Dec 15 2005
Event Explored: Microsoft READY LAUNCH TOUR 2005 Chennai
Dec 15, 2005. Chennai
Hi!
Today i and my team went to this event at LeRoyal Meridien, Chennai. Actually we started from our office at 0930am and reached (safely!) at 1030am, bcz of the famous chennai traffic.
Microsoft gave nice welcome to us and gave trial versions of VS2005, SQL2005 , valuable guidelines palmlets and a book from SAP as complements.
The keynote was given by Sanjay Parthasarathy. He gave nice and good presentation about Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. The interesting note from him is: there were 18000 bugs identified by MS-Community guys in beta releases and almost all those bugs were fixed.
Key Points from Sanjay:
- VS2005 saves 70% development productivity.
- Now a days 52% of mission critical applications are developed using .NET (The 24% using coffee [ Java!]).
- The number of transactions/sec on Windows2003 + .NET2.0 + SQL 2005 : 2915. But on Redhat Linux + IBM Websphere + Oracle 10G: 1030. (Hold on! be ready to see some math figures from Linux puppies against Microsoft .NET) .
Followed by Sanjay, Parag Amainerkar from HP (HP is one of the Platinum Sponser for this event) gave keynote from HP side. His talking and slides were very boring. He spoked like a stranger on this event.
Ravinchandran from Intel gave good presentation about Intel + Microsoft strategies. The notable thing in his note is the “Technology Transitions” by Intel, means 64-bit + Multi-core + Virtualization are the Intel’s forthcoming hots with Microsoft. – I shall write detail about Multi-core, Virtualization in forthcoming blogs.
And one more hot from Intel (with Microsoft) is “Viiv“. (A new kind of personal computer will premiere in homes early next year when Intel Corporation introduces Intel Viiv technology designed to enrich consumers’ enjoyment of digital entertainment.) – I shall write detail about Viiv in forthcoming blogs.
Atul Sarin from SAP gave notes about SAP + Microsoft. His presentation was simple and short. And one more thing is, i don’t know ABC of SAP. So, i can’t give any x and y about his notes. Sorry ya!!
The last session of Pre-launch was India Customer Adoption & ISV Partnerships. The guys from CRISIL, RAMCO and TCS shared their experience with VS2005 and SQL2005 betas. Among their, Siddharth from TCS shared his XP with VS2005 and SQL 2005 very openely and nicely. He told that Business Intelligence, Analyser and Cubes in SQL2005 provided were reduced lot of pain on data analysis work of their dashboard project. And he explained the software development life cyle (arey! SDLC) customization feature of VS2005.
Okay guys! plz, wait 4 nxt blog… in this, i will cover the post-launch sessions with some interesting news to both developers and testers (hey testers! be ready ya! MS provides lot of fun to you)
(–to be continued)
Dec 15, 2005 @ 23:17:00
Tht’s true guys..
the launch was grt and was quite informative.
abt the presentations, the last one made by Janakiraman on VS IDE was quite a smart one…
Dec 16, 2005 @ 01:38:00
That was quite an appropriate write-up on the events that occurred. I was part of the team that accompanied Mr. Udoooooooooooz to the event launch
… It was the first time I was attending such an event(many thanks Ravi! 
) and on the whole I found the entire session to be a really enriching experience. I’m sure the awareness levels of what’s available and expected has increased significantly among the team as well as the others who attended.
The presentation by Sanjay Parthasarathy was simply a cut-above the rest and he had the audience spellbound.
Ashutosh Tiwary’s(hope I’ve got the spelling right) presentation on VSTS made us realize the absolute value of going ahead with implementations in the same. The critical point in favour of VSTS was that most of the stuff that till now had highly depended on “people’s sense of responsibility”(which has been found to be highly diverse and unreliable) can be made mandatory through defined policies that are practicable (as a part of work) and are not just another burdensome process.
For managers/leads – the availability of information, reports, ability to assign tasks(work items as they are called in VSTS) and accurately track status at any point of time is a major plus.
For Developers/Architects, the benefits are tremendous. The ability to design and define systems that can work (as a result of refinement from accurately simulated validations) in the deployment environment are of indeed great value – it could save us from the hell that’s usually the experience on deployment of systems in real -time environments. Config settings, IIS settings, security, etc can be defined, validated with the designed system and modified based on the analysis provided by VSTS(through the infrastructure diagrams, etc). Test scripts, quality/health analysis, code coverage analysis, etc can also guarantee applications of excellent quality. Accountability of issues fixed and hence time spent is also something developers would much appreciate(achieved through the “informal mail as work items” concept).
Unfortunately, the fact that most of the demos by Ramakant (who shared the stage with Ashutosh) for features mentioned above failed(due to some other technical issues), was indeed an anti-climax. However, our team has resolved to learn, explore and successfully implement a VSTS solution thereby harnessing the amazing features being provided.
The last session by Janakiram was “edutainment” at its best. A glimpse of some really cool features was demonstrated in a natural and interesting way. At the end of it we realised that the statement of “70% increase in developer productivity” was not an exaggeration.
I close here now, averring that it was an amazing learning experience (w.r.t to technical as well as soft skills) and we would now be focussing on translating the knowledge/learning into productive outputs.
Cheers!
