FM's Operation Graduation

Yess! After a great PDC 2005 i installed VS2005 .The reason why i installed it after 5,6 days of PDC is because i wanted to install Linux first . However Linux has nothing to do with VS2005 but i wanted to make sure the Opensource Linux is installed first so that i can clearly keep a check on space for installing VS2005 and t was a damn good feeling when i installed it because when i installed VS2002 back 2 years...it took a hell lot of time ..i bought a 7 CD pack that time and then when i installed VS2003 back 1 year ..it again took a great deal of time...i bought 3 CD pack that time and when i installed VS2005 Beta 2..it just took i think 40-55 mins. I started ASP.NET project and made use of the Master Pages. These components were installed in it.

Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Beta 2
MSXML 6.0 Parser
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2
.NET Compact Framework 1.0 SP3
.NET Compact Framework 2.0
Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office System 2005 Runtime Beta 2
Micrsoft Visual J# Redistributable Package 2.0 Beta 2
SQL Server 2005 Mobile Edition
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition April CTP
Microsoft Device Emulator version 1.0 Beta 2

I got the DVDs of VS2005 Beta 2 from the INETA Code Run Programming Competition in which i was in organizing team.

I installed Red Hat 9.0 today. First installation of an opensource OS! I m quite happy with windows but let see what Red Hat has to offer. I m sure there will be no development environment like Visual Studio in Red Hat.

2nd Session:

We took the second session of Mr. Clemens Vasters on "Avalon (Longhorn Client) Overview". He said that as the Avalon, WinFS and Indigo are the constituents of Windows Longhorn as this was said in 2003 PDC but they are a bit change now. He said that as the Longhorn will be realeased most of the work will be on platforms of Win XP and Server 2003 and they will not immediately shift to longhorn so Avalon and Indigo are planned for XP and Server 2003. As the current windows make use of almost no Video Drivers or Graphics Card Capabilities, Longhorn will take use of it, though some features of Avalon might not work in XP. Avalon will take full advantage of media and graphics and sound capabilities of PC. Avalon based on Vector Engine and its three model consists of Application Model , Graphics Model and Documentation Model. He said furthur that programming is easy in Avalon and he showed us the demo. The demos were amazing. They used the language XAML. It has its compiler. He showed us the beatles CD and played with it in 3 Dimension. It was amazing bcuz that is hard to do in current windows. Application can be same however their styles can be customized. So in the end Mr. Clemens adviced that write win applications today and when Avalon arrives , integrate them with it. The presentation was great , especially the demos. Amazin stuff Mr. Clemens. After this session we headed for lunch.

3rd Session (Post Lunch Session):

I went to attend the session of "Programming with Master Pages, Themes/Skins and Navigation Control in ASP .NET 2.0" by Goksin Bakir. He told us about the master pages and how to apply a master page to a slide.He told us about the Page_PreInt() function which works before the controls are loaded. Played with strong typing and weak typing. Master Pages can be nested and we cannot put web part manager in master pages. He then discussed about Themes and Skins. Themes is nothin other than collection of Skins and Skins are basically the attribute of control. The told us how to apply them to a site (Page.Theme = "Basic Blue" ;) easy isnt it ..haan :)...He told us about the global themes and how to enable themes ,then about object datasource and wizard controls and then in the last about Call back. ASP.NET 2.0 with 50 new controls is cool thing to play with ;).

4th Session:

I went to attend the session of "Indigo: Whats next for Connected Applications and Web Services" by Mr. Clemens Vasters. Mr. Clemens began by saying that Indigo is near to his heart and said that indigo is infrastructure for distributed systems. Productivitiy, Interoperatbility and Service Oriented Deployment is the goal. Unified Programming Model includes WSE which includes WS-* specifications , message oriented programming blah blah... He said that service orientation is basically to share meta deta and to avoid coupling. In service and clients he reffered to Mr. Steve and said that we cant use UDDI. He told us about the end points and to remember ABC ( not Alpha,Bravo and Charlie :P:P) but ABC for (Address , Binding and Contract). Address is basically base address , Binding is transport details i.e TCP , http e.tc. and contract is how to communicate and what to communicate ???? (Gettin it ? ;). He discussed about the structure which stars from Flow Protocol then to Reliability Protocol and then to Security Protocol and then to Encoding and then to Transport...doh...Encoding can be of UTF -8,16,32 or Binary (in binary the XML data will be converted to binary 1's and 0's ..how intresting the combinations will be of 1's and 0's i wonder...hmm) and offcourse MTOM. He showed us the demo. Each class has a service host and the type is of interface. We always have to remember ABC and take care of it and provide addressing, binding and contracting. He said that main aim of Indigo is to make super complex things look easy. He concluded that the enthusiam he saw in Pakistan regarding learning new stuff is not anymore in Germany.Thanks Mr. Clemens for that. Mr. Clemens is a man of immense knowledge and he impressed everyone in Karachi.

