Last Thursday (31st) we had the .NET Day [2008] @ SLIIT. It was great to see many new students and everything went well as planned.

We had 6 presentations ...

• Intro to C# & LINQ by Prasanna Amirthalingam
• Building Web Applications with Visual Studio 2008 by me
• Windows Presentation Foundation by Uditha Bandara
• Getting started with Silverlight by me
• SQL Server 2008 new features by Gogula Aryalingam
• Intro to Student Champs Program by Primal Wijesekera & Buddhika Kalupahana

If you are looking for the presentation slides used please Click Here. (Uditha's presentation slides are not in this zip)

btw: I have been to SLIIT auditorium couple of times but this is the first time got a chance to go to the balcony .. just to see ... It's a fantastic view :)

Last Thursday (21st) 6 of our student champs headed to Uva Wellassa University for a 2 day Dev Camp. Despite the long exhausting journey all of them spent the evening setting up the labs till very late. When the event started on Friday morning everybody was surprised to see several lecturers and the vice chancellor Mr. Chandra Embuldeniya himself being present at the event. Event consisted of several technical presentations on Microsoft technologies, 4 hands-on lab sessions and a career guidance presentation by the vice chancellor.

This is one of the many events we are doing in universities throughout the year. Special thanks to Student Ambassadors Buddhika and Wajira for coordinating + organizing the whole event and the student champs Prasad, Suranga, Tishan and Kelum for the outstanding contribution.

Feedback from students proves that this has been a very successful event and the message is loud and clear, which is “please come more often to our university and share what you know”.

Not only students, lecturers were also present at the sessions	Message from the Vice Chancellor Mr. Chandra Embuldeniya	Portion of the crowd on the first day.
One of the hands-on lab sessions on ASP.NET	Heroes!	I guess they all are saying “THANK YOU” … it’s all over the feedback forms

Last week our good old mentor Ed :) forwarded me a mail looking for some tech support to configure a Community Server. These days Community Server 2.0 is among my favoutites list. Checking all the different features and configuration options in that to upgrade Sri Lanka .NET Forum. So I took the challenge to do this. It took longer than expected with my busy schedule and also due to some issues in the hosting place. I spent most of my last weekend on this. Configuring the database manually was what took most of the time. Finally with some help from the technical support dudes in the hosting service I managed to hook it up. Site is on Community Server 2.0 and it looks great. Bangladesh Microsoft Technology Community is up and running now. It reminds me how our forum was a long time back.

Now! Sri Lanka .NET Forum dudes... don't be jealous. Our forum will also be upgraded to Community Server 2.0 very soon.

All the best to Hamid (the man in charge in blangladesh :) ). And if any support needed you know the number to call

Last Friday (7th) we had a .NET day @ Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology (SLIIT). Former students and lecturers at SLIIT organized the event and the list of speakers consisted of Merill, Raja, Fiqri, Dinesh and my self. Head count was close to 400 I guess.

• Merill - Introduction to .NET Framework 2.0
• Raja - ADO.NET 2.0
• Wela - Smart Client Development with VS 2005
• Fiqri - Mobile Development in VS 2005
• Dinesh - Introduction to SQL Server 2005
• Wela - ASP.NET 2.0 Tips and Tricks

Thanks for Malith (SLIIT x-student and event organizer) for taking us for a tour around the SLIIT campus during the lunch break. Dude, you got loads of facilities there.

Few snaps ...

Merill doing the intro to .NET 2.0 session	Me doing the ASP.NET 2.0 Tips & Tricks session	Dinesgh doing the intro to SQL Server 2005 session
Fiqri doing the Mobile Dev with VS 2005 session	Raja doing the ADO.NET 2.0 Session	Me and Dinesh having a small chat with a lecturer
Portion of the crowd	Portion of the crowd

Well! wishes are not for you or me, it for our .NET User Gruop. Yeah! guys it's beign 2 years. We started the whole thing in July 2004 with Merill leading the team and our good old mentor Ed Guiding us. We have continued the meeting every month expect last October where we had the TechEd and this February where we had the VS Launch.

Due to the busy schedule I actually forgot about this. Otherwise I would have atleast brought a cake to the Today's User Group Meeting. A Big thanks to Jinath for reminding this.

It really feels good to be a part of something important.

Last Friday (3rd, March) I did the 3rd workshop of the series (first one was on Windows Applications and the second one was on Web Services. This time it was 'Developing Web Applications with ASP.NET 2.0'.

Session went on for 3 hours with full of demos. I was happy to see their amazed faces to see the cool features in ASP.NET 2.0 ... hope to see atleast few of them come up with their own sites created with ASP.NET 2.0

So, thats the end of the third workshop of a series. What's next?