.NET From India

TechMela - India's Unique Tech Event

India has been having its version of TechEd for close to 10 years or so and also MDEC for the past few years.

Looks like the India DPE team has now decided that doing so many separate events is too problematic and that it is easier to have one single event for the whole country. So that lead to TechMela. So you now have this huge event which is aimed at all kinds of people who deal with technology right from the business decision makers to developers.

The downside I see to this kind of mega event is:

1. This happens only in Mumbai, which means that the big bulk of small time developers in other cities most probably do not get to attend this event. Travelling and staying in Mumbai is extremely expensive and I suspect it will only be the corporate developers with sponsorship from their companies who will attend.
2. With a focused event, it is easier to network with likeminded people. So if I attend a mobile conference, there is a higher chance that I will meet mobile developers. While in this kind of an event it becomes a lot more difficult to network with a specific set of people.

Anyway this is another effort from MS India to come up with a viable way to have a big technical conference for India. There has been many formats tried, from 1-city only to multi-city to multi-day spread over a few months kind of effort. All of them have had their plus point and downsides. So this is another format and let’s see if its better or more successful.

Scratch - A programming language for Kids

Scratch is a new programming language for children from the creator of Lego, Mitchel Resnick. It seems to be built on the same logic a lego, where there are basic building blocks and then you use those to build more complex things. Similarly, Scratch seems to have GUI, which allows you to do things like animate, play music etc using basic building block like symbols.

Here is a BBC article that also contains a cool video of Scratch in action.

Scratch Home Page
Download Scratch

Silverlight Samples

With all the excitement around Silverlight, I assume most of you want to see it in action, before you go ahead and start learning it. There are quite a few demos and samples out there, but it is not very easy to get to all of them.

Scott Hanselman has put together a post that aggregates some of the best samples and demos out there.

Tweaking Windows Vista

One of my fellow MVPs, Vishal Gupta, posted a list of Vista Tweak utilities that are available. I decided to take a preliminary look at these share the list here:

Tweak VI http://www.totalidea.com/content/tweakvi/tweakvi-index.html - Free basic version with additional plug-ins being charged

Vista Manager - http://www.yamicsoft.com/vistamanager/index.html - Commercial Version only - 15 day trial available

TweakVista - http://www.tweakvista.com/tweakvistautility/ - Free utility, seems simple but does have a forum with a lot of tweak information

DTweak - http://www.daoisoft.com/index.html - Free and commercial version available

TuneUp Utilities - http://www.tune-up.com/ - Commercial Version Only - Free trial available