PDC Day 1

Having read a couple of blogs about PDC day 1. Here's my go at it. I'm very critical about the beginning of any ceremony and I watch closely how the master of ceremony deals with certain situations. Here's a little breakdown of the starting ceremony:

09:25a - Rahat Kazmi on the podium
09:30a - Jawwad Rehman makes his opening speech
09:50a - Rahat Kazmi
09:55a - Rafal makes a speech
10:25a - Rahat Kazmi
10:31a - Speech by NADRA's head
11:06a - Rahat Kazmi
11:08a - Speech by the CEO of Technologix
11:30a - Rahat Kazmi
11:31a - Speech by Mr. Amir Mateen from PSEB
11:42a - Rahat Kazmi for the plaque ceremony

Rahat Kazmi's personality has been extremely inspiring to me. I saw him last year hosting PDC 2004 and I saw him this year hosting PDC 2005! He is just brilliant with words, I wish I would be able to speak with such eloquency one day. This year around Rafal decided to be technical even in they keynote speech. He spoke about Visual Studio 2005, DSL tools etcetera. NADRA's head gave a very thorough speech on the practices and designs at NADRA. The presentation got a bit boring in the middle, thats when I stared to work on my robot design for an upcoming robot competition, but got pretty interesting when he told us about the biometric features that come with my new passport. Mr. Khwaja from Technologix was an impressive speaker. He is an MIT graduate and his visions of the feature were superb! In the last we got to hear Mr. Amir from PSEB and he told us about the agenda of PSEB and what its been doing lately and some of its latest projects. The plaque distribution was fun, Stephen and Kemmou were in other halls and they had to walk a long way to receive their plaques.

Because of the long ceremony, we only had three sessions today; as opposed to four sessions which we'll be having tomorrow and day after tomorrow. The first session I took was of Kemmou, he spoke on the Data Binding features of ASP.NET 2.0. It was pretty interesting to see that Microsoft is determined to simplify coding as much as possible! I was continuously eating chocolates in this session which I had bought earlier from a nearby shop. The next two sessions were of Stephen Forte on different SQL Server 2005 enhancements. He's a total New Yorker with a totally bamboozled sense of humour! Apart from learning about the caching features in ASP.NET 2.0 and the XML enhancements and the XQuery support in SQL Server 2005, we got to learn so much about New York, New Jersey, Canada, France, his girlfriend, Clemens, Oracle etcetera. He's a remarkable guy who knew exactly how to keep the interest of the audience. Although at times I fell he was over-doing it but I reckon it was just right. He talked about open-source, compared MSSQL with MySQL for a very short time and he even tried Firefox. We didn't see a lot of people using non-Microsoft tools. He sounded a fair guy who loves to learn and travel (he's been to all 7 continents and has traveled to over 50 countries!). I asked a bunch of questions in the end of the presentation and on someone else's question he put up Rs. 100 as a giveaway to the person who'd answer it! I took a go at it, but it turned out that I understood the question a little bit wrong. Anyways! I already have a hundred rupee note. We had a really nice talk with him after the ceremony where he told us that a while ago when there was a huge lawsuit on Microsoft, he gave a testimony which actually worked in the favour of Microsoft, so he has been granted the status of invulnerable (reminds me of Doom II, we had a cheat for that) by Microsoft. My friend Fahad Majeed on his blog has given full commentary on his session, so I guess you can just read more about it there.

We had a Q&A session at about 6:30PM and then it was time to leave. It was a great day and I learned a lot! Have to get up early again tomorrow.