ACAD DEV CON '09 by BDotNETStudents

Have you seen 1100+ students gathered at any one place at a time?? Well the first time i witnessed a gathering of such a magnitude was at the ACAD DEV CON '09 on the 28th of march. Venue - PESIT college Auditorium, which had "two" Balconies ;).
Look at the number of people at the dev con ;) Sridutt, MSP from Dharwad, managed to get 50 students, all the way from Dharwad to Bangalore.. Three cheers to Sridutt!!!

A week before the “gigantic” event, everyone had one question in their minds. How to achieve the target of 1000 students? Tension levels were at an all time high as we had only 3 days to sell a HUNDRED tickets in each college ( internals were causing a huge problem :( )

Somehow we BITians managed to sell a 100 tickets, with more students wanting the passes. They were asked to register online at our site bdns.in..

Day of the dev con.. I reach the venue at 8:00 with bouquets for the delegates. Already the registration counters were swarming with attendees. I met so many of my friends from PU and High school - it was more like a get together for me;). By the scheduled time i.e. 9:00 the key note speaker, Pratima Amonkar, Head of Academia, Microsoft had arrived at the venue. At 9:30 (slightly off- sched) the devcon begins with the lamp lighting by Pratima and D.Jawahar. Sahithya and Chidanand had taken the job of Anchoring, which they did wonderfully.

The key note session was a very interesting and interactive session. Many students were coming up with interesting stuff for the question “who are you?”. The Key note session was followed by sessions on

Office 2007 – tips and tricks

Windows 7 and IE8

Windows Embedded.

This was followed by lunch which was pretty good. ;)

The after lunch schedule started off with a session by Samartha, Microsoft Student Partner on Windows Virtualisation. I so wanted to attend the session.. :( but was busy charging Sourab's Laptop. Did i mention i had my own session on "Silverlight" coming up?? yeah thats right.. Butterflies in my tummy, i was trying to control my heartbeats.. Facing a thousand students, that too this being my 3rd session on silverlight.. After Samartha's session, Raveesh, our Kwizzing Master entertained the attendees with his quiz - part a.. I must say, the quiz was super!! That guy will be the next "Biggest IT Kwiz Master".. ;)

Then came the most awaited 1 and half hour - 5 demos, 15 mins each on the following technologies

Microsoft Robotics Studio - Lakshman Srikanth D

Silverlight - Me myself ;)

Deep Zoom Composer - Abhishek kumar

Songsmith - Sattvik

Popfly - Anil B Pai

Lakshman had once told me " it is good to feel scared while going up to the stage. once on the stage, you are the ruler ". For a moment after introducing myself to the 1000+ attendees, I went totally blank as to what i am there for. At that moment, the words of advice came to my mind, and took with it all the fear. ( thanks buddy ;) ) for the next 15 mins, it was just me and my presentation. All the students gave feedback after the 5 demos, and i felt happy to see many mentioning Silverlight in the "What i liked " field ( though maximum votes went to Lakshman Srikanth and his Irobo :P)

Raveesh is back with the Kwiz - part b.. Guess wat?? I know all the answers!!! hehehe ;) no no i am no genius. I was with Raveesh when he was making the ppt for the Quiz.. Lots of good feedback for the "Kwizzing Time" too :)

Then came the photo session with the Chennai MSP Diwaagar who had come all the way from Chennai to attend the DEV CON. So is the bonding between MSPs :)


So we wrap up "one of the biggest event in the History of BDotNETStudents" with words of wisdom from the three Musketeers and Diwaagar. :)

Wait!Wait! there is more :) Lakshman announces treat for all MSPs, Dinner at Pai viceroy. Some ten- twelve of us had a sumptous dinner at the expense of "you know who"!!! ;) Yaardo duddu yellammana jaatre.. hehehehe

All in all - BDotNetStudents rocks!!!