Great Indian Developer Summit Wrap-Up

Last week I spoke at the Great Indian Developer Summit in Bengaluru, India. This was my second year speaking at GIDS, so it was great to be back. Before the event Telerik’s Team Fantastic Four set up the booth and then hit McDonalds for a Maharaja Mac. Remember India does not eat beef, so we HAD to go to McDonalds and check it out! Imagine a McDonalds without a hamburger. Totally awesome. (Though we all preferred the McAloo, a potato patty sandwich.)

The event is really 4 conferences in 4 days. One day each on: .NET, Web, Java, and Seminars.

On the Day 1 (.NET) I spoke on:

• Building Data Warehouses
• Building Applications with Silverlight and .NET (and sharing the business logic)
• What's new in SQL Server 2008 R2

No computer malfunctions like last year, my sessions went smooth. This is rapid fire presenting: only 50 minute sessions! With so little time, I had almost no slides and went straight to demo. It is hard to show data warehousing in only 50 minutes, but I focused on star schemas and ETL and I think it went well. Other than no AC in the Silverlight talk, the rest of the day went great.

Telerik had a booth at GIDS and we gave away tons of tee shirts and did hundreds of demos.

Day 2 was “Web” day with mostly designers and Flash people. I was able to sneak a .NET RIA Services talk in there. I just started to code, no slides at all. In 50 minutes I was able to cover items 1-4 and 8 in Brad’s blog. (I also wanted to cover 5-6, and 9-10, however, 50 minutes was all that I had!) We had a lot of people come by the Telerik booth as well. Coming home from the National Science Center where the Summit is being held, we got stuck in a massive hailstorm. To be honest this video does not do it any justice, the balls were the size of marbles.

Day 3 was Java day, so we rested and hit the Bengaluru Palace to see some sights. I particularly liked the room that had lots of paintings of nudes. :) It is good to be King (or Maharaja.) I also watched a lot of Indian Premier League cricket.

Day 4 was the seminar day and I did my “Agile Tools and Teams” session that I have done before in Pune (see the link for the downloads). I was in rare form, of course decked out in my Rugby Jersey. There was no AC hitting the stage, so I went in and stole a fan from the conference center and put it on the stage. I challenged the audience to a trivia game and asked them where “Scrum” came from. Most guessed Ken Schwaber and I said that Scrum comes from Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, “The New Product Development Game”, Harvard Business Review, January 1986. Just for fun I quizzed the audience on the Rugby World Cup and the Hong Kong Rugby 7s. We had a great seminar, actually it was a fire hazard since people were sitting on all the available stairs and floor.

After the event, Team Telerik went out for some pizza and headed to the airport to go home. Two weeks in India just flew by. See you next year!