These are the basic things you need to provide. The fun part is when you realise that each can be provided in so many different ways...
take this simple connection string
connstring = "Data Source=local; database=Northwind;user id=sa; password=;"
Lets examine this one...
Data source tells us where the data resides, which server.
Database: Tells us the name of the database
User id & password: provides the ceredentials for accessing that data.
Another connection string
connstring="Server=local; Initial Catalog=Northwind; uid=sa;pwd=;"
Now here we've replaced our initial "local" keyword with "Server", "database" with Initial Catalog, and "user id" with "uid", "password" with "pwd"
You think thats all ... wait till you see this one ...
connstring ="Addr=10.0.0.1"; Initial Catalog=Northwind;Trusted_Connection=True;"
hey what happened to the user id password... and what happened to the server name.... and would you believe it there are a couple more combinations in which you can specify the basic constructs of your connection string. So initially when people learn it one way confuse them with another and another.. Oh yes you say all the stuff about backward compatibility and more options to the developer... but to those writing articles and books out there... they should reference a particular topic "SqlConnection.ConnectionString Property" present in the MSDN documentation. This shows the numerous options out there to connect. Can you think of how many options are possible ? keep guessing or read the documentation :-)
First there was the connection then came the data. The string to many an application
I went back to the basics on this one...
the connection string is the very first things I decided I should play with.
connection strings come in so many flavors it is amazing.
In any connection string you need to specify a couple of things, the source place where the database resides, the database name itself, authorization credentials. These are the basic things you need to provide. The fun part is when you realise that each can be provided in so many different ways...
take this simple connection string
connstring = "Data Source=local; database=Northwind;user id=sa; password=;"
Lets examine this one...
Data source tells us where the data resides, which server.
Database: Tells us the name of the database
User id & password: provides the ceredentials for accessing that data.
Another connection string
connstring="Server=local; Initial Catalog=Northwind; uid=sa;pwd=;"
Now here we've replaced our initial "local" keyword with "Server", "database" with Initial Catalog, and "user id" with "uid", "password" with "pwd"
You think thats all ... wait till you see this one ...
connstring ="Addr=10.0.0.1"; Initial Catalog=Northwind;Trusted_Connection=True;"
hey what happened to the user id password... and what happened to the server name.... and would you believe it there are a couple more combinations in which you can specify the basic constructs of your connection string. So initially when people learn it one way confuse them with another and another.. Oh yes you say all the stuff about backward compatibility and more options to the developer... but to those writing articles and books out there... they should reference a particular topic "SqlConnection.ConnectionString Property" present in the MSDN documentation. This shows the numerous options out there to connect. Can you think of how many options are possible ? keep guessing or read the documentation :-)
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