I’m (was?) not a big football fan but watched many world cup matches during the last 4 weeks. Head is still on echo mode after hearing that Vuvuzela for so long. At time it sounded very annoying but then again the tune in the entire FIFA 2010 was that. Wonder how a normal football match will look and sound like without the Vuvuzela. It became so popular … even YouTube added a special button to play the sound on the video player.

Anyways … couple of us got together to watch the finals and during that I was thinking. A FIFA comes once every 4 years. Same goes for Olympics, Cricket world cup and I don’t know what else is out there. If a human lives an average 60 years and if we consider only 40 years of that … the fella gets to see only 10 of these world events. In my memory … in the parts that I can recall … I have watched/seen three cricket world cups, three FIFA’s and three Olympics … anything before that I barely remember. Dang! only 7 left for me … I’m not going to miss any of those in the future.

Champs Stall @ Hobby Fair VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Organizers invited Microsoft to put up a stall and demo some products. So our Student Champs gang took the challenge and did a fantastic job manning the stall for 3 full days and kept the tempo going. This was the first time Sri Lanka hosted an event on this nature. I mean not the exhibition … but an exhibition of hobbies. There were 70+ stalls and some pretty awesome stuff. I loved the coin collections and stamp collections.

At our stall Champs demonstrated products like Windows Security Essentials, Songsmith, Worldwide Telescope, AutoCollage etc. Couple of presentations were also delivered for large audiences.

It was a bit disappointing to see a low crowd. I mean hobbies are something which people are drawn into. I mean who doesn’t have a So theoretically unlike any other exhibition this should have more attendance. It was pretty obvious that something had gone wrong in the awareness creating. Anyways … it’s the first time something of this nature was organized, so there is enough room to improve next year

It’s the same university but a different faculty. Yup! during the last couple of years we did .NET days at the Science and Arts section, but after a while I decided to stop it due to there is no continuation of activities. Sorry guys I have to say this. We did event based on the request but after that there were no continuation in the champ program or anything from the previous organizers. Then when a new group of office bearers got appointed in the computer society they organize a session again … etc. I’m more interested in supporting the students in a continuous fashion.

So this time the request came from students from the Engineering Faculty with the promise of continuing the programs … and these guys are hungry for new stuff, knowledge etc.

Chanaranga deserves a big thanks for taking the initiatives to organize the event. As you can imagine handling registrations and coordinating a two day event is not an easy task … especially when you are working in Colombo and when the event is happening 100 km away.

A big thanks to Dinesh Asanka, Dinesh Priyankara, Susantha Silva, Prabath Fonseka and Tharindu Nanayakkara for joining the long trip with me. Looking forward to have a continuation session very soon.

Photos@ Windows Live Gallery / Photos

Still @ the Bangkok airport. have sometime before the boarding starts. Had a long 16 hours long flight to Bangkok from LA and then a ridiculously long transit for 14 hours … around 4 more hours to Colombo.

Things at PDC09 went fantastically well. Day 1 keynote was delivered by Ray Ossi and it was mainly focusing on the future … Azure etc. Ray Ossi talked about how committed Microsoft is to the bring a seamless experience in all three platforms. Throughout the PDC there was a major focus for Windows Azure. I think this clearly demonstrates where things are heading. Also how serious Microsoft is when it comes to cloud computing.

Most of the times there were about 10 parallel sessions. Since unfortunately it is possible only to be at one place at a time I had to make some hard choices. All the sessions were in good quality in contents, demos etc. Anyways it is really good that all the sessions are recorded and published in the site to download.

Day 2 keynote had several highlights, announcements … first part was mainly on Windows … basically how it was built over the years and how bugs are tracked and fixed etc. For me the most interesting part of the keynote was the part done by Scott Gu. Yup! even though we just release Silverlight 3.0 … during the keynote Scott Gu announced the availability of Silverlight 4.0 beta …. and the final version of 4.0 will be released around mid 2010. Talking about giveaways … it was a surprise announcement. ALL 4000+ ATTENDEE at PDC09 got a Acer tablet PC for FREE. Not a crappy low config one, but a tablet with 2 GB RAM, Core 2 Duo, etc. There were about 5000 attendees. However as usual Microsoft employees were excluded from this fabulous free offer.

