The Great Indian Developer Summit - this was one event we were most looking forward to. It promised to be 5 wholesome days of total tech immersion. Like any other conference, this one too, had its share of highs and lows.

We had to divide our time between interacting with people at the booth and attending sessions. The booth experience was really interesting – explaining to a variety of people what Directi does, what “Quit Working” (which was on front page of the Directi brochure) means. and playing a couple of boxing rounds on the Nintendo Wii (the prize for the winner of the Directi Treasure Hunt).

Now to the meaty stuff: the sessions we attended. The first session was on Building Great UX with .Net, conducted by Kalpesh Parmar. It was quite a disappointing session, to say the least. Kalpesh Parmar is the lead technical evangelist in India for Infragistics, Inc. While he explained the concept of User Experience, and how it is different from User Interface design, he did not delve into the related capabilities of .Net, and it seemed like a preamble for the next session on “Building LOBs Applications and Dashboards using Infragistics Components”. We decided to give the second session a miss, as it was clearly going to be a demo of the Infragistics component suite.

Next we attended a session that was somewhat misleadingly titled “Hone Your Coding Kung Fu with Best Practices”, by Jean Luc David. Jean Luc David is a Developer Advisor for Microsoft Canada and is the author of five books, including Professional Visual Studio 2005 Team System. The content of this session was mostly a demonstration of the various features of Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team System rather than the best practices to be followed while coding, which would have been much more interesting.

We also attended two other sessions, one on ASP.Net MVC, and the other one on Silverlight 2.0 Deep Dive, both conducted by Todd Anglin. Todd Anglin is an active .NET community member, President of the North Houston .NET User Group, and Telerik’s Chief Technical Evangelist. Both his sessions were well planned and executed, and had a lot of very interesting, cutting edge technical content besides being peppered with fun trivia and anecdotes. The seminar hall was completely packed, with a lot of people having to sit on the stairs for lack of available seats. His interaction with the audience throughout the session kept us from dozing off (even though the Silverlight Deep Dive was a three hour marathon).

The session on Practical Semantic Web, by Jon Aizen was also quite interesting. Jon Aizen is co-founder and CTO at Dapper. In his session he described how Dapper advocates and implements a new approach to transform the existing web into a semantic web.

Another session that we were looking forward to attending was the Master Class on The elements of User Experience, conducted by none other than Jesse James Garrett, co-founder and president of Adaptive Path, also known as the Father of Ajax. His book, The Elements of User Experience, has been called “brilliant” and “essential” and is considered one of the seminal works on user-centered design. While this session had some interesting content on the elements of user experience, he did not speak much about Ajax, which seemed to be what the audience was expecting.

Connecting the Worlds - Design/Development Collaboration using XAML, Expression and Silverlight, a session by Harish Ranganathan was a very basic, hello world demonstration of how Expression Blend and Visual Studio can be used for collaboration between the user interface designer and the software developer. They demonstrated memorabilia.hardrock.com to showcase the new DeepZoom technology in Silverlight. This presentation, although interestingly conducted, had very little technical content.

Personally, we found many sessions to be lackluster and vendor centric. The hands-on sessions on Silverlight by Todd Anglin from Telerik, .Net Gottchas by Dr. Venkat Subramaniam were worth its weight in gold and were the highlights of the three days we attended the Summit. Bhavin’s session (Building a Scalable Architecture for Web Apps) had a packed audience. People shot a lot of intelligent questions, which he handled in his ever energetic, crisp and without batting an eyelid style. :-)

Also, you could have a look at the GIDS photographs on our Flickr stream.

-Co-authored by manoj.ku