* TechMela : Day 1

As promised i am here with updates on Day 1. It was a day of mixed feelings.

As requested i reached the venue at 8 am. Registration took 2 minutes and after that i had practically nothing to do till 9:30am as partner booths were empty and tea/coffee machines were Off. But i managed to make some friends there. I was disappointed to see today's agenda as my favorite session on Dynamic Language Runtime was missing from 'Developer Fundamentals' Track . 

In keynote Steven who is the GM with Development Technologies group at Microsoft gave an excellent presentation on Microsoft's vision for Development Tools and Server Technologies. His keynote speech was filled with demos about unified communication with Exchange server, Windows Virtualization Technologies and SilverLight demo. He also gave an overview of how Microsoft is trying to unify Identity Management across its products using AD, Management of various server products, Visual Studio as a single tool for developing for all server products and Exchange server as unified communication platform. All in all it was a good overview session.

I finalized on Track 1 which was 'Developer Fundamentals'. I miss the 'Dive Deep' sessions of Tech-Ed :-(.

It started with an overview of Visual Studio 2008 with some basic demos. There were 2 sessions on LINQ which covered basic programming of LINQ over objects and RDBMS. There was one session for introduction to ADO.NET Entity Framework.

The session on Testing tools available with Visual Studio Team System was excellent and i am sure lot of people got good exposure to how unit testing, Web testing and load testing can be performed using VSTS. New testing related features of VS 2008 were also showcased. The team who is actually developing these tools in MS Hyderabad came to show the demo.

One session covered the basics of threading and how 'Concurrency and Coordination Runtime' which is still with Microsoft research makes concurrent programming for multicore machines more sensible.

That's it for the day.. tomorrow i am planning to cover Silverlight end to end in Track 3 which is 'Web Fundamentals'.