I think Srini on his previous post did tell you some glimpse of what was in store and what we all MVP's from Bangalore did for the VS & SQL Launch at our Usergroup.
Snaps from the Launch Day.
Hope you liked the snaps. But this is just a representative set of what type of sessions we had. It was really a big time blast. A total of about 11 sessions over two complete day's. What else can someone ask for with these new technologies.
VS being the First day it had how VS could prove to be a big time productivity gain from a Developer, Architect, Program Manager and tester point of view. There were couple of interesting questions by the VS or the Visual Developer MVP's did a fabulous job. And something worth to note here is we even had two speakers from the Community who were nominated to talk at the event. You can catch the pix from the link above. Even though we staretd with about 20+mins delay, end of the day everything went off well.
Next moving to the day two !!! We were determined to start on time this time and we got it rolling on time. Praveen (Microsoft RD) started his session on BI and he explained from Data mining, SSIS, SSAS and SSRS. Two hrs of packed info to start with. Next after the break, it was turn for Srini to start his SQL Server 2005 for Developers. Now this turned out to be equally challenging were Srini had to talk over all the dev features with just about an hr and half :). But he did a very cool demo trying to meet the ends together. We took another break for Lunch and post-lunch it was my turn. I started with "Building highly available applications with SQL Server 2005" and walked through the partial availability, database mirroring, snapshot isolation, database replication and more ... Did my level best to do it demo oriented and get the crowd excited about the new features. Then back to Srini for some serious “SQL Server 2005 for DBA's” from a security point of view. He talked in length about User-schema separation and encryption algo's. Again a session packed with lots of demo's. I liked the way he presented the whole concept. And lastly my turn again to talk over “More on DBA tools for Monitoring and Performance Tuning”, even though I was tempted talking in depth about the internals I found a lot of them have not used any SQL 2005 tools. So started with SAC, Profiler, DTA, SSMS, SQLCmd and a lot more which was just demo oriented. Trying to tell people what can be achieved in each tool. Did a cool demo of tuning a 2.1mins query workload to 6 sec :). So by the time we finished it was 6:30PM. But I had a great satisfaction that we did something in-depth and I am sure people would agree it was a real over-doze of VS and SQL for 2 days.
There were lots to give as goodies including VS Team Suit and SQL Server 2005 - 180 days Eval Copy. Let aside the T-Shirts, Pens etc that they got. We even had lot of fun with Sudoku game and couple of bags to give away.
I will let the community speak for itself. A couple of Blog post on the event can be got from here and here.
Lastly would like to thank all who made this event possible. Including but not limited to the speakers and fellow MVP's Manoj, Saravana, Pooran, Srini, Praveen (Regional Director). And all the folks who joined hands to write the first UG Launch Book for the community. Thanks to Dr. Pavanaja, Kashi and others. Just incase you are interested and part of BDotNet UG then get the book details here. Thanks a million to the RVCE College MCA department HOD and staff who were intrumental in giving us a fabulous audi and sponsoring the event.
I am still thinking Community Rocks or did we rock the community ;) ...