DevTech Day 2013 held in Kathmandu

Microsoft Innovation Center Nepal together with WinServer Community and AspNet Community organized DevTech Day 2013, a full day event on September 28, 2013 in Kathmandu in the midst exhilarating participation of more than 230 IT Professionals, Software Developers and other technology enthusiasts from various organization across the country. DevTech Day, the annual event of Community User Groups from Nepal, aims to bring people together under one roof from various backgrounds to educate them about Microsoft products by bringing about a high-end conference on technologies that have never been discussed or trained in the past in Nepal, primarily those that were released currently or say that are hot in the industry today. Apart from this, DevTech is a platform for interaction and relation building in a relaxed and peaceful environment.

The morning session began at 11 am with all participants and speakers converging at Kailash Hall, Shankar Hotel in Lazimpat. Ms. Shaba DC, Microsoft Student Partner 2014 played the role of MC at the event, introduced all the guest speakers and welcomed all the participants to the event.

During the keynote, Gauri Sohoni, one of the distinguished guests who is Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) and Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) briefly talked about the exciting prospects of Microsoft technologies and the importance of achieving Microsoft certifications.

Then, Pradeep Kandel, lead of WinServer Community, got up to the dash next and gave an introductory presentation on what WinServer Community is, and also informed that technical communities are to share knowledge and gain knowledge . He also informed that the WinServer Community organizes monthly roundups for face to face meeting to share knowledge about various infrastructure technology topics such as Windows Server, SQL Server and other such IT pro topics.

Then, it was Alok Pandey, lead of ASPNET Community, who came onto the stage and introduced the ASPNET community and its objectives. He informed that AspNet Community started organizing face-to-face meeting since 2011 and has been conducting workshops and similar meetups in promoting to develop software in Windows platform. He thanked BrainDigit, Microsoft Innovation Center Nepal, Pluralsight and O’reilly for helping and supporting the community in every possible ways.

Yauvaraj Rimal, Active contributor of ASPNET community then got to the dash next and gave further details about ASPNET community and the benefits of joining the community. He informed that the community has helped promote communication and networking, find connections, provide Career Guidance and resources to members. The community has been a great way for students to meet senior professionals and small companies to start collaborations with large companies.

Dev Raj Gautam from ASPNET community then presented some of the future activities of ASPNET community such as organizing boot camps on .Net platform besides also organizing monthly meetups. In the meantime, the first year anniversary of ASPNET community was also celebrated by cutting a cake.

Next, the distinguished guest of honor for DevTech, Biplav Paul, Program Manager at Microsoft India came onto the dash and delivered an energetic presentation about community mobilization in South Asia. His interactive presentation brought about active participation from the attendees. He discussed the principles and the importance of having a technical community. He explained that a community consists of variety of people of various backgrounds and opinions all of whom work towards a specific goal. He also explained that a community is not just limited by IT but also with a day-to-day life and all other sectors as well. He also emphasized the importance of speaking up and sharing ones expertise and views in a community.

In order to close the morning session, Allen Bailochan Tuladhar, Country Director for Microsoft Innovation Center Nepal came onto the stage and thanked all the speakers and attendees for being at the event. He informed that even though the initial estimation for the number of people attending the event was 150, over 230 people registered for the event which signified the interest in the technological community to attend and be involved in events like DevTech. He thanked Biplav Paul and Gauri Sohoni for being part of this event. He also suggested ASPNET community and WinServer community to collaborate and bring together all technological enthusiasts for better impact in the community. With this, all participants dispersed to lunch at 12:30pm. Next was to see breakout sessions that were handled by WinServer Community and AspNet Community in parallel.

Both the parallel sessions kick started at 1:30pm. The first session in the developer hall was with yet again Allen Tuladhar, Sonika Manandhar and Nairisha Shrestha. Ms Sonika and Nairisha are the Windows Developers from Microsoft Innovation Center Nepal who during their session focused on explaining the various advantages Windows Phone 8 had over other operating systems used in mobile phones and why developers should start coding for Windows Phones.

The session was very informative and interesting with the speakers informing all the developers attending the session of all the awesome new features of the new Windows Phone. Some of the features that were discussed during the presentation were: Shared Code, NFC (Near Field Communication), Nokia Map Technology, Company custom Apps, Personalized Start Screen, etc.

The speakers also gave a brief overview of Windows 8.1, an OS that is going to be released worldwide in this October.

