PDC Day 3

We reached a bit late in the morning and we directly went to Sir Saqib's session where he was presenting on Web Services in Visual Studio 2005. The next session we took was on Avalon by Clemens Vasters. It wasn't any fun at all because I had taken Avalon sessions last year as well by Mr. Hadi.

I missed the third session as myself and Muhammad Zeeshan were upto no good in the community lounge. Sir Saqib Ilyas had brought a video camera for recording. As INETA executives, we interviewed Clemens for about 3-4 minutes. I asked him a couple of questions which Zeeshan had prepared and then I asked him what he thought about the people out here at PDC, he told us the developer community at PDC was world class! Next up were INETA speakers: Hammad Rajjoub, Adnan Farooq Hashmi and of course the country leader Sir Saqib Ilyas. We asked them all a couple of live questions. Zeeshan told me that he'd edit it and send it to Channel 9. It would be great if Channel 9 approves those clips and shows them. I'll update the blog in case that happens. It was a great experience doing the interviews. I was a bit nervous and I'm not sure how I looked in the camera, because I know that I don't sound too well in the microphone (I always get away by claiming that the simple microphone analog converter is not advance enough to handle the scrupulous frequency variation in my vocals!). We tried to catch Lara as she was in the lounge but she disappeared before we could reach her. It was so much fun.

The fourth session was with Clemens on Indigo. Again, I had already taken an indigo session already last year so it wasn't much fun. He designed an indigo application right there from scratch and the best thing I like about Indigo services is that they don't rely on IIS, however if you have an IIS running, they'll plug right into it!

The closing ceremony was excellent. I got to hear Rahat Kazmi again! He was immense out there. By the way, we had to wait for the acting president Mr. Mian Soomro to show up for about an hour. The session was to commence at 5:15p, but it actually commenced at about 6:15p. We had the Holy Quran recital at about 6:17p, followed by speeches by Sindh IT Minister and Muhammad Mian Soomro. Mr. Mian Soomro seemed to be an accomplished speaker. Keeping in view of the time constraints, they both decided to keep their speeches short. I was kind of bored listening and for some mental exercise I borrowed Zeeshan's copy of the Spider magazine that was provided free of cost as a part of the PDC kit and solved the puzzle on page 91. I was able to finish the puzzle before the end of the ceremony. We had Mr. Jawwad Rehman's vote of thanks after that. The grand finale was the X-Box distribution ceremony, which everybody had been anxiously waiting for! The first two XBoxes went to two NEDians! Another XBox went to my superb friend Mumtaz Ansari.

PDC 2005 is gone! I'm going to get busy with other things now! There's a robotics competition coming up in August, too bad .NET won't run on my ATMEL/PIC microcontroller!