New Delhi (India), April 25, 2018
The C# Corner Annual Conference 2018, one of North India’s largest developer conferences, commenced on April 13-15, 2018 at the Leela Ambience Convention Hotel, New Delhi. Like the previous years' conferences, this year we also had a spectacular event with over 70 extremely informative sessions by 60+ celebrated international and national speakers covering all the latest cutting-edge technologies, along with career advice and personality improvement tips.
The main focus of the conference was to make the developer community aware of emerging technologies, like Blockchain, Quantum Computing, Cryptocurrencies, AR/VR, Artificial Intelligence, Cloud, Wearables, IoT, and Robotics etc. The #CsharpCon18 was a three-day affair. Informative hands-on sessions were organized on all three days in multiple tracks. There were some special events also only for C# Corner MVPs and speakers.
Let us have a brief look at the happenings of all three days.
Day One: Two Tracks and MVP-only Event
The first day had two events– an open day event for attendees and a private evening event for C# Corner MVPs, speakers, and team members. Registration started at 7:30 am sharp.
In the day event, there were two tracks, a Cutting-Edge Track and Career Track respectively, with back-to-back sessions. Day 1 was inaugurated by Stephen Simon, who talked about Web VR in the Cutting-Edge track, and by David McCarter, who gave tips on how to rock your technical interview, in the Career Track.
Attendees just loved their sessions because of the great teaching and the little jokes every now and then. The second session in the Cutting-Edge track was given by Vivek Raj where he unraveled the process of building AR/VR games using unity with practical examples. In the Career track, C# Corner founder, Mahesh Chand gave a very informative session on becoming fearless in an interview.
By the end of the second session in each track, it was time for the Keynote. Mahesh Chand, Founder, C# Corner, opened the session with a warm welcome to the delegates, speakers, sponsors, and MVPs and a short introduction to C# Corner via a video clip. Then he talked about the importance of newly emerging technologies like blockchain, cryptocurrencies, quantum computing, and information security.
After Mahesh, keynote speaker Bill Wolff got on the stage and took the audience on a journey in the history of how Information Technology evolved over time along with the timeline of his inspirational career. That was a great keynote and by the time it ended, the Keynote hall was jam-packed with attendees. Here is a glimpse.
Now, Niloshima Srivastava held the stage fto impart her knowledge on what to use while developing a software – Agile or Waterfall, in the Cutting-Edge Track, while Destin Joy gave his session on positioning yourself for the future in the Career Track.
When Niloshima ended her session with a small Q&A, Bill Wolff got on the stage to talk about the differences between Angular, React, and Vue. On the other hand, after Destin’s informative talks in Career Track, Sourabh Chaturvedi started unleashing the secrets of becoming employable. That was great information which every job seeker needs to learn.
Next was a session from Dan Gershony in the Cutting-Edge Track, who discussed the features and significance of Blockchain for developers. Whereas, the stage of Career Track was owned by the panel of our very talented industry experts – Pinal Dave, Mahesh Chand, Joe Darko, Joseph Guadagno, and Magnus Mårtensson – for a question hour kind of session to resolve the queries of the audience. Both the sessions went very well and people really learned a lot.
By the time both the sessions ended, the delicious lunch was ready. The audience, speakers, and team C# Corner enjoyed the lunch and got ready for the next adventure.
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After lunch, the audience of the Cutting-Edge Track was addressed by Romil Bheda presenting “the evolving era of Artificial Intelligence with AI Assistants like Microsoft Cortana and Amazon Alexa”. In the Career Track, Mahesh Chand started his power-packed session on how to become successful in your endeavors.
After learning the secrets of becoming successful, the Career Track audience was addressed by Naveen Sharma with his refreshing ideas on new age career options. Naveen started his session with a beautiful song to refresh the audience. In the Cutting-Edge track, Alagunila Meganathan took the attendees on a deep dive into Microsoft Flow.
After Alagunila, Sachin Kalia got on the Cutting-Edge Track stage with his session on ASP.NET Core 2.0. There, he explained the features by creating a small demo application. In the Career Track, it was another panel discussion by experts, Mahesh Chand, Chris Love, Pinal Dave, Naveen Sharma, and Bill Wolff.
