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!

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.

Madurai DotNet udergoes a transformation

I was browsing through the web and this thought came to my mind."Why don't we redesign our Groups' home page??"...as the UG activities at MNET has started to pickup its pace.So I sat for 2hrs and redesigned the page using Fireworks 2004. Check that out Here
Ur feedbacks are valuable :)

AJAX at TCE

On the 11th of August we had a session organized for the 2nd and 3rd years on using AJAX in ASP.NET apps by Kaushik Srenevasan of Microsoft India. The session lasted for two hours and demos on the usage of ATLAS to develop the GMAIL kinda experience was shown by Kaushik Srenevasan. The session was really fine and only the 2nd years were a bit confused as they found it difficult to understand the concepts. We recorded the session on tape and would soon be made available to all the members of the MaduraiDotNet User Group.

A dream comes true
It has been a pretty long since I blogged…but I made it a point to record one of my happiest moments in my life. By God’s grace I got a dual placement in Hewlett Packard. It all started on the 13th of July, first was the AT, which lasted for 2hrs. It was pretty tough actually. Out of the 285 attended 25 were shorted listed for the Technical Interview. The Technical Interview was quite easy and was on my project in a Linux Cluster, the one which I had been doing since my second year. Then after that was the HR that lasted for 20 mins. The results were announced at 8.30pm and 8 out of the 25 who cleared the AT got placed :)

Placed in TCS
After a very long time i've updated my blog(nearly three months). I've got a job after 15years of studies.What 15years? From I standard to my III year in college. I was one among the 287 selected from college.TCS arrived at our campus on Monday, the first phase was the online AT. I should say the AT was pretty tough especially the Critical Reasoning section. Then we had the Technical Interview, for me it lasted for 15 mins almost all the question were on my .NET project which I did in my second year. Then I was shortlisted for the MR interview. This also lasted 15mins. The results were announced on Wednesday and I was happy to find my name on the list of selected candidates.

IWeee

We left the hostel at midnight and decided to go to Kanyakumari to see the Sunrise. 8-( we couldn't see it properly, then we raced towards Trivandrum and reached RajMahal Cottage(the place where we stayed during the trip) at 11.00.I shared the room with Senthil, Shanoof, Prabhu & Praveen .We liked that room, especially for that ... :-P. We then visited the BSNL company and went over to see the sunset over the beach. That evening we went looking for a NV hotel and we finally ended up into one and left there with tears in our eyes bcoz of that Chicken Masala we ate(tooooo spicy). Shanoof unable to bear that poured some water into it ;-). We then retuned back to the cottage and joined our friends who were playing Dumb Sherads. Later that night we five decided to have a GD kind of thing. From the moment I and Praveen started to speak, all the others went to sleep ;-) We spoke on things from blogging to Da Vinci Code. It was fun. The next day we visited the USSoftware Company at the Tecnhno Park(Truly awesome). That night we left for Madurai after having dinner at Nagercoil. Lessons learnt at Trivandrum- never eat Chicken there ;-) . Had a great time at Trivandrum.

Off we gooooo

After much of an hassle we have finally set things right to go for an Industrial Visit to Trivandrum on Sunday night(12th). This is the third time we are going for such a tour oops! ... I mean Industrial Visit. We had earlier gone to Chennai and Bangalore. I am keyed up for tomorrow. I could somehow find time to go to KLN and SIT ,with the Community Road Show around the corner. Will return back on Wednesday(15th). I'll blog once when I return from the trip.

Un changement enfin!

Zapppp! And it's ready. My blog has undergone a transformation. Not to be too technical... Nice template isn't it.

How I happened to learn .NET?

During the beginning of my second semester in college I went out to town to buy some books. It was there in a store in front of the College House Restaurant (near Railway Station) I saw a Computer magazine by the name Developer IQ. During my school days I used to go the library to read Computer magazines like Digit, PCQUEST, Computers@Home ,…. and I even subscribed to their CDs from our school computer lab just for the Demo Games. So I couldn’t resist the lure and guess what? That CD contained the .NET FMK and ASP.NET Webmatrix. I had no clue idea about .NET at that point of time and my brother told that it’s an upcoming technology and said we buy it. I was very much excited about the Games and other Benchmarking tools in it. After installing the games, the CD was put in the closet where it lay to be uncovered at the opportune moment.

As a new entrant to our CSE Department I got an opportunity to showcase my talent at the Cyber Showcase, a software presentation for the I yr students along with my friend Ramji. I was eager to make a mark there and we decided to present two softwares, a Quiz using Jscript and an Analog Clock using C. During the exhibition of our softwares a couple of my seniors asked “why u didn’t use any Database to retrieve the questions and why no dynamic pages?” We lost the competition. I pondered a lot over this question and thought of learning a Server Side programming language. My brother and I tried a lot to configure Apache Tomcat in our system but in vain. So my dream went into shambles.

It was then my brother happened to borrow the ASP.NET Webmatrix Mechanical Toolkit book from his library. I installed the .NET FMK and Webmatrix as told in the Book and was all too excited to develop my very first Dynamic web page.Success! 8-) I started working on the exercises given in the book chapter by chapter and I never knew developing interactive web apps would be that simple. I didn’t have SQL Server at that time, so I had to download the MSDE (63MB) from my system through a Dial-up connection which lasted over 6 hours. It gave me anxious moments until I could install and configure it for my Webmatrix.

In the next semester we had the same Cyber Showcase, this time round I had developed Quiz using ASP.NET and MSDE along with Ramji and we bagged the First Prize. Right from that moment I developed a passion for .NET Technology and believe it or not we bagged the First Place in the South Zone of Microsoft-India Student Project Program 2004-2005(Expo’05,Chennai). A remarkable achievement is it. My ardor for .NET will persist.

A lesson learnt

It was the last day of the qualifying round of Code4Bill. It was 10.30 pm and just one and half hours to go for the showdown. The question set consisted of 8 questions and I was confident about only two ;-) and 4 were doubtful. But I thought I wud give it a try. With just two minutes to go for 12.00pm instead of clicking the Submit button I accidentally the Backspace (<-) key :-(. By the next time I could resubmit it I got the message Timed-Out. I could do no more. Hoping that I wud get another opportunity next year.

Phew...

Phew the community launch is over. MaduraiDotNet has achieved yet another milestone. It was my first experience onstage ,addressing a large gathering of over 300+. After the intro session on .NET was over I was nostaligic, looking down the path through which I came, from my first seminar in college Microprocessor... :-). "Experience is the best teacher",how true it is . The Communty Launch is just the beginning of what's going to come next. Its a whole new xperience for me, the last minute scare ;-), the decorated salads..... Its just like a dream too real to believe but its true. The dream continues......

On a Christmas Eve

On christmas eve I could somehow find time to modify my website and host it once again .I got some valuable feedback from my friends and have tried to implement it. One major cause of worry is that I have some banners tied to my page which takes quite some time to load. Hope it looks much better this time round.

My fears Shift+Del -ed

On the day when the results were out I was a bit hysterical coz it was the first time internal setting and valuation of papers were implemented and moreover I didn't want my score to fall below my overall score. In the end my fears became a history and it turned out well :-).

Hello,World

It was on this day that I started to blog. Amidst the tight exam schedule and the nearing Community Launch I could somehow find time to do this.