Partner Expo (exhibition) was great … actually much bigger and exciting than the entire Infotel exhibition we had last year. Almost all the stalls had something exciting for people to come and talk to. I talked to many people from the partner booths … including DevExpress, Telerik, Infragestics, Code Projects, Dundas, Resco, ComponentOne, Channel 9, Mono ext … Yup! I got a chance to talk to the guy who created the Mono project (.NET on Linux).

One of the most fascinating things I got to see @ PDC was the Windows Azure Data Center Container. I have been doing some reading and home work on how Microsoft is providing these crazy capacities and services to millions of users around the world. I mean Windows Live platform as of now has over 240 million accounts … multiply that by 35GB storage per account (5 GB in Live Mail, 25 GB in the SkyDrive). Several months ago got to know about this amazing innovative concept of how Microsoft is adding servers to the datacenters … containers … I actually got the chance to see … not just see … I went inside it … awesome!

Watched couple of movies during the stay in LA. 2012, Fourth Kind, Planet 51 and the most amazing one was ‘A Christmas Carol’ 3D movie .. .guys this is off the hook. This is the first time I got a chance to watch a 3D movie. At the entrance to the theater they gave a 3D glass to wear. Don’t have words to explain it. It’s too good to believe. It’s like I was inside the movie. When there were fast moving scenes and objects closing … I automatically / naturally moved to sides to save my head … well! that sounds dumb … but it was so real. I have to do some reading and understand the technology behind 3D movies.

Being in Microsoft gives me access the loads of material to stay on top of all new technologies. However the amount of time I get to spent on those is very little. Suddenly out of the blues I got an opportunity to go to the PDC09 (Professional Developers Conference) in Los Angeles. Even though I was so excited about going to PDC … didn’t even get a chance to blog about it … that should give you an idea about the ‘busy’ level. Anyways right now I'm in LA and looking forward for a great event. Have already picked several presentations in to the ‘must go list’ … too bad there are many good parallel sessions.

Will write some exciting happenings from PDC as and when I get time. Next 4 days is going to be packed with techno stuff.

Finally I managed to find some time to write this mail J. Firstly thanks for everybody who joined the bowling tournament on 15^th. It was a fantastic experience and I’m sure everybody who joined had loads of fun.

A quick summary …

As planned we started the event on time. We had a total of 14 teams competing for the big trophy. In total about 120 user group members joined the event. However few bailed out at the last minute … some didn’t even show up … may be they were scared J … competition was so stiff.

Round one went smoothly with some remarkable performances. Selva from team ADT Blasters became the top scorer of round one with 150 points. Team Navantis, ADT Blasters, Marmy Army, Teamwork Bumpers, Rolling Stones, Executors, Sri La and Yakumba scored the highest and made it to the second round. Round 2 was not smooth at all … it was a major battle. However teams ADT Blasters, Rolling Stones, Sri La and Yakumba made it to the top 4.

Throughout all the rounds ADT Blasters showed consistent performance. In round 1 they scored a total of 644 points, in round 2 they scored, 722), but seems like at the final round couple of guys in the team lost the grip of the ball. Oops!

Team Navantis was in the top league all alone, however last minute team Yakumba scored higher and made it to the top 4 sending team Navantis to the bench. Sorry folks!

Well! Well! Well! Did you know that there was a Cinderella story. Team Sri La was also very consistent on performance. Even though the team claimed that 5 out of 6 of their players are first timers they managed to crawl into round 2 at the eight position. Then surprisingly they managed to crawl into the top 4 teams too … again in the 4^th position … and finally they ended at the 4^th position, keeping things consistent. Next time folks! It’s the fun you had that matters.

Among the lot we had a team with a matching name for their performance. Team OOT (Out of Target) from SLIIT became the last of the first round living up to the name. Most of the shots were right out of the target. Woo! Hoo! But the team stayed with us till the event ends helping us to finish up the booze.

For team RollingStones I think all the practices they did before the event paid off. I saw them shooting some killer shots and scoring big points. In Round 1 and 2 they were balancing things and played a subtle game. But last round they were ruthless.

CONGRATULATIONS! To team RollingStones for taking the Technical Communities Challenge Trophy home. Take care of. Put your name on it. And bring it back next year J

Team: RollingStones
From: Assette Softwares Pvt Ltd
Team Members: Ajith Pushpakumara, Aneef Fashir, Jude Ellawala, Julius Fernando, Manoj De Rose, Prabhath Wijesinghe

Special thanks to everybody who supported me to run the event successfully. Especially Thulitha for making the announcements and helping to run the show on schedule. Jinath, Shaminda, Chandana and Gogula for supporting to coordinate the event and run the show on sight, Alan for bringing the fantastic beats which kept the tempo going. All in all it was a fantastic event.

Throughout the whole event Tariq from team ADT Blasters became the top scorer with a score of 177.

See ya’ll next year …

Check my Facebook and Windows Live Photo Gallery for pho

Not that infotel 2008 is over its time for me to write :) ... wanted to write during the event ... kind of a live blogging. But hell! who can spent time to blog when there is a xbox 360 plugged to a big screen right in front of you. It was a tiring 3 days but with a loads of fun because most of the active community fellows were there.

From our MVP team Jinath, Manzi, Dinesh Asanka, Fiqri, Shaminda, Padman and Dinesh Priyankara joined the party. Also representing the student champ team Uditha, Ransara, Senaka, Bhashitha, Charith and Akila joined. Also Chandana and Seminda volunteered. Special thanks to Shaminda and Seminda for the support given at the end of the event to pack things.

Thanks to Lilian for the goodies sent.

Overall quality of the exhibition is questionable at best. Hope to see something better next year as Infotel is the biggest IT showcase in the country.

This is a little bit old news, but i have to mention this in the the blog because it is so important.

As some of you might already know Junior Past Pupils Association in my good old school is a fantastic team who is really willing and geared up to do something valuable to the school. So to celebrate the 70th anniversary we decided to host a mega size exhibition on 25th - 27th October. This became the biggest exhibition ever done in the school and also the biggest ever done in the whole region. We had over 100 different exhibition stalls including 20+ government departments, student talent shows, a carnival with a musical show, and our very own FM channel - 'D' FM.

I was overall responsible for the IT/Computer section. It was not that hard to create a wonderful IT experience to the visitors which eventually became the 'most popular' section of the whole exhibition, because I had a great team to work with ... Rajitha, Charith (Mr. Facebook), Anuradha, Dilum, and several others, my brother midda did some great work in creating most of the artwork. Also there were many school chaps. Among the things we did for the IT Showcase ... we created a 100 foot long poster - 'Computer History Timeline' which elaborates the History Computers ... you name it all the key inventions, important people, incidents ... everything is there in this, next we designed about 50 A1 size posters displaying information about important companies, people, hardware and software in the industry ... and then there was XBox's which kids lined up to get their turn to play. It was a loads of fun to have the game challenges etc. Also I did couple of presentations for groups (approx. 30 students) about PhotoSynth, HDView, Windows Live etc.

It's not fair if I thank the team ... because no point in me thanking for something which we all did ... Let me just say ... we nailed it ... woo! hoo!

So ... another big initiative from the junior past pupils association ended successfully. Stay tuned for the next big extravaganza ... Well! we always aspire to do big things ;)

Last Thursday (31st) we had the .NET Day [2008] @ SLIIT. It was great to see many new students and everything went well as planned.

We had 6 presentations ...

• Intro to C# & LINQ by Prasanna Amirthalingam
• Building Web Applications with Visual Studio 2008 by me
• Windows Presentation Foundation by Uditha Bandara
• Getting started with Silverlight by me
• SQL Server 2008 new features by Gogula Aryalingam
• Intro to Student Champs Program by Primal Wijesekera & Buddhika Kalupahana

If you are looking for the presentation slides used please Click Here. (Uditha's presentation slides are not in this zip)

btw: I have been to SLIIT auditorium couple of times but this is the first time got a chance to go to the balcony .. just to see ... It's a fantastic view :)

Last Thursday (21st) 6 of our student champs headed to Uva Wellassa University for a 2 day Dev Camp. Despite the long exhausting journey all of them spent the evening setting up the labs till very late. When the event started on Friday morning everybody was surprised to see several lecturers and the vice chancellor Mr. Chandra Embuldeniya himself being present at the event. Event consisted of several technical presentations on Microsoft technologies, 4 hands-on lab sessions and a career guidance presentation by the vice chancellor.

This is one of the many events we are doing in universities throughout the year. Special thanks to Student Ambassadors Buddhika and Wajira for coordinating + organizing the whole event and the student champs Prasad, Suranga, Tishan and Kelum for the outstanding contribution.

Feedback from students proves that this has been a very successful event and the message is loud and clear, which is “please come more often to our university and share what you know”.

Not only students, lecturers were also present at the sessions	Message from the Vice Chancellor Mr. Chandra Embuldeniya	Portion of the crowd on the first day.
One of the hands-on lab sessions on ASP.NET	Heroes!	I guess they all are saying “THANK YOU” … it’s all over the feedback forms

I spent a considerable amount of my time on traveling to the distance places to share technical knowledge. Continuing the journey ... yesterday Primal, Wajira, Buddhika and me went to the University of Ruhuna Engineering Faculty @ Galle, Hapugala. Kudos to Charith, our coordinator for the hospitality and organizing the event.

We started the proceedings with a presentation about the Microsoft Student Champ program and Primal, Wajira and Buddhika did it. Then I continued with a long presentation on Silverlight. It's great to see some real interests on the latest technologies. Q&A session was in a satisfactory level. Finally it was the Imagine Cup 2008 intro session. This year there are many who are competing from Ruhuna.

Few photos ...

On a separate note, Ruhuna Hapugala is having the best hardware resources I have seen in any university. One lab they showed me is having over 150 computers and most with 2 GB RAM. This is great as it opens up opportunities to students to try our new technologies without hardware being a barrier to do that. Also I got to know that there is a plan to increase this number up to 1000 computers, so there will be one dedicated computer for each student. That's awesome ... and I think thats how it should be in every IT University/Faculty. I think all the other universities in the country should have a look at this place :)

Looking forward to do more similar sessions in the near future.

Yup!   It's being 3 years since our last DevDay. I still remember the good old days where EdQuek and Stanley Tan gave some kick a** presentations @ the DevDay and gave a big boost to our User Group Meetings, which resulted in many good things after that.

Several months back I remember I regularly called and bug my (now) colleague Alan 'Hey Ala, when is the next big event happening' ... now he is asking me 'Hey Wela ... when are we doing the next big event' ... ha!

Hmmm!   things are in preparation stage for the next DevDay ... so guys ... stay tuned :)

Yesterday we restarted the IT Pro User Group. First meeting was held about 4 months back, but it stopped at that because Ruwan went to Singapore and I was too busy to handle two user group meetings. Now that Padman (MVP - Exchange Server) is there to boost the IT Pro User Group.

We had a head count of 30 representing several companies and several levels varies from IT Managers, Network Admins and so on. Padman did a session on Exchange Server 2007 which I saw some cool kick a** features, best of all is the Voice Mail facility where it can connect to a PABX unit and handle Voice mails. Volunteer speaker Sandaruwan (Technical Expert from MIT) did a session on ISA Server. By looking at the feedback received during the Q & A session I assume it was pretty good. But my .NET brain couldn't digest most of it :)

www.tech2guys.com

As uaual the schedule got nuts and couldn't blog about this.

Last Saturday we had our first MVP open day event. Manzi was in charge of organizing the things and he did a kick ass job. Selected destination was Royal Palm Hotel @ Kaluthara. We were planing to start the drive @ sharp 9 AM, but guess what ... as usual we started bit late. How can we start early and break the traditions. Once we got there first thing in our agenda was to have the planning meeting before we start anything with the booze. Meeting went on about 45 minutes and we discussed about all the .NET Forum activities for the next couple of months, which included stall at Tech.Ed, Deepdive session, Community Day etc. So guys stay tuned ... there's going to be lot of cool things happening in the near future. After the planning meeting it was all fun + fun + fun. From the MVP team Manzi, Jinath, Pras, Dinesh, Padman and me participated. Merill and Buddhike couldn't make it. And from Microsoft Alan and Indica Joined (a big thanks to Alan for initiating the whole thing). and we invited our buddies from the .NET forum ... Razor, Casper, Charith, Chandana, Rajah etc. but Chandana and Rajah couldn't make it. Looking forward for the next MVP Open day ... who wants to join ?

14th, 15th and 16th things were really busy in my schedule due to the Future Minds exhibition. Before start writing anything I must say thanks to my friend Mithra who brought this event into my attention. In general things were OK @ the exhibition. But as I mentioned on Sunday crowd was not big as expected. Anyways things have been really good for the .NET User Group.

Day 1 (14th)
Even though the exhibition was scheduled to start @ 10 AM, things started way early for us. My self, Charith and Razor arrived at the location around 8 AM to start setting things up. After putting up the banners, posters and LCD screens things looked good. Padman (new MVP) and Alan joined around 9.30 to support us with the setup. Also Merill joined in for few minutes to hand over the MVP standing poster and the other banners. Other than that Joy and Chandana dropped in in the evening.

By 11 AM I had to step out for few hours as I had to do the sessions @ Moratuwa event.

Day 2 (15th)
Jinath, Charith, Chandana, Casper, Razor were there the whole day. I was also there except for few hours which I went to Moratuwa to do a session on Vista. Malith from SLIIT joined in, in the evening. 

Day 3 (16th)
Last day of the exhibition was better than the previous two days. Few entertainment activities happened at the main stage etc. Fiqri and Casper joined around 12. Pasan and Charith bit later and Madhawa, Ludmal and Dinesh dropped in in the afternoon for few hours. Also our new friend Fazmil also joined with us. All of us visited the RedHat stall in the evening and we exchanged RedHat Caps with MVP bags. Casper and Razor was there with me till the last minute and helped me to pack things up to end the show. Thanks buddies.

me checking the machines and projector display	guests interested in the MVP tattoo	Scene from the dancing item 'Kahmalee'. It was really nice
left to right: Pasan, Fazmil, me, Dinesh Junior, Dinesh and Ludmal	We at the RedHat stall sharing some ideas	left to right: Charith, Fazmil, me, Pasan and Razor
Me, after three tiring days of hard work	Razor, Charith and Casper busy with things @ the stall	Me and Fazmil after a long chat on various things

A very big thanks from the MVP team to all the volunteer buddies from the forum who helped, in their names Charith, Razor, Casper, Fiqri, Pasan, Joy, Malith, Madhawa, Ludmal and Fazmil. And a big thanks to Alan and Chanditha from the MDP for a support given. Also our MVP Lead Lilian and Kristy from the APAC team for sending all the cool goodies. Hey Lil, those bags are really nice. We have few left which we are going to give to the user group members at the next monthly meeting.

Faculty of Information Technology (FIT), University of Moratuwa celebrated their 5th anniversary last week and they organized an exhibition and a series of technical presentations. My self and other MVPs were invited to do few sessions. After discussing I agreed to do two sessions and Merill agreed to do one.

Day 1 (14th)
Fuzzy time Chamdima (buddy from last years Imagine Cup team) came to pick me from the Exhibition and Convention center. I was expecting it to be a presentation for a small crowd. But I was amazed to see the demand for both Office 12 and Vista sessions. At the last moment we had to change the hall due to the high demand. It was nice to see an audience of 450 both students and teachers representing schools, universities and technical colleges.

Day 2 (15th)
Actually it was Merill who was planning to do this session. But suddenly he was missing. I think I tried about 25 times to reach him over the phone. Since couldn't locate him I decided to do the session for him. Later found that Merill was badly sick during the weekend. Get well soon brother. It was a smaller crowd today representing different companies etc.

Section of the crowd for the Office 2007 session on day 1	Section of the crowd for the Vista session on day 1
me doing the Vista presentation on day 2	Appreciation token from FIT Thanks folks!

Thanks to Wajira, Thinesh, Gayan, Prageeth, Chandima and everybody else who I don't remember the names.