Enjoyment Unlimited - Part 1

Hi!! friends, the last 2 weeks has been too good. Let me start with the first one. The first week was filled with 2 things.

1. Sun Tech Days ;-)
2. The Community Bandwagon

Sun Tech Days
This is a technical conference that Sun Microsystems (inventor of the Java programming language) holds annually at different countries. Last year, it was in Bangalore and this year it was in Chennai, at the Chennai Trade Center. The crowd turned out to be more than 4000 and they had a bonus 3rd day. It had 2 tracks called the "Netbeans day" and "Solaris day". This big event ends with the JavaOne conference that is held at San Fransisco, USA.

As usual, the 2 day event was superb with experts showing off the new features of Java language, developing web services using netbeans IDE, sun java studio creator, sun java enterprise studio, AJAX and a lot of other cool stuff. The sessions i liked the most was the ones on mobile devices, web services security, AJAX, Matisse (the new GUI creator for netbeans) and developing web applications using the sun java studio creator.

All the tools mentioned are 100% free. Netbeans 5.0 can be downloaded from here. By becoming a member of SDN, you can download Sun Java Studio Creator 2 and Sun Java Enterprise Studio for free. Even the membership for SDN is free.

A Java jacket is given to 1 person among the audience. 6 people have to volunteer from the audience and they have to showcase their unique talent. Based on the response of the audience, he is given the java jacket. This year it was won by Sivanand working for HCL.


The Community Bandwagon
Myself and many Microsoft Student Champs from Chennai and Bangalore worked on an idea called "The Community Bandwagon". The main purpose of this was to promote technical usergroups and create awareness about the latest technologies, particularly .NET. As part of the plan, we had to visit colleges in and around Chennai and talk to students about technology. We covered about 4 colleges per day and went to more than 12 colleges in Chennai. The Bangalore guys joined us on 7th Feb.

After enjoying a superb dinner with the Bangalore people, we set off to colleges from 8th morning. We took a bus with us to different colleges and told some students of each college to paint a portion of the bus. The painted bus will then move to other colleges. This was absolute fun and every moment was recorded. At the end of the tour, the bus was completely painted and it looked colourful with the creativity of the students.

In every college, we spent about an hour and half by giving out pamphlets on Microsoft Academic Project Program, Imagine Cup. From the 20 of us, some of them were selected to talk at each college on introduction to the user group and its activities etc. We conducted sudoku contests, JAM and a quiz session at the end. Those who got the answers right were given t-shirts, visual studio 2005 express editions, visual studio 2005 trial editions and original windows xp professional. We received very well at every college we went and the event was a huge success.

The Community Bandwagon at Chennai lasted for 4 days covering more than 12 colleges and it culminated with the "Date with .NET" event organised solely by/for the students. The event was held at Kamaraj Memorial hall, Chennai on 13th Feb 2006. Eminent speakers at the event included the Anna University Vice Chancellor Dr. Viswanathan, Former CSE HOD at IIT-M Dr. MuthuKrishnan, Microsoft Academic Lead Mr.Chander Sundaram and Microsoft Academic Developer Evangelist Mr.Ashwani Sharma. More than 1800 students all over the city participated and in one word, the event was "excellent".

After an excellent week of ceaseless excitement, the Bandwagon team moved on to a tour of South India comprising of Coimbatore, Erode and Madurai. More about it in the next blog ;-)