Last week was pretty hectic with me attending a lot of conferences. It started with the Modelling 2006 conference from OMG (Object Management Group). The session was about Model Driven Architecture and advances in that field with case studies from organization like Motorola and Infosys. The opening key note was really nice and set the pace for the rest of the session. Overall, the session was quite informative and time well spent.
The next day was a session from NASSCOM about software licensing best practices. It had various consultants come and talk about best practices for maintaining software assets in a company and how to comply with various regulations. There was also a session on software copyright, which was very interesting.
The very next day, I had to attend Microsoft Research's 1st anniversary, called TechVista and this was really an eye opener. It had some of the most eminent brains in the industry like Turing Award winners come and talk about their work in the field of computer science. A few sessions stand out in my mind. The first one was from Sir Tony Hoare (1980 ACM Turning Award Winne). If you do not know him, he is the inventor of the Quick Sort algorithm! The other session was from a Carnegie Mellon professor called Takeo Kanade and he talked about robotics. Man, THIS IS RESEARCH!! The other session that I liked was from the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Research Dan Ling. He showed some of the advances done in the area of mobile devices and the demos were really cool. The final session was from Andrew Zisserman from the University of Oxford and it was about finding human faces in video images. Really cool!
Overall, 3 days of various events left me exhausted mentally with the amount of information amassed :-)
The best thing that has happened in this UG launch is that all MVPs in Bangalore came together and contributed articles and this resulted in a 70+ page book which will be published on the UG site. It is a book that covers VS 2005 and SQL Server 2005 and should be a great asset for people learning these technologies. The best thing however is that this book is not free! Not that it is going to be costed, but we are planning to have some internet games around this book so that you “earn” the book and do not get it for free! Watch the UG site
http://groups.msn.com/bdotnet and
http://groups.msn.com/sqlbang for more details.
Just finished the UG (community) launch for SQL Server 2005. It was a great event with around 100+ people attending. The sessions were broken down into BI, Programmers and DBA specific features of SQL Server 2005. I took two sessions on programmability and other fellow MVPs had sessions on the other main topics. Overall, it was a great event and quite an overdose of SQL Server :-) which left the audience spellbound with the new set of features. We did receive quite a good feedback on the various features. All of the presentations and demo scripts that were used during the presentations will be made available for people to download and play around with.