The time rolled on very fast and before we knew it, it was time for the last sessions in both tracks. After ASP.NET, it was a time to learn some Java in the Cutting-Edge Track, so Mala Gupta caught the stage for a wonderful session describing which Java version is the best. She opened her session with a Tongue Twister, which made the audience more active with a laugh. In the Career Track, Microsoft MVP evangelist, Joe Darko imparted the secrets of what to do to earn the prestigious Microsoft MVP award.
The public event of day 1 ended there and we started preparing for the MVP-only event which was to be attended by speakers, C# Corner MVPs, our sponsors and VIP guests, and team C# Corner.
The exclusive program kicked off at around 7 PM with a warm welcome by Naveen Sharma and then, guests started introducing themselves.
After the brief introduction, the C# Corner founder, Mahesh Chand, who is also a 12-time Microsoft MVP, technical author, and a software architect, thanked all the MVPs and the team and shared his vision for the community in the coming years. The C# Corner team showcased the new features and enhancements introduced in the last year and shared their future plan for the community, such as the emergence of Alexa Skills and Bot applications into support module of the C# Corner website.
Then, Mahesh talked about the partnerships of C# Corner in the previous year with industry-leading ventures, such as – Stratis, Wintellect, and Noltran, and informed the attendees about C# Corner exploring new future opportunities for the betterment of the developers’ world.
After Mahesh finished his speech, Magnus Mårtensson got hold of the stage to tell the delegates why and how all PowerPoint templates are incorrect. His session was full of tips, tricks, and light-hearted jokes that made it a wonderfully memorable event. Also, Magnus announced Gaurav Gahlot the winner of his presentation challenge that he started one month prior to the conference and gave him 15 minutes to present his slides.
The hall was filled with the sound of claps and the event ended with a finger-licking buffet and guests networking with each other. All the guests enjoyed the delicious dinner with great enthusiasm. Even our speakers from foreign countries liked the Indian recipes a lot.
Day Two: Four Tracks and Prize Distribution
The second day of C# Corner Annual Conference 2018 took place on April 14, 2018. This was a public event and the Welcome Note, Keynote, and the Closing Note were open to all while the sessions were divided into four separate parallel tracks - Dev Track (Track1), AI/ML/Data Science Track (Track2), Mobile/Security Track (Track3), and IoT/DevOps/Cloud Track (Track4) – for providing the attendees an environment of extensive learning with their choice of technology.
The event started with registration of guests at 7:00 AM sharp. Over 1000 delegates were gathered there to learn cutting-edge technologies and connect with fellow developers from all around the globe. Long queues could be seen at the registration desk. All the attendees were given a string bag and a C# Corner Conference T-shirt as gifts.
After registration and breakfast, the conference started with an introduction to most useful design patterns by Prakash Tripathi in Track 1, secrets of developing smart applications using Cognitive Services by Nishith Pathak in Track 2, and Digital Transformation with SharePoint and Office 365 by Vignesh Ganesan in Track 3. Attendees also enjoyed networking with each other just before the final showdown.
Next was a session by the very experienced Sanjay Vyas in Track 1 on “Stop the war between static and dynamic”. The stages of Track 2, Track 3, and Track 4 were owned by Tadit Dash, Parveen Malik, and Vishwas Lele with their informative sessions on "What, why and how of Dependency Injection", “Web/Cloud/ Infrastructure Security” and "Overview of DevOps" respectively.
As the sun moved up in the sky, the crowd started arriving; at 10:00 in the morning, the hall of the Day 2 Keynote Session was packed with techies. The Keynote session started with a warm welcome from our founder Mahesh Chand where he welcomed and thanked everybody. The Keynote hall was jam-packed with technology enthusiasts, C# Corner MVPs, our honorable speakers, and the C# Corner Team. Mahesh started his presentation with a motivational video clip of current Indian Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi.
