This Sunday (19th November), I had the opportunity of attending DevCon 2006 at the Microsoft Office in Hyderabad (Gachibowli). DevCon is an annual event which facilitates knowledge exchange among developers and architects from various organizations. MUGH conducts conferences on the innovations around .NET, and this year's focus is on the recent developments in .NET framework, and SQL Server 2005.
Personally I am very much excited about attending this event. But, it seemed to me it was the same for many developers here as well! 450+ registrations on the website, and almost equal number of attendants…it’s good I started early to arrive at the right time. By the way, did I tell you this is also my first visit into the Microsoft campus? :-)
The program started with a presentation by the sponsors, MAQ software, on Mobile devices market and .NET Compact framework. We had a nice idea on the latest (selling) cell phone brands in the market.
Followed by which, Cordys (that's my company!) presented on SOA and the Green Field Myth. It’s about the paradigm shift we need to have on getting into SOA architecture, and a nice demo on Cordys platform and how it does abstraction to deliver software as a service. The demo was received really well!
There were a couple of eye-catching presentations from Microsoft Team on Web 2.0, Atlas, and on MSN live by Janakiraman (the TV9 guy). MSN Live demo was about a couple of Live Bots (type a query...get an automated response) and it kept us awake after lunch :-)
We had some more on C# 2.0 features and what to expect in 3.0. Though its interesting to see more classes and support getting added, but additions always come with more complexities :-)
And then the last was on WS-Factory, which was fast-paced and completely technical. I felt it dragging, but that might be because it’s the last for the day?
Its interesting to see the developer community in such an active mood till the end of all the demos. Though every session was not on time, and it got extended by almost an hour, the lot stayed back, and did not agreed for conducting parallel sessions to speed up!
In hindsight, its sad to note that there were some hiccoughs throughout the program in the form of the delays in security checks (no ‘parallel processing’ :-)), double registration (there was an online registration but that’s not considered), non-availability of pen and books (lucky I got a paper and pen to scribe), bad lunch, no directions in campus/canteen…
There was a continuous disturbing tick…tick sound throughout every presentation like a time bomb that’s about to go off any moment…I finally managed to find what it was…it’s the sound of System Clock running on every presenter’s laptop coming through the speaker! :-)
