Microsoft TechMela

On Tuesday, Microsoft organised TechMela, an event to focus on the web and software enterprise solutions using Microsoft Tools. So as per my interests, I attended the workshop on "Web Application for Enterprise". Though it was a bit more on enterprise side, but was worth attending even after taking a day off from college.

The gathering was decent, i mean not a big rush i was expecting for a free event. The major reason would be the Weekday effect. Anyways, they had great food and great workshop, that was important.

The workshop was further divided into six sessions, taken by different so-called Evangelist. The first session was of building an enterprise grade rich web app in 15 mins, and i was going to bet that he won't be able to do it in 15 mins. But i underestimated the visual studio power, after lots of chitchat in between, he was able to complete it in 25 mins (oh offcourse he skipped the part of database creation which i was counting on initially :)). Anyways, that session was really basic, he told us bout the basic usability of AJAX toolkit in enterprise apps.

The next session was more of my type, they showed us PHP on Windows, though it's just a simple thing, but using FastCGI with IIS was what that made it interesting. They showed how the use of FastCGI over tradition CGI for perl and PHP would speed up the process and reduce server load. Though they didn't show any real application in PHP, but they showed a comparison between CGI, FastCGI and FatCGI with enabled caching.

The next good session was that of SilverLight and AJAX. SilverLight as some of you might be knowing is an add-on launched by Microsoft which enables users to view pages coded in XAML. They actually converted an image into xml code :0 The image (also including media file) was made in their software called Expressions, whose code is pure XML which they call XAML. This silverlight made them do stuff only made for high speed internet, work correctly on normal broadband connection. That was really impressive. AJAX part was again the same, showing the different tools available in AJAX library and toolkit that comes as an add-on of Visual Studio.

There were a few more sessions, one was on MSDN and other other developer resources offered by Microsoft and other on best practices to follow in an Enterprise, but those were not of that interest to me, to write bout them. Though I have attended the webinars of two of the speakers who came for the workshop, but this truly was good experience for me. For the first time I came in direct contact of the actual people behind these things. Well there's a similar workshop on 13th this October, i hope to attend that too.. Lets see what they have this time!