Microsoft TechEd 2010 - Day 2 @ Bangalore

Today is the day 2 @ Microsoft TechEd 2010.

We had lot of technical sessions as usual there were many tracks going on side by side and

I was attending the Web simplified track, Which comprised of the following sessions :

1. Developing a scalable Media Application using ASP.NET MVC - This was a kind of little advanced stuff. Anyways I couldn't understand much because this was not my piece of cake and I havent worked on this before
2. ASP.Net MVC Unplugged - This was really great because this session covered from the basics of MVC showing what is Model,View and Controller and how it worked and the speaker went into the details of the same.
3. Building RESTful Applications with the Open Data Protocol - There were some concepts explained about this from the basics on how to build RESTful Services and it went on till some advanced configurations of the same.
4. Developing Scalable Web Applications with AppFabric Caching - This session showed about the integration of AppFabric with the .Net Web Applications. Instead of using Inproc Sessions, we can use this AppFabric as a substitute for Caching and outofProc Session Storage without writing code and doing a little bit of configurations which brings in High Scalability, performance to our applications. (But unfortunately there were no demos for this session )
5. Deep Dive : WCF RIA Services - This session was also an interactive one, in this the speaker presented from the basics of WCF and took a Book Store Application as a sample and explained all details concepts on linking with RIA Services

Apart from these sessions, in between there happened some small events in the breaks like

• Some discussions about Technology, Innovations
• Music
• Jokes
• Mimicry, etc.

And on doing all these things, the developers were given some kool gifts / goodies like USBs, T-Shirts, etc.

And today I got a chance to do the following certification : (70-562)

Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist in .NET 3.5 Web Applications

Since I already have an MCTS in .NET 2.0, I wanted to do an MCPD and for doing the same I was required to do an update to my MCTS with the .NET 3.5 framework and I did the same I cleared it and now am an MCTS in .NET 3.5 Web Apps

And on doing this I got a T-Shirt and they gave something called Learning $ of worth 30$.

And in various stalls for attending each quiz or some game or some referrals we got some Learning $ which we can redeem later based on our Total Learning $. I got 105 $

which i was able to redeem and got a Microsoft Learning BagPack, 1 free Microsoft certification offer, a laptop light and an e-learning content activated.

And after all these sessions and small events, we had

something called Demo Extravaganza like I mentioned yesterday. This was a great funfilled event with lot of goodies for the attendees.

There were some lucky draw which enabled 2 attendees to get Netbooks (Sponsored by Intel) and 1 attendee to get X-box (Sponsored by Citrix).

After Choosing the raffle in the lucky draw they kept it on a device called Microsoft Surface which is a kind of big touch screen device and on putting the raffle on that it detected the code of the attendee and said intelligently how many sessions that person has attended and if he has attended more than 5 he got a Netbook and this was coded by a guy called Imran.

Apart from they showed demos on :

1. Research by 2 Tamilnadu students from Krishna Arts and Science college, taken 1200 photographs of their college from different angles and put that up in Bing maps using silverlight and linked with Photosynth, which showed a 3d view of their college based on the photos they uploaded
2. Reasearch by Microsoft on Panaramic HD views of the images. One young guy from Microsoft Research showed a demo of this on Srivilliputhur Andal Temple, in Tamil Nadu and its history with a panoramic view of the temple and the near by places with narration of the historical information on the same and with the videos embedded in it with high definition images which we can zoom to a very detailed level.
3. Some Demo on a business app with Silverlight, Business Intelligence (BI) and maps integrated. It showed the sales of a particular product across locations.
4. Some kool demos by 2 geeks who used Robots to show their development talents.
   • 2 Robots fought with each other
   • 2 Robots danced in sync for the A.R. Rehman song Humma Humma...
5. A dream home project by Raman. He is currently using the same in his home too. Robots are controlling his home currently. They showed a video on this. Here are the list of activities that Robot does for him
   • When he reads a book, robot automatically scans that and shows that image of that person in the screen (TV or comp) in front of him. It shows a wikipedia about that person. It says that person is not in linked in. do you want to add him
   • If he sees an IPL Match news in the book and smiles it understands he is interested in that and opens a website related to that and shows the current game and the scorecard.
   • It cooks for him
   • It cleans the room for him whenever he leaves the house
   • when he is doing something if some intruder comes inside his house his computer automatically switches his screen showing the video of the person coming inside.
   • When he wakes up it automatically opens up the system, loads his mails and the news by the side, etc.
6. Some Demos on Microsoft Pivot. This was there in livelabs but it is now available in getpivot.com its a pivoting of the pictorial data based on some categories and filters on the searches that we do.

And finally on filling up some feedback forms we got T-Shirts and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Training Kit CDs.

Whats more on TechEd??? Stay tuned!!! Will update you soon on the other happenings!!

PS : I typed a lot of content for more than a hour but I pressed a backspace and it went to the previous page and all my content were lost and I was not able to retrieve the same and I typed everything again.