My Experience At The C# Corner Annual Conference - 2016

I am here to present my experiences and learnings at the C# Corner Annual Conference – 2016 held in Delhi/NCR on March 18-19, 2016.

I was super excited to participate in the conference; not just to receive my MVP award, but to hear the great speakers who flew not just from South India, but from the U.S. as well.

Somehow I missed the private event held for MVPs and speakers on the evening of March 18; however, I managed to be a part of it by interacting with the speakers and other fellow MVPs.

The next day, March 19, started with a yummy breakfast in the hotel. Being a vegetarian, I liked the fact that the hotel served a variety of vegetarian dishes.

This time we had two tracks; i.e., the Dev track and the Mobile/Cloud track. I attended sessions on the Dev track.

The Dev track started with a session on ASP.NET where Braj Mishra explained how next generation web apps can be built using ASP.NET 5. One of the core enhancements is that ASP.NET 5 doesn’t load all the modules by default, instead it uses middleware to optimize loading of modules on demand.

This was followed by a session on aspects of open source ASP.NET or .NET Core by a speaker from Microsoft who showcased how Microsoft is working towards making its platforms and technologies available in open-source platforms. He also explained the concept of Docker and Container, and demonstrated one of the Azure Docker services, followed by running the ASP.NET application into Linux.

And then the Welcome Speech by Dhananjay Kumar (DJ) was amazing, and presented some facts and figures explaining how the C# Corner team has grown over time, along with the history of Annual Conferences starting in 2011.

This was followed by the keynote session by C# Corner founder Mahesh Chand, who delivered a session explaining how technology is changing day-to-day life more than ever by IOT, smart devices, and wearables.

These sessions were so engaging that despite the fact that we reached lunch time, I was eager to listen and interact more.

And then came Jason Beres from Infragistics, who spoke about controls built with Ignite UI and JQuery, and demonstrated the awesome prototyping tool,  Infragistics ultimate. His energy was simply amazing, considering his seniority.

And then a passionate speaker, Glenn Block from Splunk, spoke about deploying Web APIs on Core CLR to Docker. He nicely demonstrated how applications can be built and migrated across platforms using Core and Docker.

Lunch Time

After a nice lunch we got ready for a session on SQL Servers by Vinod Kumar from Microsoft who took the excitement to the next level with some great Excel tips, including flash fill. Then he demonstrated nice SQL Server performance tips, which include the importance of the update statistics command, the live query plan feature introduced with SQL Server 2016, the real difference between temp table and table variable, in-memory tables, row level security, and data masking in SQL Server.

Following was the session on angular by Dhananjay Kumar, who started with pain areas of Java Script and then moved on to Angular. He nicely explained the concept of function constructor in Java Script to create new objects. He has also broken the myth by clarifying that Angular controller is not similar to MVC controller.

And then Glenn Block came again to talk about ScriptCS, one of the open-source implementations by the community, to which he has also contributed. ScriptCS appeared to be a great tool to play around with objects and service calls without getting into project creation in Visual Studio. Some of its features are similar to PowerShell, however, unlike PowerShell, ScriptCS uses C# and hence attracts C# developers.

Tea/snack break

After a small tea break, we gathered again for the ceremony for MVPs, speakers, and contest winners.

MVPs were called one by one in alphabetic order to receive a trophy, certificate, and kit.

Following this was a group photo session of MVPs, speakers, and core members, and a thank you note to all of the attendees.

group photo session of MVPs

After the session, I happened to interact with some of the speakers and fellow MVPs in the closing party. The temperature of the party was in proportion to India’s winning prediction in the India-Pakistan T-20 match. I also met Mahesh Sir in order to understand his vision on C# Corner and ongoing plans, which include spreading IT industry awareness in colleges.

To conclude, I truly enjoyed the conference and look forward to coming back again.

I hope you liked the article. I look forward to your comments/suggestions.