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Saturday 11th June 2005: PDC Registration

I wrote before that Salman Ahmed Khan did my registration for the PDC when I was in Dubai and my visit to Karachi got confirmed. Me and Salman met at DNUG a Dot Net User Group around two and a half years ago that is back in 2003, in the following months, our friendship was strengthened and we started participated on a number of other user groups namely PAKITS, Core.NET, Pakistan.NET, .NET Wizards and INETA Pakistan, but sadly besides online discussion, we never even spoke to each other until Thursday and didn’t see each other until today (now that’s too bad on my part).

But I scheduled to finally meet Salman today for the registration (you can call me selfish here, forgive me Salman if you are reading this ;). He is a really nice guy, as enthusiastic as he looks online, we chat for a while, before entering the PDC Secretariat.

The PDC Secretariat
During the registration, I was informed that no one is allowed to bring laptop, digital camera and not even cell phone during the PDC. Now that was really surprising for me, because I brought them with me especially for the PDC.

The PDC Day 1
Today, I made it a little early to the venue, due to security restrictions no one was allowed to bring any electronic device, but to my dismay, I saw people with cell phones and found myself a little left out. I was planning to sit in the lobby and wait for Salman and other guys, but the seating started just after I reached the venue followed by the opening keynote from various speakers.

I attended the Overview of ASP.NET 2.0 session by Abdelmalek Kemmou, session went fine nothing new for me though, I guess people new to ASP.NET 2.0 must have taken advantage of it, I heard some interesting questions come up from the audience, this gives the evidence of its popularity and willingness to adopt.

Next session on Implementing Data driven Caching with VS2005 and SQL Server 2005 by Stephen Forte was really interesting and one of my favorite topics (this would have been the next post on this blog after Script Callback in ASP.NET 2.0, because I had already investigated it). Starting from the caching implementation in ASP.NET 2.0 Data controls, he explored the caching engine; output caching as well as Partial Page Caching and introduced SQL Cache Dependency; he demoed how the SQL Cache Invalidation which works in ASP.NET 2.0 in conjunction with SQL Server 7 & 2000.
Next session I attended was Using VS 2005 to build Data driven application in ASP.NET 2.0 but I didn’t like the session as well as the presentation of Abdelmalek, the presentation style was not interesting at all and most of the content was repeated from the Overview of ASP.NET 2.0 session.

I also met the three prominent leaders of INETA Pakistan, speakers in the PDC and also the recently awarded MVPs, Adnan Farooq Hashmi, Saqib Ilyas and very own Hammad Rajjoub; it was great to talk to them. I have always admired their efforts to promote .NET development in Pakistan and to organize events and create awareness among the Pakistani youth to come forward and participate in user group meetings and learn revolutionary new ways to code or improve their knowledge about existing technologies. Keep up the good work guyz!

All in all, it was a great first day!