Finally, the most awaited event for the developers Tech.Ed India was flagged of in Bangalore on 14th of June. A new venue for this event, Hotel Grand Ashok. Till last year J N TATA Auditorium was the venue. This year it was a new place with a new look for the Tech.Ed. The no. of tracks was increased to 6, the Mobility and Embedded space was provided a separate track.
14th June 2005
The registration desk was setup at the pool side giving a pleasant ambience for the crowd. There were atleast 10 registration desks which reduced the crowd at each desk to a very large extent. Professionals from the companies Infosys and Wipro had a seperate registration desk. The delegates and the attendees were given a DVD set containing Visual Studio 2005 Beta, Visual Studio Team System and SQL Server 2005 evaluation kit.
There were two hangars setup close to the pool. The Main hangar could accomodate approximately 1000 people, the other hangar was the partner pavilion where the partner booths were setup. There were 7 booths in the partner pavilion
- Microsoft Tablet PC
- Microsoft Press
- Microsoft Community
- INTEL
- Sapient Technologies
- Avocent
- Grape City
The Keynote started by 9:00 and since I was a part of the Microsoft Tablet PC booth I could not attend the Keynote till the end. I just went inside the main hangar for few minutes wheh Sheila Gulati was addressing the crowd. She was talking about the different Microsoft initiatives in India. Then she said that
"The future of India is so bright that I need to wear Sunglasses to look at each software developer"The keynote session ended around 10:15 which was actually late by 30 minutes. Then the professionals went to the tracks of their wish. The architect trach was held at the Main Hangar and the rest of the tracks were held in the convention halls, ball room and the other halls.
As we had to take care of the booths we could not attend the sessions. Later in the day myself and Sunil went to the Microsoft Office to install the softwares on the Tablet PC's which were to be used for the Hands on Lab on Day 3. Within 2 hours we could complete installing the required software on 3 systems. At lunch time we returned back to the Hotel. The lunch was really good, especially the desserts. Ice cream and the cake was really delicious.
The session which we were eagerly waiting was the Building Bluetooth Applications with WinCE 5.0/Windows Mobile by Gaurav Khanna. It was really a very nice session where he gave the introduction to Windows Mobile 5 and demonstrated how to work on it. He introduced the new API's and also gave a demo on how to build applications. This being the last session for the day, we had to go back to he booths as it was the TechExpo hour, i.e. people came for the partner booths. There was also a contest called the TechExpo where the people who attended the booths had to tell about the different things they learnt from each stall and 10 persons who wrote the highest no. of correct entries won a watch each.
Then in the Entertainment Night, there was the laser show and the Rock show by Unknown (Forgot the Band's Name). Then it was the time for Dinner. Once again good food with excellent desserts.
The second was once again very good and I got an oppurtunity to attend the session by Michelle McKelvey and Kevin D Souza. The sessions were really good which helped us to understand how to use the Tablet PC SDK and Speech SDK for the mobile devices. As usual the food was good. This was the end of the event and in the closing ceremony the prizes were given away.Both days there was the feedback contest, where one person won the prize for the feedback they provided at the end of each session. The winner was selected by the lucky draw.
16th June 2005 The Third day was the Hands on Lab where we were in charge of the Tablet PC and the Mobility track. There was a huge rush for these Hands on Lab. So we had to breakdown the sessions to 45 minutes each and we accomodated 3 sessions each. Each session we accomodated around 30 people, so 90 people for 1 lab.The Three sessions were...
- Building Managed Applications with Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC SDK 1.7 by Michelle McKelvey
- Building Network-Aware Mobile PC Applications by Kamesh Tumsi Dayakar
- Building Power-Aware Mobile PC Applications by Kamesh Tumsi Dayakar
Michelle McKelvey is the Evangelist for the Tablet PC and the Mobile team.
Both of them were from Redmond and it was really a nice time with these both.
Really these three days have become one of the most wonderful days of this year, meeting a lot of people and learning a lot of new things...