Closing Session of PDC 2005:

The Cheif Guest Acting President of Pakistan arrived and the session started right away. Proceedings started with the recietation of Holy Quran and then the Host Rahat Qazmi invited the IT Minister of Province Sindh to deliver the speech. He took 15 mins approx. and told us about the future plans and what has happened till now then came the Acting President of Pakistan and he gave a nice speech and asked every Pakistani to work with great spirit to achieve success in every field. He pledged to give his full support for IT activities in Pakistan. Mr. Jawad Rehman Country Manager of Microsoft in Pakistan said that they will try their best to make Karahchi --Cyberachi ..isnt that kewl???...Cyberachi name rocks!!!. Sheilds were given to the Speakes and the Sponsers. When Mr. Clemens came to receive his sheild the whole arena just gave such a clap in appreciation that really Mr. Clemens deserved. His knowledge is great and his informative speech and style was brilliant which impressed everyone . He came last year as well and he is no doubt one of the many best speakers of PDC. After that a book originally signed by the creator of C# came all the way from Washington for 9-year whiz girl from Pakistan, that is great honour for our country..way to gooooo (y). She was called on and so was the box filled with lucky coupons.Everyone waited for X-boxes for such a long time and there they were , 8 of them and probability for each candidate was 1/2000 :P (think abt it ;)). * numbers were called and lucky winners were quite astonished and at the same time delighted that they won the prize and they took it from Mr. Jawad Rehman and the Acting President of Pakistan and the IT Minister of Sindh.

In the end just wanna mention it: I would like to thank the PDC Speakers for coming to Pakistan inspite of all their doubts, i hope after they came here the doubts would have been nullified. The people of Karachi were honoured that you guyz came here.All of the speakers were great and we hope to see you guyz all next year as well. Especially Mr. Rafal Lukawiecki,Mr. Stephen (we missed you the next 2 days) , Mr Clemens the techie guy, Karachi will be waiting for u guyz....Helll Yeah...We are waitin for PDC 2006!!!!!

bye bye PDC 2005!
Goodbye :)

1st Session:

We (Me and my friends) came 15 mins late and most of us went to take the session of Abdelmalek Kemmou on "Visual C#2005 Language Enhancements". I came when he was discussing itterations. He dicusses Partial Classes, nullable values , enumeration, foreach usage. The content that i missed but gathered information about it was Generics , Anonymous Methods and delegates which are offcourse function pointers. He gave demos of partial classes , enumeration. He talked about code generation that is developed by the VS itself i.e form designer code which is seperate than the code of program. I missed the early demos which would have given me more info regarding the new features in C# in 2005. However as the session ended we headed for tea.

2nd Session (Post Tea Session):

We then went to Arvindra Sehmi's session of "Software Factories: Assembling Applications with Patters,Models, Frameworks and Tools". Arvindra Sehmi first gave us an idea about Modelling, Software Modelling i.e and then gave us the idea about Software Factory i.e Automation System brings Domain Specific Process (DSP) together. He said that Software Factories consists of Layer of Process tools and language than consists of equal level of layers namely DSL (Domain Specific Language) Tools, GAT (Guided Automation), FALCON, SDM (System Definition Model) , MSF (Microsoft Solutions Framework) and all of these working on top of some platform offcourse. He told us that make a DSM (Domain Specific Model) . for e.g model the ASP.NET 2's config file , code file. Now Use the DSL and send it to generator which will generate the editor's code and which will be used to create domain specific web services and when it is compiled it completes the meaning of framework. DSL can be anything for e.g like SQL which is used for databases i.e which is specific for some job.Language used is XML in the backened. He than told us how to build DSL's and then building a designer for VS. He talked about Modelling platform and than Mapping. He showed us the demo about how to build DSL. It was a very absorbing session ...dohhh and we headed for the lunch.

3rd Session (Post Lunch Session):

We then went to take Mr. Clemens session. He was tired because of the long journey to Karachi from Miami. Mr . Clemens and the audience were both 15 mins early Mr. Clemens after sayin that I m a german and i will start on time gave us something extra and that was an inspirational presentation regarding 1920's and Structure/System of Organization .In that he compared b/w today and 1920's organization and their differences like email replacing the messages sent on paper in 1920 , IT revolutionized the way of communication in an organization blah blah..and stuff like that. As soon as the clock ticked 2:00 pm he started his session on "Visual Studio Team Foundation and Team System (Part 1)". He told us about IT Solution Life Cycle i.e there are four players on same level namely Developers, Architects , Project Manager and Testers. First of all Personas are created. He gave us the example of Peter (Age 42, Bank Manager, energetic) , Rita (38 , two childern , husband died in accident) and Tery (who sell stuff in electrical store) . These examples are showing that personnas are representation of real world user just like Microsoft have 3 personnas :P namely Mort (whoe gives 8 hours to programming, programs in VB) , Elvis (instrested in future works) and Einstein ( who is always ahead of Microsoft in his thinking, and knows C# and VB ). Now he gave the order of working in a team structure.After creating personnas ,create Scenarios that will be done by Analyst then comes Project Manager who plans an iteration and then architect sketches out the application and how it will work for each personna. Division of scenarios into task takes place then. Developer than picks the tasks and find out the cost i.e time and money and send it to PM and then PM will look that iteration. Developer will make unit test and the testing will be done by testers and the bugs will be fixed or will be fixed in the next iteration. He talked about MSF Agile which integrates with Microsoft Framework. However as he was showing the demo the mic created problem momentarily which broke the momentum three or four times which really was dissappointing and Mr. Clemens decided to give the remaining session in the next session that was on the same topic but offcourse it was the 2nd part of it. The session was nice and infromative. In the end i asked Mr. Clemens the question that Mr. Stephen asked regarding "Jane". :D

4th Session:
I will write about it :)...feelin tired right now .

