The Great Indian Developer Summit- 2008

The Great Indian Developer Summit(GIDS)- 2008

Day-1:

I had wished to attend the Daring Java conferences which were part of GIDS-2008, but i did get a chance to attend the Summit but not Daring java it’s Bleeding-Edge .NET Conference. I thought that these summits were a bit too high for a student like me but i was wrong. The 5 talks which i attended were all from the ground up. I will put a key notes on about the talks here. It was a great experience to be sitting amidst the developers and listening to the best in the field. I would not have spent Rs. 10,000/- for the conference but i was lucky enough to get pass from the company where i am currently working on a projec. There were many stalls at the Expo stalls by Adobe, Forum Nokia, MSDN, Amazon, Oracle, DirectI, Taroby, Cordys. infragistics and many others. I suppose there are 24 of them out of whcih some i heard companies for the first time. These stalls were explaining what they offer like products, services, and other things which are usually told. Then we were given Lunch coupons- but i had lunch without giving my coupon- interesting right!!!

Coming on to the sessions i attended:
First Session- ASP.NET Ajax and future of Web Developement
This session was taken up by Todd Anglin (One can visit his blog here)
I had absolutely very very little knowledge about ASP.NET AJax and i thought it would be tough for me to follow the talk, but i was wrong. The talk was simple and it was taken right from the basics explaining the advantages and disadvantages of Ajax and how ASP.NET Ajax overcomes these disadvantages.
One thing i want to mention is that- Ajax- This is the correct way to write and not AJAX, cause Ajax is not exactly an abbreviation. Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XmlHttpRequest.
Ajax is a De Facto Standard. There were many issues taken up like- Ajax breaks browser’s back button, breaks browsers Bookmark system and the Ajax content cannot be crawled. But ASP.NET Ajax overcomes them.
Pretty interesting session it was.

Second Session- Internet Explorer 8– by Janakiram MSV ( You can visit his blog here)
This session gave us an bird’s eyeview of the upcoming IE8 from Microsoft. This seems to be mainly aimed at the Standards and for the developers. They have provided an IE7 emulator in IE8 so that the pages that requires IE7 can still be rendered by IE8 using the emulator. He explained the concept of WebSlices something similar to RSS Feed Burners, where in one can get some part of the webpage to appear on the Favorites tool bar and can easily access from there. Developer Tools is the new feature which is similar to Firefox’s Firebug where in the developer can immediately see the result of the changes done to the HTML.
For more on IE8 one can visit the following links:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie
msdn.microsoft.com/ie

Third Session- ASP.NET MVC: First Look– By Todd Anglin
MVC- Model View Controller Architecture, where the controlling ie actual business logic is seperated from the View and the Model does the data related task and the View is reponsible in generating the actualy Look. So in this the load on the view is lesser i.e it has to do lesser tasks.

Fourth Session- IIS 7.0 For developers– By Colin Bowern (One can visit his blog here)
This was something that went over my head. Actually i slept through this session.

Fifth Session- .NET Framework 3.5- LINQ and Language Enhancements– by Bijoy Singhal
This was the best session so far. And we were introduced to some new Language Enhacements in .NET Framework 3.5 and LINQ. The various language enhancements are: Object Initialisers, Local Variable Type inference, Anonymous types, Extension Methods, Auto Implemented Properties, Lambdas, Expression Trees, LINQ. More on these can be found here

Look out for more about the Day-2 of the Summit here