Mahesh talked about the C# Corner Community, its significance in today’s competitive environment, its achievements, and its future plans etc., along with introducing our speakers and sponsors to the guests. After Mahesh, Mads Torgersen was ready to give us a sneak peak of the future version of C# programing language. Yes, the information shared by him unveiled many features yet to be announced in coming versions of C#. The crowd went crazy hearing the top-notch experts.
Then, Mahesh called upon the keynote speakers Jason Beres and Jeff Prosise for talking about “digital transformation, internet growth, and fabulous opportunities for the developer community in India” and “insights on fast emerging technologies” respectively. This was great to hear from key people of the C# Corner foundation.
After a grand Keynote session, the Annual Conference went back on track (tracks in our case) – the four tracks full of knowledge. Post-keynote, the first session in Track 1 was reserved for Mads Torgersen, the PM of C# project at Microsoft, where with a hands-on demonstration, he unveiled what’s new in C#7.x. In Track 2, Sanjay Vyas discussed Concept Visualizing Technologies. The Track 3 audience was mesmerized with the tricks for developers to increase Office efficiency by Nitin Paranjpe, and Track 4 was captured by the extremely useful and informative session by Chris Love on development using Progressive Web Apps.
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After Mads, Maarten Balliauw took the audience on a trip down memory lane by exploring .NET’s memory management in Track 1. On the other hand, in Track 2, Pinal Dave dictated the tips and tricks of boosting the performance of SQL in just 60 seconds. The Track 3 audience learned to build Native Mobile Apps using JavaScript and React in a session by Joseph Guadagno, and in Track 4, Jordan Andrews from Stratis took on the stage to deliver a fully-informative session on the emerging Blockchain technology. Then, Jeff Prosise held the stage to teach about building an end-to-end AI/IoT solution with Microsoft Azure.
As the time passed on with knowledge spreading on all over the conference, the event was put on hold and a delectable lunch was served to the guests.
After lunch, Bala Chirtsabesan got on the stage of Track 1 to talk about building modern web applications using ASP.NET Core framework; Dave Nel got hold of the Track 2 stage to impart his knowledge on implementing CaaS using Azure Bot Framework; Bill Wolff introduced Vue.JS in Track 3; and Allen O’Neil presented a very entertaining session on building IoT Robots in Track 4.
The next session in Track 1 was taken by Mads Torgersen again. He displayed the tactics of herding Nulls along with showing a glimpse of future versions of C# programming language. The track 2 stage was owned by Jinal Shah while he unleashed the CRUD Operations Firestore using Angular. Amit Dewan got hold of the Track 3 stage and talked about the gimmicks of Agile development, and the Track 4 audience got a chance to meet Microsoft Regional Director, Prabhjot Bakshi and learn how to use IoT with Azure.
This was a time for a short tea break to let the audience refresh themselves and digest all the knowledge they were gaining. Time rolled on very quickly and before we realized it, the last sessions were going on. This slot of Track 1 was reserved for the entertaining yet highly-informative session of David McCarter on rocking the .NET app performance. David gave his guitar-breaking performance this year too. Here is a glimpse.
Meanwhile, in Track2, Pinal Dave offered powerful tips and tricks of boosting the performance of SQL Server; in Track3, Bill Wolf showed the differences between AngularJS, React, and VueJS; and in Track4, Vithal Wadje imparted the tips of continuous integration and development using VSTS.
Finally, it was time for a grand closing note, prize distribution, and to present the MVP Awards. Mahesh Chand came on stage to thank all the delegates present in the hall. The MVPs were awarded their MVP certificate and the prizes were distributed to the winners. The grand prizes at the conference were a MacBook Pro and a Surface Book which were given to the lucky winners using a lottery system.
All MVPs gathered on the stage for a group photo with speakers and key members of C# Corner.
And finally, the team of C# Corner also made a pose for a cheering group photo.
The day 2 of C# Corner Annual Conference ended here with loud cheers and great enthusiasm.
