The day is finally here, five teams were chosen from over forty-five entries from almost all the universities in Sri Lanka. Today evening at the Taj, each team will present their Imagine Cup entry to a panel of judges as well as an audience that includes their colleagues, lecturers, industry as well as the media.
One team is going to emerge victorious and will be makings its way to the global finals in India where they will compete with the other national winners.
AirNow, the team that I mentored, spent quite a lot of time over the past weekend as well as the last two days, polishing up on the presentation and demos. I got them to do something cheeky by including a quote by Steve Jobs on connecting the dots ;)
Best of luck to all the teams!
Wela announced yesterday about the launch of www.imaginecupsrilanka.com. As usual a job well done by Wela and team which included both Razor and Charith.
The finals take place next Wednesday and is going to be much bigger than last time. Amity (AirNow), the team that I’m mentoring has a good chance of winning (I haven’t seen much of the other presentations though) and I wish them all the luck.
Another plus to my team is that it is dominated by women with a ratio of 3 to 1. In Sri Lanka ‘Women in IT’ is alive and kicking. The way these geek girls move around so comfortably within the Visual Studio tools can put many guys I know to shame. They tell me that they’ve only been using Visual Studio in the last five months which I find very hard to believe.
AirNow is going to KICK ASS!
PS: If you would like to come see the finals register at the site, there are a few slots available to the public.
I hope those of you who came to the .NET User Group meeting yesterday enjoyed my session on Cool ASP.NET Tips and Tricks.
As promised the slides and demos can be downloaded from Scott Guthrie’s post or you can directly download the file.
The Sri Lankan .NET developer community will be given a rare treat today when Dr. Nitin Paranjape an Office MVP does a talk on Developing VSTO Application at the NDB Auditorium at Navam Mawatha.
I have seen Dr. Nitin in action before and this guy is a truly gifted trainer and a great orator. You will understand what I mean when you see for yourself today. He follows a mantra of ‘teaching people to learn’ and his sessions are thought provoking. No wonder then that he was picked as the best MCT trainer worldwide by Microsoft.
I will be going to the session today more because I want to see and learn from how he teaches than for his session on VSTO, which undoubtely is going to be fabulous on its own.
The other speakers at the Deep Dive will include Wela on ClickOnce and Prasanna on DataBinding. If you are a Smart Client developer you owe it to yourself and your company to be there today.
This being our very first INETA meeting we’ll also get to meet Howard Lo from Microsoft Singapore (he’s also a star in Singapore). Howard Lo is also the MVP Lead for Sri Lanka, so do definitely have a chat with him when you meet up today. He’ll give you the low down on the MVP program and what plans he has for the Sri Lankan community.
This event is a brainchild Jinath who relentlessly kept on banging doors to get the event going. Kudos to him and the rest of the team which included Dinesh, Prasanna and the ever reliable Wela for pulling this off in such a very short time.
Towards the end of last year I was involved in training a batch of non-IT graduates on .NET. The specific program was a pilot project with Moratuwa University funded by USAID where the goal was to pick a group of deserving graduates who were un-employed and skill them up to be employable in the IT field.
My joy was to see the students so taken up with .NET that most of them chose to do their final project on .NET and I’m happy to note that all those who completed the program are now employed [LBO]. Unfortunately I couldn’t attend the graduation ceremony last evening as I was held up with the Imagine Cup judging.
Speaking of the Imagine Cup, last evening we had a tough time picking the top five finalists for the national round given the wealth of innovative ideas and solutions from among the 40 odd proposals that came in. Over 200 undergrads from a number of local universites took part, I was happy to see entries coming in from Ruhuna and Wayamba as well. The teams should be announced shortly so keep an eye out for an email from Jina.
Wela and I had a blast at the University of Moratuwa last week where we hosted the Visual Studio Community Launch for about 200 odd students.
Wela started off with the session on Smart Clients which he claims he could now do in his sleep (he did the exact same sessions at the Microsoft launch for an audience of about 1400 and then at the University of Colombo for about 350 students).
My talk on ASP.NET went pretty well except for a small hiccup at the end. Given that the presentation was 80% demo with over a 100 steps plus I just prepared for it the previous day staying up will 2.00am.
We then broke away from launch theme and Wela showed off the Atlas stuff that had just been demoed at the MIX06 conference.
Thanks to Microsoft who sponsored the event with refreshments as well as loads of giveaways.
Events like these let me do my bit by giving back to the Sri Lankan community. I get to talk about the tools and technologies that I’m passionate about as well as use day-in day-out. Plus I get to help make the next generation of graduates more prepard for the industry that they are going to enter.
We also have a few other universities that we are planning to hold the launches in the next month or so, if your university is interested feel free to leave a comment.
Now, I need to get back to judging those Imagine Cup proposals.
The posters at dotnetforum.lk do a
great selfless service to the development community in Sri Lanka, and whenever
possible we at Microsoft like to show them our gratitude.
This time around we are recognizing and rewarding our top posters. These guys
and gals will be be walking away with price cuts off the Tech.Ed tickets.
The top 3 posters get 50% off and 9 more following them get 25% off!
The top 3 who get 50% off:
- hibri_m
- DineshPriyankara
-
Samantha
The following 9 who get 25% off:
- madhawa
- Sirrius
- Aruna
-
Razor
- magneto
- Lolitha
- amal
- mahasen
- rnim
Please note that all Microsoft employees and MVPs have been excluded from
this list.
To claim your discounts please get in touch with me either through email (merillf@microsoft.com) or call me on
077-7788583.
Let’s rock Tech.Ed! Keep posting!
PS. We have great things planned for dotnetforum members who attend Tech.Ed
so sign up today if your not already a member.
We will be holding the September User Group Meeting today at the Gateway
Auditorium at Cotta Road. A fresh new face will be talking today and this guy is
a SQL Server junkie, just check out Dinesh‘s blog (http://spaces.msn.com/members/dineshpriyankara/)
and you’ll know.
As promised at the user group meeting yesterday here are the slides and the link to the Ajax .NET library.
Download: Ajax – Presentation
Ajax.NET Library: http://ajax.schwarz-interactive.de/csharpsample/default.aspx
I hope all of you enjoyed the presentation as much as I did and I need to apoligize for the demo cock up that happened. I would appreciate any feedback that you can give as well as answer any questions that you may have regarding the Ajax library.
