Tech-ed India | 2009
I have been an attendee to Tech-ed. And this year, it is great pleasure and honor for me to be a speaker in Tech-ed India 2009! This year it happened in Novotel @ Hyderabad with a grand opening Key note by SteveB.
What is Tech-ed? It is a very big community event by Microsoft addressing the technology group and showcase the new products and its cool features. It enables technology community to skill-up with upcoming industry trends, best practices and also provides platform to connect between people & build network.
I, along with my colleagues (Ashwani, Rahul, Raja, Anil, Mahantesh & Vivek) took responsibility of proctoring Hands-on Lab sessions on App Dev Platform. Teched runs over 3 days and each day consists of 4 lab sessions. There are two tracks namely, App Dev Platform and IT Pro Platform.
What is handson lab? There are sessions which are speaker based. Handson are different where developers can try out the new products on the lab terminals. The lab content usually are in a form of VPC / Hyperv image and have a structured manual. Alongside, the lab proctor give them conceptual knowledge on product features, will guide devs to work with the lab contents and help them troubleshoot with obstacles, if any. For some of the lab sessions like WPF, Visual Studio 2010, Web development etc. we had full occupancy of around 30+ participants per session. Approximately, more than 250 devs were benefited by attending these sessions which spanned over 3 days of Tech-ed May 2009.
Behind the scene: Preparations started a month before. Lab contents are provided to us by Harish and Ravi (DPE team). Thanks to Harish & Ravi for their guidance and support to help us in every stage in contributing better. We met Harish to understand how things work and prepare a plan of action for us to kickstart. Allotted sessions among us based on our expertise. Cross-checked the lab contents and manuals. Ready to go!
On the D-day: Next day is our TechEd and the previous night, Ravi helped us in preparing lab environment, setting up base OS, copying lab contents into terminals and validating them. As lab sessions run back to back, Ravi pre-planned to have two sets of machines. As a lab session continue on Set A machines, we prepared Set B machines with contents for next session. It was quite an amazing experiance for me to see things how they run in real-time to get it organized and ready for such a big event!
Feedbacks from the participants were amazing and very positive! It was wonderful and another most successful Teched this year. Am eagerly looking for the next year.
Our Tech-ed team:
