PuneITPro UG Meet

It was 9.00 am in the morning of 10th April, 2004. A blissful Sunday, with the sun already out and shining. It was about 60 minutes for the session on Longhorn to start off. So I got ready and reached the Venue by 930 hrs.

Moments later, my cell rings. It was Manik Ahuja, IT Professional Evangelist, Microsoft Bangalore, on the line. He was also close to the venue and was asking me the last minute directions (since it was held at my college :)). Its about 0945 hrs now, and the session was to be started. However, the hall seemed margingly full and I was worried if people would turn up for the session or not. All I could see at that moment, were some students from various colleges across Pune, about 10-12 of them. They were really interested to know about Longhorn.

We (read: Manik and I) setup Manik's laptop and the project by around 0955 hrs. Few more people had come into the "Smart Room" and I was feeling relaxed about the audiance. More minutes pass by, about 1003 in the clock and we start the session. There are about 35 people now in the room.

To start of with, Manik showed an interesting video on Transition in Microsoft, from Windows 1.0 to 3.0 to 95 to 98 to 2000 to XP and then the most awaited Longhorn. This video, actually got the audiance into the groove of the session. Later on, Manik explained the audiance about the 3 pillers of Longhorn, viz. Avalon (the presentation SubSystem), Indigo (the programmers dream) and WinFX (a completely new file system built on top of NTFS). He also explained various facts about installation, which would take only about 15-20 min to install a DNS server. He also explained stuff about IIS 7.0, using a video, which would be shipping in as a feature of Longhorn. He also showed a video, of how you could install the Longhorn Server using the command prompt. So basically there was a lot of Gyan for all the System Admins present out there.

Not to leave some developers behind ( and ofcourse students), the onus came onto me. After Manik's nice and intersting talk about the Servers, I gave a demo about the Longhorn Client. It was actually fun telling people about the SideBar, a complete new Interface, the New Calender and stuff. So basically showed what is there in the Longhorn OS for people to watch out for and what features would it provide for the developers. Laterz, I take a back seat and Manik starts a nice Q&A session. Lots of question get answered, however, someone pops up a question on XAML.

I was planning to show an XAML basesd application which worked fine on my desktop, (Win XP with SP2, November CTP Download for Avalon and Whidbey Beta 1). Manik knew that I had some knowledge about XAML so he directed the question to me. However to my bad luck, the app did not work fine on Sarang's lappie. Not to fall back, I explained the XAML Code to ppl and told them steps on how to go about downloading it from the NET for their XP based machines.

Lastly we winded up the session by 11.30, and Manik was open to all the offline questions. However before winding up, Manik threw a surprise for all the attendies, that PuneITPro would be giving away a cool Grey MSN India t-shirts. It was a great surprise for all of them.

Before I forget, a great thanks to Anand Deodhar sir, for providing PuneITPro all the infrastructure for the session, without whom, the session wouldnt have taken
place.