DEVCON-2012 by BDOTNET (4th August 2012)

Its a privilege and am honoured being a member of the BDOTNET group. We meet every fortnight and discuss about latest technology, meet the technology expert, learn from the sessions by speakers & best part is the networking with great and innovative minds while sharing information. The interest for community attracts many folks to forum like BDOTNET. The funda is simple  “Lets grow together” .

After a couple of regular UG MEET this year we got this opportunity to experience a technology extravaganza DEVCON-2012. I attended the #devcon12 this Saturday at Microsoft Building, Bangalore. Some of the tips , tricks and learning I was interested to share goes like this.

Let me clarify few things…If you have missed devcon12, may be you have  missed

 

some funny moments with technology, some great learning,  some goodies, some books , you missed the opportunity to meet speakers , great products demo, technology enthusiast and above all some great authors.

After the keynote by Ranjan Bhattacharjee (Group Manager, India Global Technical Support Centre, Microsoft) the great technology events begins with lots of enthusiasm and passion. I remember Ranjan saying “With a little tweak you can take this technology to any device and keep working on your skill be it C# or it is HTML5, you can still develop great product with Windows 8”. He deliver a nice and a quick intro on windows 8 and welcome everybody to the devco2012.

Fortunately/unfortunately I attended some great sessions and missed some very great to.

 

ASP.NET MVC4 + Web API by Chaitra Nagaraj

Just before the session Chaitra asked me “How many??” , I told her “Housefull ” and it was a housefull session. The love for web brings everyone to session like ASP.NET MVC .

You can create new APIs using this new ASP.NET Web API framework. She displayed some really cool demo and put emphasis on how to cover a larger audience starting from web to mobile devices by designing HTTP services using ASP.NET Web API.

You can install the mvc4 RC from  http://www.asp.net/mvc/mvc4 and start learning it from http://www.asp.net/web-api . If you need some documents on the same visit http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=243043. Just for HTML5 lovers check what you can do with MVC using the html5 & JQUERY datepicker

Query composition, Code-based configuration, Content negotiation and so many other cool features are there in the ASP.NET web API. Chaitra has promised she will be coming back with some other cool demos in future UG Meet.

 

Building Applications for Intel Ultrabook Platform and Windows* 8 by Rajagopal A

Rajagopal is a Intel Ultrabook Technology Champion and travel more than 80KM everyday to build his passion and provide a shape to it. He demonstrated the new UltraBook the slimmest ever model I have ever seen. After the first view itself I was “Inspired by Intel”.

Once you have this Ultrabook in your hand “Suddenly everything else seems old-fashioned”

Its true when Intel says “Intel® Rapid Start Technology returns your Ultrabook to full operational power within seconds, so you can jump right back into everything you were doing.”

He displayed the beauty of ultabook with Windows 8 and gave some tips and tricks to develop the touch based , gesture based, sensor based and others on the Windows 8 platform with APIs from Microsoft. The best thing is he promised a half day meeting if we can come up with some apps for ULTRABOOK and need some help/suggestion on the same.

 

Ignite the Leader within you by Vinod Kumar

Vinod ~ “Let me ask you couple of questions”

What is leadership to you?

Are leaders born or made?

These are very common questions , but if you can answer these in uncommon way you get it.

When you watch movies like LAAGAN , whether it really motivates you or just for the sake of entertainment you loved it. You may recall  the scene where Amir Khan convinced the management (sarpanch) and the team players to include “Kachra (was treated as untouchable)” in the cricket team telling “The team is efficient but the best part is what we don’t have or what we are missing will be fulfilled by Kachra”. Amir Khan has displayed the real Leadership attitude and managed to bring Kachra into the team.

Real leadership is being the person others will gladly and confidently follow.

Its always good to follow leaders but at the same time find out the leader inside you

“The first person you lead is YOU.”

Some keywords that focus on the “Leadership Aspect” are Self Confidence, Accountability, Focus on the whole, courage etc. Just try to cultivate this and define yourself.

Emotional Quotient controls you many time, before you flow with this – control your Emotional Quotient. People are attached to leaders and not managers. Being a manager doesn’t make you a leader.

Vinod Kumar , a all time favourite speaker of mine presented a different topic and try to ignite the mind of the young and talented professionals to start thinking different as they can. We have never missed a session from Vinod, because of his guidance. He is guru for me & Sudeepta.

He suggested to some good books: 7 habits of highly effective people, Start with Why by Simon Sinek,  Lets get real or let’s not play by Mahan Khalsa

He delivered more than what we have expected for the day. The session is not the end , he has open his teaching through his blogs on the no-technical aspect of a highly technical professional. http://blogs.extremeexperts.com/

SQL Server Tips and Tricks for Web Developers by Pinal Dave 

People consider most of the SQL session as dry. Ask them to attend a session by Pinal Dave. I don’t want to praise him because he presented a nice session and people enjoyed a lot, but I should praise him because every single morning he teaches me a new concept in SQL Server and I love the way he does it. I want to congratulate him because in last 5 years  @pinaldave has completed 2200 blog post at @sqlauthority & 22 Episode of SQL in Sixty Seconds. I heard Vinod telling “Pinal works very hard and prepares a lot”. That hard work is his key to success and his energy and passion he gathers during each and every presentations he delivers.

This time also it was LOL session. This time he taught some fundamental but nice concepts for performance using keywords IN, EXISTS and JOIN. Scalar Functions help you to give a tough time to the DBAs . (Do not try it in your production but )

 

Visual Studio 2012 – Tips & Tricks by Lohith G N

A much awaited speaker for the day with his cool “Tips & Tricks” for speeding up development with Visual Studio. Love to use the keyboard

Every shortcut he spells the audience used to say “WOW”. Visual Studio 2012 is the latest offering from Microsoft in the Integrated Development Editor segment.

Check some of the shortcut provided by MSDN

Lohith is a true BDTONETTER by heart , the best part is in each of his presentation he proudly claim that. This entire devcon12 was smoothly organised because of his hard work and dedication to the details.

HTML5 – what you NEED to know by Amar Nithyananda

This session was to clear the confusion , whether to go for the much hyped HTML5 or not and how are the Microsoft tools and technology are related to HTML5.

Amar demonstrated some cool demos with Visual Studio , MVC using HTML5. He told bits & Bytes on using different websites to check compatibility of HTML5. Which browsers supports the maximum features. He spoke about different new features on HTML5 and how its gong to impact the web.

Amar will be sharing the slides of his talk in FB for all.

Closing Notes

 

Finally Vinod presented the vote of thanks to everyone including the audience, the speakers, the volunteers and last but not the least the companies who made this day, the sponsors TELERIK, Microsoft, Pluralsight and INTEL.

I met the author of one of my favorite book 3Lives Srinic.

Everyone who walked out from the room got a Pluralsight Subscription coupn worth $29 and keychain from Telerik. Couple of them got books from SQLAuthority, T shirts from Telerik and almost all of them with great learning from the day.

Intel also announced a contest for which Lohith says

If you did not attend the DevCon 2012 event. Intel one of the sponsors of the event has announced "EXO PC" as a giveaway to the best blog article on the event. So those of you who attended the event – hurry and write what you felt about DevCon 2012 as a blog post. paste the link to the blog post on BDotNet facebook wall….. so whos gonna win the EXO PC"

Be a BDTONET member today check the image links.  

Like every time this time also I got couple of followers in twitter

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Till next time “Keep Smiling”