During the session, a very exciting demonstration of the MICopter using both Windows Phone and the Windows Surface was given that lifted the MICopter up, made it turn and land at the touch of their fingers with the power of Windows devices that enthralled everyone present in the hall. The session followed by Q&A.

The other session in the Developer track was with Gouri Sohoni. She started her session that started right after tea with a quick survey of the most commonly used programming language by the participants most of whom replied it as being ASP.NET. She then gave a brief introduction of Team Founder Server (TFS) as well as climb server and the role of a team in development of program. She concluded her session by distributing various freebies to the interactive participants and for further details and reference materials, she shared the following links:

http://www.ssgsonline.com

http://www.dotnetcurry.com

At the end of the sessions, ASPNET community felicitated the various speakers with certificates.

In the next hall, where IT Pro presentations and discussions were held, Pradeep Kandel, WinServer Community Lead, kick started the sessions after lunch. Mr Pradeep called up Suprasiddha Tamrakar, Technical from MIC Nepal on to the stage who delivered his demo packed presentations of Windows 8.1, its features, abilities and performance upgrades.

Mr. Tamrakaar, discussed about how good Windows 8.1 work for touch-enabled devices and tablets. Windows 8.1 has very good support for keyboards and mice too. He further added that if a system is currently supporting Windows 7, it has capabilities to support Windows 8.1 as well, so, performance upgrade doesn’t necessarily mean hardware upgrade. Mr. Tamrakar also pointed out the differences between Windows 8 and Windows 8.1. The 8.1 version has better performance than Windows 8. It is faster, easier, safer, and definitely better-looking among many others.

Next, the session was handled by Rajan Maharjan, System Administrator at DeerWalk with a presentation on ‘Power of PowerShell’. Mr. Maharjan discussed about PowerShell, its functions, new features in PowerShell 4.0, and how PowerShell is a System Admin’s best friend. Mr. Maharjan also highlighted the fact that PowerShell is the best tool available in Windows OS to monitor processes and resources of a system. He further discussed about what’s new in the latest installation of PowerShell. PowerShell 4.0 has its own Integrated Scripting Environment (PowerShell ISE). According to Maharjan, PowerShell 4.0 is a great tool that helps to interact with the system, the sort of interaction that a GUI cannot provide. He then talked a bit about CmdLets, remoting, pipeline get-process, scripting, etc.

After a coffee break of half an hour, the IT Pro track had another session by Rajan Maharjan, DBA from Nabil Bank on ‘SQL Server Optimization Techniques’. He basically highlighted the features of MS SQL Server 2014 and its comparison with MS SQL Server 2012 during his presentation. He also discussed in brief about various data techniques, including, simplification of movement of databases between instances, data backup to Azure, global data centers, and much more. He then talked about optimization of database giving various tips on SQL optimization. He emphasized on the query design efficiency. To sum it all up, he said (a) operate on small result sets, (b) isolate long running queries, (c) use indices and (d) avoid resource intensive queries. He closed his session way through defragmentation of data in SQL Server.

Mr. Biplav Paul, then led the next session with a topic on ‘SQL Clustering’. Mr. Paul began by talking about SQL optimization. He showed tremendous concern about people using servers that are at least two versions old. Mr. Paul, then questioned the crowd – “what is the need of availability? And what is higher availability?” He added to the presentation, a fact, “the more you invest, more available you will become”. He then began with clustering, which basically is scattering your servers to facilitate higher availability. Mr. Paul talked about HADR, mirroring and transaction log shipping.

Mr. Paul stated that keeping two servers can be very cost effective in case of clustering, which is, otherwise, very expensive. He then demonstrated Hyper V configuration with a couple of Virtual Machines. The demonstration was about server clustering. He stated the fact that one machine may have upto 5 to 10 SQL engines running due to each program providing their instance of SQL Express. This severely eats you resources away. The solution would be to install a LocalDataBase. Use of a localDB conserves tremendous amount of resources. He finally demonstrated the creation and usage of localDB before battling questions from the crowd.

At the end of the sessions, WinServer community felicitated the various speakers token of appreciations. The program ended at 1730 Hours, local time, as scheduled.

Special thanks to Microsoft Innovation Center Nepal, WinServer Community and AspNet Community for managing and making the event successful. Also, thanks to Biplab Paul, Gouri Sohoni and other key resource persons without whom this event would not have been possible.

Thank you!