Day Three: Two Tracks
Similar to Day 1 and Day 2, Day 3 of the C# Corner Annual Conference was also reserved for extensive learning with back-to-back sessions. It was April 15, 2018, and the crowd was already crazy even at the registration desk. There were two parallel tracks that day – Web Dev Track (Track 1) and Cloud Track (Track 2).
Day 3 was initiated by Sourabh Somani in Track 1 with his informative session on learning Python in minutes, and Gaurav Jain in Track 2 with an introduction to Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
After the first sessions, in Track 1, Neha Nivedita taught how to get ahead of the curve with MongoDB in a very interesting way taking examples of superheroes and action movies. In Track 2 though, Sandeep Soni hopped on the stage to tell how API Gateway can enhance the performance of RESTful Web Services. This also was a wonderful session for developers to learn a lot.
As the sun got up in the sky, it was time for the keynote session. Our brilliant speaker from Sweden, Magnus Mårtensson opened the keynote session with small chit-chat and talking about the significance of women in the society as well as in the tech community. He invited our guest Mallika Singh on stage to talk about women empowerment and breaking the gender stereotypes. Well, we are grateful to have Mallika with us as she gave a powerful speech and the hall was full of claps and cheers.
After Mallika, Joseph Guadagno was invited on where he talked about the future of open source technologies and their application in modern development.
Then, Pinal Dave also took us on a brief history of the Database and talked about its role. The last but not least speaker in the keynote was Magnus again talking about various cutting-edge technologies like Cloud, IoT, Big Data, Microservices, AI and Mobile. The keynote ended with a huge round of applause and the conference was split into two tracks again.
In Track 1 now, Jinal Shah put together a fully informative and hands-on session on working with Angular Material and CDK. While in Track 2, Albert Anthony talked about the security of workloads in AWS.
The next slot of Track 1 was taken by Nitin Pandit where he unraveled the tactics of powerfully testing the Angular Apps. And in Track 2, Nitisha Soni got on the stage and imparted her knowledge on developing Progressive Web Apps with Polymer.
The last sessions before lunch in both the tracks were taken by Neha Sharma and Pankaj Bajaj respectively. Neha introduced the Redux internals to the audience while Pankaj dove deep into Big Data Management in AWS.
Once all the sessions finished, it was time for lunch. A delicious lunch was served to all the attendees and guests in a buffet.
After lunch, the stage of Track 1 was owned by Joseph Guadagno delivering the secrets of building a Cross-platform application using Ionic. The Track 2 audience listened to Kasam Sheikh imparting the deep knowledge of Text Analytics in Azure Logic App.
When Joseph finished his session of great importance, our rockstar David McCarter came on the stage in a traditional Indian attire and rocked the stage with an introduction of Xamarin. On the other hand, Suketu Nayak got on the stage after Kasam and enhanced the knowledge of the audience with an overview of Azure Data Lake Analytics.
The clock was moving on and it was tea time. We were towards the end of the conference. This is when Sekhar Srinivasan took hold of the Web Dev Track and showed the tricks of consuming REST services from Xamarin.Forms. The command of Cloud track was in the hands of Akshay Patel. He took the audience for a deep dive into Cosmos DB.
Time passed very quickly and before we realized it, the last sessions were going on. The Track 1 audience was leveraging the knowledge of S. Ravi Kumar and learned to build iOS and Android Apps using Xamarin.Forms. In Track 2, the last session was taken by Jaswant Sandhu teaching the delegates how to use GraphQL with NodeJS.
Well, that was it. The C# Corner Annual Conference ended with a big thanks from Mahesh Chand, the founder of the C# Corner community. Team C# Corner is also very grateful to all speakers, MVPs, attendees, and delegates who made this event so memorable and successful.
We are sure you are willing to see all the pictures of this memorable conference. Well, you can get access to all the photos of the C# Corner Annual Conference 2018 from this
>>> Google Drive Link >>>. About C# Corner Annual Conference
The C# Corner Annual Conference is a three-day annual meeting where C# Corner MVPs, authors, International Speakers, Tech Influencers, Chapter leaders, moderators and editors meet, honor, demonstrate, plan, and have fun. Authors and speakers talk about cutting-edge technology, trends, and topics.