I am moving to thespoke.net

I no longer blog here. I've moved my blog to thespoke.net the site which is blogged the most by .NET freaks all over the globe.

View my new blog at

www.nirmalanand.co.nr

or

http://thespoke.net/blogs/nirmalanandj/default.aspx

Déjà vu

Last week the World Finals of the Imagine Cup 2006 which concluded on August 15th 2006 was aired on CNBC TV. Prizes for the different categories were given off to the winners. Almost every prize winner looked like a geek :)

Kapil Sibal addressing the gathering at Imagine Cup 2006

Back in September 2004(when I was in my Second year) our team FUTURE INSIDE started a project on Police Crime Record Management System for the Microsoft Student Project Program (Now under the name Microsoft Academic Project Program). MSAPP as we all call was the first of its kind for students by Microsoft. The project spanned 8 months and we got a placed in the Top 300 projects on an all India basis in the second phase of our Project. We also got an opportunity to exhibit our project at the Student Project Expo’05 at Meenakshi College, Chennai. There our projects were reviewed by professionals from ISoft, Verizon and of course Microsoft. As we had taken Ramji’s CPU in order to exhibit our project we ate our lunch half-heartedly. Then it was the moment of truth as the result were about to be announced. Finally 8 months of Hard work paid off and we won the BEST PROJECT AWARD in SOUTH ZONE.

Ramji and Me(other three of my teammates not in this picture) receiving Wireless Desktops from Shiela Gulati, Microsoft India Director at MSP Expo 2005,Chennai

Through this project I could get in touch with people like Kevin D’Souza who is an Academic Developer Evangelist from Microsoft, Abhisek Kant and many other from there as well.

It was at the same venue that Kaushik Srenevasan, Sriram Krishnan and Aarthi bagged the best project award in South Zone for Imagine Cup 2005. All the three are now in Microsoft India Development Center, Hyderabad. It feels great to have shared the same stage with people like them :)

My .NET Session at KLN College of Engineering

On the 26th of August 2006, I went to KLN College of engineering with our team from MaduraiDotNet UG as a part of its Campus Reach Program. The Campus Reach Program (a newly coined activity) aims at taking .Net to the colleges in and around Madurai. KLNCE was the first college in our list and it was there I took my first Technical Session outside TCE facing a crowd of over 200 plus. This remembered of my “Introduction to .NET” session at the Community Launch in Jan 2006. Read the article in The Hindu




Me In Action

The .NET Team consisting of 13 members, 3 from Final Year and 10 from Third Year started of from TCE at 9.30am in the bus that KLNCE had offered us for the trip to their college. We reached there at around 10.30am. We were received there by the Placement Officer of KLNCE. We decided to start the session at around 11am but we had trouble installing VS2005 as we couldn’t find systems with the right configuration. So I had to proceed without the demos planned for my ASP.NET Session.

The first session was an Introduction to .NET. Then was a Quiz session which was handled by our juniors. Trial Versions of VS 2005 DVDs were given off to the students who answered enthusiastically. The next session was mine. It was on Web Services. I started off with a slide on how the world would be if there was no interaction among the web apps hosted on the internet and the “Vision of Microsoft.NET”. I went on to speak for 15mins and towards the end of the session I cited some web services offered by WINDOWS LIVE, PASSPORT.COM and GOOGLE. As we ran short of time I couldn’t take my session on ASP.NET 2.0 :(

We then had a hearty meal provided by them. The Principal appreciated our efforts in taking pains to inculcate .NET among the student community there. We then asked them to nominate two students to take up the role of Microsoft Student Partners at KLNCE. Within two days I got a mail from them. I was overwhelmed by their response and I am really thankful to the Principal of KLNCE for helping us organizing this event and allowing MaduraiDotNet UG’s wings to reach out to the student community there. Also the junior team from a college got a good exposure by conducting Quiz sessions. I can say that this is one of the best way to train potential UG Leads :)

One feedback that really impressed me was that of a second year student from the CSE Dept. who thanked us for this wonderful session and making him understand what .Net is all about and wiping away his misapprehension that .NET was something related to Networks and Hardware.

With happenings like these I can guarantee that the Campus Reach Program will definitely be a super hit :)

Take up Microsoft Technical Specialist Certifications

MaduraiDotNet UG has provided an opportunity for eight students to write the following Microsoft Certification exams free of cost:

1)70-431:Microsoft Technical Specialist: Microsoft SQL Server 2005-Implementation and Maintenance.

Screening Test Portions:
* .NET Fundamentals
* SQL Basics
* SQL Server 2000

2)70-536:Microsoft Technical Specialist: Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 -Application Development Foundation.

Screening Test Portions:
* .NET Fundamentals
* VB.NET or C#.NET

3)70-235:Microsoft Technical Specialist: Developing Business Process and Integration Solutions Using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006.

Screening Test Portions:
* .NET Fundamentals
* BizTalk Server Fundamentals
*Advanced Knowledge on Integration of Business Solutions.


These tests can be taken up at any of the Microsoft authorized centers. There will be a screening test conducted on 25.9.2006 at Zo Hall of CSE Dept,Thiagarajar College of Engineering and based on their score eight members will be selected to write the Final Online Exam for which the voucher would be provided. Interested students can just add a comment with their Name, Year of Study and Department.

I am also planning to take up the test on 70-536.

ALL THE BEST GUYS!

PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework

Phalanger is a PHP compiler for .NET Framework. Using Phalanger you can write PHP codes and run them under .NET Framework and IIS. One another important feature that this compiler enables for us is the ability to use thousands of .NET great classes. One cool feature of this compiler is we can write an ASP.NET application with PHP codes for code-behind so PHP programmers can enjoy the power of .NET. You can download current release from here.

Windows Vista for 199$

Microsoft Corp. a couple of weeks back announced that its Windows Vista Operating System will be available at a cost of $199. If your are having a Genuine Version of Windows then you can upgrade it for $99.95. Click here to learn more on this.