Manimaran M

My First Ever Talk for the Academia

On 19th June 2004, gave a talk at the Christ College, Bangalore on the occasion of Corporate Connexion. The topic I chose to talk was “.NET-An Overview”.

I had never expected such an event to happen at Christ College. Always wanted to be part of this beautiful campus as a student. Great college with great people around.

Initially, did not know what to talk on. Had no idea about how much the academia is updated with .NET. So, decided to present a very basic talk. The intension was to instill the basics. Clarify all the jargons surrounding .NET technology. Also to give a clear picture on how the various components of .NET fit into the development infrastructure.

Found a paper in ASP.NET starter kit precisely doing that stuff. So, prepared a ppt on the basis of that paper.

I knew that there is no point just going on telling about .NET without involving J2EE. So, wherever possible, gave the parallel. Later found that the audience were comfortable with J2EE because they have it as part of their curriculum. This method indeed work out very well with most of the questions revolved around comparing J2EE and .NET

Some of the questions asked were:

• What are the job prospects for .NET over J2EE
• What is UIPAB
• What is a Web Service
• What is the compilation and execution procedure of a CSharp program
• Since, Fortran and other 3rd party languages are essentially non-object oriented, are their .NET counter parts object oriented
• What is IL
• What is JIT compilation
• What is MVC
• What is Struts Framework
• What is DataSet and how is it used

Some of the information I wanted to share and did not (due to various reasons):

• CLI
• Managed Code vs UnManaged Code
• PInvoke
• Open Source Tools for .NET development (SharpDevelop, Web Matrix, Mono, NUnit, Maverick.NET, CruiseControl.NET, NAnt etc...)
• CTS

In general, the talk was good and was good feeling to talk to students. I've infact learnt most of .NET by virtue of teaching others about it.

The funniest part was the students addressing me as "Sir". Not that I do not know the intentions. So, did not hesistate to accept the addressing. I think they were more comfortable with that way of addressing rather than using my name.

The presentation is available for download here

Realization of the importance of regular failures! (off-topic)

Once upon a time, failures was a way of my life. Most of the small experiments done by me during primary school went for a toss. Such experiments were a result of not proper planning and being very serious about the whole stuff. Then, such small failures became so common that, I never even was afraid of a failure.

But, for some time now (after getting into the software industry), not many opportunities arose for me to be a failure except for the first project which I had worked upon which was a near failure (thanks to inexperience, it was not a complete failure).

I am famous for not completing what has been started. Nowadays, I am not even consious of this fact (which is even more bad). This resulted in averting most of the challenges. This has been so deep rooted now that I don't take up topics which are challenging to me for presentations and talks.

I was recently invited to be part of a discussion in an academic institution and immediately chose to present a topic on “Basics of .NET” rather than the more challenging topic like “How .NET and J2EE stack up?”

Being a .NET developer and not having much exposure to J2EE, presenting the second topic is more challenging to me than the former one.

More over, just lost a bet with my collegeues. That has made me broken. Just realized that, if failure is not tasted for a long period of time, small failures like these can cause a lot of pain. As a matter of fact, I've not even failed in any of my interviews yet. I guess, it is time to get more challenging than to be comfortable doing the stuff that i've mastered over time.

Currently, thinking of some intermediate topic for the discussion, that can deliver the basics of .NET.....