GIDS- Great Indian Developer Summit 
It was a great day at the GIDS. I did attend a very few sessions today but none the less there were the most productive ones. The whole of the morning session was spent in the .NET Gotchas workshop. It was an interesting and productive session by Dr. Venkat Subramaniam. Some finer points on .net were dealt in the session. At the end of the session there was a small but easy quiz and he had three copies of the book “.NET GOTCHAS” authored by him as the prize. As the quiz was easy there were many answers and he randomly picked people and gave them the book. I was late to come for the workshop on Silverlight- a three hour workshop- which i was awaiting to attend but i couldn’t get a place for me and i heard the session for about half an hour standing at the door of the hall. This indicates the number of attendents. The hall was jam packed with people seated on the stairs in the hall. I couldn’t follow the talk as it was not audible. So i went out to get stamp from the stalls. We were given a booklet and were asked to get the stamps from all the stalls. It was aimed so that people could learn about the products of the companies at the Expo but anyone hardly listened to them. All those who visited the stalls did only one thing- get the stamp on the booklet. The personnel at the staff were tried stamping the booklets. Just a thought that came to my mind- Why don’t they automate the stamping proess.
Anyways after a long ordeal i could get stamps from all except three companies. I waited for about half an hour near the help desk waiting for the Organiers to start distributing the T Shirts. The main reason why i got the booklet stamped is for the T Shirt. They were asking us to go to each stalls and get to know the products. I then thought of attending some session, it was 3 in the afternoon, went to the main seminar hall- very few attending the talk- on what? God knows! I sat there- result eyes started droping – consequence- walked out of the hall soon after i entered. Fine, i went here and there spent time somehow and then had my Tea at 3:40 and then walked to the Main Seminar hall to attend the Talk on “New Features in VS 2008 for ASP.NET developers” by Colin Bowern. It was a pretty interesting talk for others! Yeah not for me though- i slept through the session- expect at two instants- At the beginning and towards the end. Any way i regret missing the Silverlight workshop by Todd Anglin- One of My favorite speakers the the Summit.
In all on Day-2 i attended only two sessions out of which the Wokrshop on .NET GOTCHAS by Dr. Venkat Subramaniam was amazing.
One thing i always keep dreaming is about the Forum Nokia Luck draw- where a very lucky person gets to win a Nokia N95!!! I have not tried my luck yet. Its a daily draw and each day there’s a different winner. Obviously it has to be a different winner!!! Anyways no freebies for the delegates at the Summit- confused with word “Delegates”??? It none other than we who are attending the conference. The companies could have offered some freebies for people attending the company talks. May be it will be done next time…..
I am not sure whether i will be atending the Day-3 which is on “Rich Web”. If i attend then i will surely put up my experience at the talks.