Report :- Amal
During the Community Tech Days 2010 held at Kochi, K-MUG decided to conduct monthly user group meeting for Central Kerala region at Kochi. First meeting was conducted on Nov 13, 2010 and the venue was Mastermind Institute of Engineering, Kakkanad, Kochi. I was given a chance by the K-MUG people to take a session on Windows Phone 7.
Although I had started making slides and creating some demo applications, last minutes hiccups is unavoidable. The case is no different here, I didn’t wanted any issues to surface during the presentation coz of my unstable development machine, so I decided to demo the application inside a VM. For that I created a new one with Windows 7 64-bit as OS and then went on to install the Windows Phone Developer Toolkit which is a free download from MSDN. Even though I had 3GB memory and a dual core processor, it took a pretty decent time to install. But to my horror, I found out that the application is not loading in the emulator after a successful build. So after googling for a while I was able to get the problem behind that, Windows Phone Emulator will not work properly in a VM. The time was almost midnight and I had to catch the early morning train, so I decided to show it in my machine come what may.
Next morning I got up early and reached the station in time. During the journey I decided to go through the ppts and demo applications and made sure that everyone is working fine. I reached Eranakulam around 9.30 and thanks to ever present traffic blocks in Ernakulam, I was late by half an hour in reaching the venue. When I entered the hall, Yanesh was mid-way through his presentation on Test Driven Development and I was unable to listen to his talk coz I was busy with settling down and Safil was waiting for me to have my lap to show his presentation. Although he had Praseed’s lap as a backup, I handed over mine to him to prepare for the session. By this time Yanesh wrapped his session and I was not able to pay attention. Really missed it, coz I had attended his last session on Generics at CTD Kochi and it was an excellent one. In the meantime, if someone is wondering who Yanesh is, this is for them. He is a solutions architect with Millennium Consultants who has got 16+ years of experience in designing and developing application using Microsoft Technologies. Please visit the event page to know more about Yanesh .
Next up was Safil with his presentation on Microsoft Surface. Safil's area of focus is mobile app development and is currently associated with SunnySoft Solutions Kochi. Although he is fresh out of college, he has got in depth knowledge in developing apps for iPhone and is also good on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). He started his talk by saying that he just wanted give an introduction about surface and told us to wait until his next session to explore the programming side of it. He then gave a brief history about the concept (actually a reality now). I had seen some articles about it, but When Safil said that the concept of Surface dates back to the 80’s, it was new to me coz all these year I believed it as new technology from MS. He then explained the various features, its underlying hardware, hardware and software requirements and also about its basics such as multi touch, 360 degree view, object recognition technology and its UI design principles.
After Safil session, the sponsors for the venue gave a little intro about their operations and their courses on offer. They also distributed leaflets and brochures to the attendees and it was almost time for tea break. I always loved these breaks in between coz it gives me the opportunity to link up with new people and friends.
After the tea beak, it was my turn to take the session and this was my first session in a K-MUG event. My talk centered on the new product from the Microsoft stable, the Windows Phone 7 OS. I expected some iPhone or Android developers for the event, but to my surprise there were only two or three people. So I started my session by talking about the history and features available in WP7. Then I went to on to mention about the hardware specifications and tools available for developing WP7 apps.
Frequent power disruptions caused interruptions during the session and during one we decided to hand over the certificates to students of Adoor Engineering college who had completed their academic projects under the guidance of K-MUG people. This initiative was led by Raj, who sadly left us last month and Praseed did mention about it while giving away the certificates to the student representative.
After the presentation I explained the Windows Phone emulator and then the life cycle of a WP7 app. Then I went ahead to show some demo apps which included areas such as display orientation methods, life cycle events and isolated storage. I had prepared one more app for the demo but the time constraints meant I had to wrap up the session without showing it. I will be putting it up in the blog along the with the slides I used for the presentation. So please keep on reading my blogs....
The last session of the event was Saravana Kumar, a Senior Software Engineer with Orion India, Kochi. He is into developing enterprise application using Microsoft Technologies and also writes articles on www.wcftutorial.net.
He started his session by explaining what WCF is and the new features available in WCF 4.0. He then went on to explain every features in detail and also showed us a demo for the majority of the features.
By the time Saravanan finished the demo it was almost one o clock and everyone was dying to have food. So we quickly wrapped up the things at the venue and next up on my itinerary was a quick visit to Aluva, so I decided to be the pillion rider in Safil's bike who going in that direction and the rest went on to have food in a near by hotel .......
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