Starting Session:
PDC 2005(Pakistan Developer Conference) an Annual Event started b/w 9:30-10:00. The first session started by the host Rahat Qazmi who introduced the Guests. The centre of attraction was Mr. Rafal Lukawiecki who has a great following in Pakistan because he was the best speaker in the PDC 2004. Rafal Lukawiecki starting session regarding the upcoming techonologies was great. He gave an impressive overview of Visual Studio 2005 ,.NET Framework 2, Teamwork, Microsoft Solutions Framework 4,SQL Server 2005, Longhorn (Avalon , Security) blah blah..... then after the Chief Guest presentations , we headed for tea.

2nd Session (Post Tea Session):

I took the session of Mr. Abdel on Overview of ASP.NET 2. We (me and my friend) were late entering the room so we had to stand up in the start but fortunately we found places in the middle of the session. He discusses about new features in ASP.NET 2. The new controls especially. He gave a demo on security i.e giving a login page and then creating user and then defining its roles. He discussed about Web Parts i.e different parts of pages have seperate working and then relating them. He talked about Profiles and Profile Management and the Site Management. The presentation was good and it enhanced my information related to ASP.NET 2. After this session we headed for Lunch.

3rd & Unforgettable Session ( Post Lunch Session):

I first went in the session regarding Future of IT but then i simply realized in the start that the session can easily be understood via presentation slides so i then went where i thought in the start i should be to Mr. Stephen Forte session of "Implement data Driven Caching With Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005" (grr...such a long name) . Well as soon as I entered the hall , i saw him executing data binding demo and that was not working at first and then he polled to the audience whether it will work or not once, twice than thrice and then he excalimed ..."don,don,done..doneee ...don-don-done-donee-doneeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee"
i was amazed reallyyyy by his emotions and so all the listeners. He was like giving points along with cool stuff in b/w which kept the ppl charged up during the session. He talked about
Datacaching in VS2005. He discussed about 5 data sources. (No oracle...it was all microsoft there :D) . He talked about ASP.NET Cache Engine. He discussed different types of caching i.e ouput caching and fragmanted caching(caching of user control). Caching by parameter such as in Amazon website . He discussed lightly about Caching about Router Level. Mr. Stephen was very kind to both right and left hand side ppl :D....He always kept the seat at the left hand side for his gf ;) in the spanish class :D so u know why left side ;) and why the right side..hmm..maybe the rostrum was there thats why. He was really an amazing personality i have ever heard , i became extremely fond of his style of his presentation that i decided not to leave the hall and wait 15 mins there for his next session.

4th and Again Unforgettable Session:

15 mins wait over, Mr Stephen started again and this time on "Using Xquery to query and Manipulate XML Data in SQL Server 2005". XML DataType is introduced in SQL Server 2005 and that data type can be converted to char and vice versa. He discussed that to query XML Data we have "XQuery Technology". XQuery is superset of XPath. He mentioned that XML Query is based on FLWOR (For, Let, Where , Orderby, Return) e.t.c. He then mentioned about Ugly Americans :D and then about New Jersey ppl hahah i love that stuff. Whatever he was mentioning there was listened by the audience with great intrest. He discussed XQuery in detail giving demos on it as well as relational approach and using them together . He discussed about XML Schemas and how schemas handle XML datatype. The overall presentation was great and then after the Q&A session he told the audience (though much of them left for the tea break) but I and 20,25 ppl more stayed to listen his Paris Story :P. Here it is now...Lights on ...Camera rolling, Action: This was the time when American and French were really in war of words regarding the American-Iraq War issue and Mr. Stephen had to change a flight in France in his Europe tour. His father told him not to spend any money there (strict orders :D) and when Mr. Stephen reached there he went to bathroom thrice and he switched b/w terminals A,B and C in the airport car offcourse which was free :P and the driver was freakin upset with him :@...then he buys a magazine and he realizes...oh my God...i have bought one..my father told me not to :@ (Chuckles :D:D..i wonder if his dad knows abt it :D ), that was it guyz.

After that Q&A session took place. The day was superb and i think it was more due to Stephen Fort this time around. His presentation rocked the PDC 2005..yess i repeat..his presentation rocked the PDC 2005 and those who were there were veryyyyyyyyyy luckyyyyyyy (like me ;) to hear and see such a gr8 presentation.

bye bye PDC 2005 Day1!