There is an interesting tale behind this, I first saw a computer in the early 1990's at my school. My youger sister was learning LOGO at school. I took her book and read through in summer. The next year I started learning Basica at school in my 8th grade. My fascination grow when i saw somebody play Prince of Persia game on a 486 PC. I went onto study Computer Science in College . I started learning algorithms and programmed in FORTRAN 77 and PASCAL.

I still remember my programming assignment which exposed me to a different language called Scheme. I could see the power of recursion in action. We had to convert a 600 line c code to scheme. The scheme code turned out to be only 100 lines. I learnt Visual basic 6.0 in college, which taught my how to build data driven application. This helped land ino my first real job which was developing a contact management system in Visual Basic 6 and MS Access. From there I went on learning web programming and developed applications in classic ASP and moved to .NET.

Its been 2 weeks after the InfusionDev Sleepless in L.A  event. It's time to talk about it.  I really enjoyed the all night coding challenge on sharepoint. There were just two people from Northern California for the event. I was suprised to know from Kurt that only 4 people were registered for the event.  I liked all the presentations of Kurt and Shawn. I wish they gave some training. I was expecting to gain some insight on Business Data catalog (BDC). It was there on Kurt's slides and he never had time to talk about it. 

The evening was fun, the event was sponsored by Microsoft. We had a ride on a Limo ( partied like a rock star).   I was in a team of two. We were short of one person. We decided to get something implemented soon and hit the bed. So Paras and I  wrote a Photo Slide show Web part using Flicker.Net Api from Codeplex. The idea was to contribute something to community kit for sharepoint in codeplex.  We had an arguement whether to try silverlight with sharepoint or not.  We did not win. The judges were looking for some sharepoint features like list, document library. Unfortunately, we did not leverage it. Kesav's Team won the prize. They deserved it for their idea and implementation. 

Here are some pictures from the event.

such a big hummer Limo.

source: infusion sleeless

I should be hiding somewhere in the back on the right side.

 source: infusion sleeless

2007 was the year for facebook . I would like to see how 2008 fairs. Does the year promises more startups to come. We would have to wait and see. Is Web 2.0 losing its steam, with market going towards south, the new innovations are going to be put in the back burner.

I will be going to L.A this weekend to participate at the Sharepoint training  event sponsored by InfusionDev.  I'm very much excited about coding all night in sharepoint.

I like Visual Studio IDE for the myriad of features and tools without which I can't craft ( I mean cut paste copy) code. The part  that irritates me is when it crashes. I had the problem coming on and off  since the Visual Studio 6.0 days and, guess what it still happens in 2008.   I assume that if you want to be a successful developer like me, then you will crash the IDE couple of times .

Gabe swears like Zed