Microsoft Pakistan Software Architecture Tour (SAT) 2004

I wanted to write about another pattern but couldn't squeeze out time this weekend. Here is a quick review of Software Architecture Tour 2004 arranged by Microsoft Pakistan in Mohammad Ali Jinnah University, Karachi. The event was on Saturday (27th Mar). The following speakers were there:

1. Jawwad Rehman - MS Country Manager
2. Vaqar Khamisani (AI wala) - Developer Evangelist and ISV Manager, Microsoft
3. Gurkan Salk (from Turkey) - Developer Evangelist MS MiddleEast/ Africa
4. Rai Umair (an SZABIST BCS student) - INETA Pakistan Chairman (self-declared)
5. Haseeb Abdul Qadir (Pakistani) - Software Design Engineer, Redmond, MS USA
6. Khurram Shakir (FASTian 97) - Software Architect, Kalsoft

It was well organized; there were more than 100 participants, almost all of them professionals.

The event started with Jawwad Rehman's speech who emphasized upon the quality of education at BS level. He also told that MS Pakistan is pushing hard to introduce "Best Practices/ Inhouse Trainings Practiced at MS" as elective courses at BS level in universities.

The second speaker was Gurkan Salk who talked mostly on Service Oriented Architecture and it's comparison with Object Oriented Architecture. He discussed things only at conceptual level. However, it was one of the two presentations from which I learned something directly.

The third speaker was our very own Vaqar Khamisani. He joined and left Clarusoft after Neovision and has now joined MS. Though a very knowledgeable person, his presentation was the most boring and off-topic. His topic was "Business Intelligence through Data Mining." Needless is to say that he repeated many basic concepts of AI and didn't talk of anything new.

The third speaker was Rai Umair - a kid who is doing BCS from SZABIST. He believes that he is a representative of International .NET Association Pakistan and tried to motivate people to join him in the NUG. Gave out his phone number :) and talked of many innocent ideas.

Then was Haseeb Abdul Qadir. He is a grad of University of Toronto and is currently a Software Design Engineer for Windows Error Reporting Module in Windows XP and Longhorn. He was very impressive in terms of communication skills and knowledge of the subject matter - but WER isn't related to us (the ISV's) as MS requires contracts with subscriptions to use it for your applications.

The last was our very own Khurram Shakir - the only speaker who spoke in Urdu. His topic was Design Issues with Multi-threaded Applications in .NET (If you don't know Khurram Shakir, let me tell you he is a great coder though he lacks good communications skills.) He talked of various classes and methods related to multi-threading in .NET. But most of the matter can be easily found in MSDN and there was nothing impressive, except his knowledge that spans from COM (STA and MTA) and Java to .NET.

The event had nothing to do with Software Architecture. And like always, we are far far behind from where we should have been.


Carpe Diem - Seize the Day!