In Hebron “Introduction to VS2008 & ASP.NET” session

As part of PalDev activities I was in Hebron this Saturday to deliver a “Introduction to VS2008 & ASP.NET” session for the PPU –Palestine Polytechnic University – CS and IT students. The workshop was held in Friends of Fawzi Kawash IT Center of Excellence (FFKITCE). We stopped the event registration process after 65 person was registered regarding the room limitation and we also emailed the latest 25 person that the priority will be given for those who registered earlier and we will re-hold a similar event for those who could not attend.

Anyway I went to Hebron using public transportation and it was like using “Crazy Taxi”!! it was really a mad drive I reached with no harm and headed to the FFKITCE center. The presentation started after 12:00 pm and continued to 4:00 pm nearly. It was really a very quick 3 hours full with Microsoft Buzz.

The audience was excited –I think- and I was very pleased to see those motivated students which really encouraged me myself to pursue latest tech’s further and further. The audience was interested with the powerful features the .NET and VS2008 provides which ease the application development process and save time and efforts. On the side of the presentation I introduced the express editions Microsoft offers, Microsoft Dream Spark and MSP programs.

In general the presentation run smoothly except that I could not figure out what happened in the second demo when my VS 2008 refused to connect to adventure works sample database. Although I checked the sample scenario early that morning and it was running fine but this is the demo’s hell I really tested –many times probably- !! Anyway we was already exceeded the given time so I skipped the rest of demo and finished the presentation. I am looking forward seeing more interaction from the students with PalDev and I really think that the time when such events are being held by the students themselves is very near.

A several suggestions came along with the presentation: some folks asked for advanced topics and this is very eligible and PalDev already has plans to do a bunch of advanced sessions for advanced users. Another asked for HOL’s but this is very limited due the limitation of available well equipped  labs.

Hope that helps anyone
Huthaifa