Microsoft Expression around the clock, Global designer conference at Bangalore

I got an invitation from Microsoft for Expression round the clock, global designer conference at Bangalore. I was interested & enrolled in to check what actually Microsoft Expression Studio can do. It happened at Fuga, brigade road. Since I was not been much to this area, I took a print out of Google map & went to venue in time. Registration was going on, even though registration was limited to 200, many un-registered people came to join. And few didn’t had confirmation mail from Microsoft. I went in & started looking for any known face & found a “Blog’A'lorean”. Started chatting with him & another guy Ram[sodidi.blogspot.com] came to me saying “Hey Tech Bangalore, Sorry I don’t know your name!”. I was happy that Tech Bangalore has become my identity.

Conference started off with key note from Shelley Armstrong, which I sincerely not understood anything. Because venue was too small to accommodate & I was behind some tall guys. I was not able to see & hear properly. There were about 200 attendees & seating was there for only about 60-70 people. We had a small break after Shelley Armstrong’s session. There were lot of hot drinks, but since I have not yet touched them I went for “Real” mango juice. There were some snacks looking like “Pakoda’s” but smelled like chicken pieces. In confusion I didn’t went for that since am a veggie.

I finished break quickly & managed to stand (yes STAND) bit front to watch session. Supreet Singh started his session, he explained how powerful is silverlight. He started with a web video player built with Silverlight. The player was able to play SEVEN high definition video streams at a time. User can switch to any video with a mouse click & switching takes less than a second. He also showed one more Silverlight application which enables video editing on web.

In between he handed over session to developer Pandurang Nayak. He showed some desktop applications & web applications built with Silverlight & Expression Studio. He demonstrated a Patient monitoring system, which had great user interface. It had 3D views of ECG..etc & very good look & feel. Then he demonstrated a stock market application, which also had 3D look & feel, good usability interface. Pandurang also showed an example of air ticket booking web application & compared it with conventional web pages.

Supreet & Pandurang had a fun designer - developer quarrel & started to create a video player with Silverlight. Supreet made a video box & a button with no functionality. Pandurang added a Play/Pause functionality to that button through coding. They just wanted to show designer - developer interaction in developing a application. Looking at its power, it might hit Adobe’s Flash & Creative Suit market.

At end Microsoft gave away some goodies to attendees. A Microsoft Expression Studio CD with 60 days evaluation period, a “Design Now” magazine, an Expression Studio brochure & a Reebok T-Shirt. A guy from TV 18 took a short interview of mine, I don’t know if he published it or not.

Links:

http://www.microsoft.com/expression/