Great Indian Developer Summit 2009
Four well packed days with Information and Technology that too latest in trend and which is going to change the future is called Great Indian Developer Summit 2009. Not only that, thousands of participants, 75+ presentations on technologies, 15+ Labs driven by experts from all over the globe and all this organized by media leader Saltmarch Media in a great environment of IISC, Bangalore.
Rich Internet Applications
This year also as the previous years it has came to prove that whatever new in a developer's mind comes has been achieved and has not only given satisfaction to him but to the consumer too.
As a Developer & Designer, I pulled myself in the second day of the summit because this day the experts were gonna talk about RIA (Rich Internet Application), the future of web applications. On this particular day GIDS talked about following topics:
Web 2.0 & Social Applications
Enterprise 2.0
Mashups
Social Networking
Ajax In Action
Comet
Dynamic Scripting
Browsers & Rich UI
Rich Web Security
Rich Web Stories
There were five parallel sessions going on at a time, so I was not able to attend every session. But I was able to focus myself to the session of my interest. I am a developer on Microsoft platform and having a keen interest in new Microsoft Technologies, so picked up sessions targeted on Silverlight 3.
I have attended following sessions:
Unravelling the New in Microsoft Silverlight 3
Nahas Mohammed 
Deep Dive - Microsoft Silverlight Pipelines
Praveen Srivatsa
Building Rich UI using ASP.Net AJAX, AXAJ Control Toolkit & jQuery
Harish Ranganathan
Reusable Components for Building Killer RIAs (on Adobe Flex)
Anirudh Sasikumar
You might be thinking that when I am talking about Microsoft Silverlight, what I was doing in the session for the Flex. The reason is very simple, when you have the chance to learn new technologies and side by side compare them with similar technologies, why shouldn't? So before leaving for the day I grabbed this opportunity too. I have also rated the presenters along with their contents. All over here I would like to say that I had a nice Thursday. The biggest takeaway for me was numerous seed of growth opportunities, which is a result of combined efforts of huge exposure to technology and GIDS.
To conclude this post here I would like to encourage the readers to participate in this kind of events. These events not only give you a chance to explore the new and happening world around you, but also provide a good networking environment, which in terms help you grow in your career.
Virtualization In Software Development
Virtualization's big push to fame was arguably kick-started by VMware's Workstation product, which allowed individual users to run a bunch of OSes, versions or instances (similar to multiple application windows) instead of having a one-at-a-time multi-boot environment. In many companies, virtualization arrived with developers first using the technology quietly to do testing and development, then introducing the virtualization tools to IT higher-ups.
While today, computer virtualization fuels many production environments, e.g., servers, desktop infrastructures, and as a provisioning tool, virtualization is also used by a still-growing number of software developers. For starters, they use virtualization tools to provide a range of target environments for development and testing (such as different operating systems, OS versions and browsers), and also to provision/re-provision configuration instances quickly and easily.
Here's a look at how and why some of today's developers are using virtualization and what their quibbles are with the technology as it stands.
Provisioning Multiple Test Environments
Mark Friedman, a senior software architect, works in Microsoft's Developer Division, where upwards of 3,000 people create Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. Friedman himself works mainly on the performance tools that ship with Microsoft's Visual Studio Team System. "About two-thirds of the people in my division are in development and testing -- and most of these developers and testers are using system virtualization (via Microsoft's Hyper-V technology) as one of their key productivity tools," says Friedman, who is also a board director of The Computer Measurement Group.