A two day Dev Camp was held at the Uva Wellasa University on the 22nd and 23rd of February 2008, although student champs had to spent 4days in total to for the event as it was far away. So it took some carriage to go there spending 4 days in total. Bashitha(SC) form UCSC, Wajira(MSSA), Kelum(SC), Madhuranga(SC) and me from FIT UOM were among those who were present. We went there on the 21st Thursday 6.30am and arrived at the university @ 3.30pm.It was a beautiful site a University surrounded by Mountains.
Warm welcome was given to us by representatives from the computer society to the University. Some discussions were done with the Lectures of the computer since department Mr. Neeshadha and Mr. Punyagee about the Dev camp. They were very helpful in providing the necessities for us. Then we were to check out the machines of the computer lab which had nearly 100 computers. All necessary software’s for the lab sessions were installed by the Our team and the support team form the UWU on that day till 10.30pm and we could not have done this without them.
On the meeting with the lectures few points that were raised was that they are isolated so that they do not have enough resources. They suggested that monthly meeting Colombo should be telecasted live using windows live, so they could participate the meeting form there. So this is a great opportunity if Microsoft can implement the concept of live in Sri Lanka for the student champ meeting. An alternative to this was to build up Central student champ community with UOP and UWU.
On the very first day of the Session first session was on the student champs program which was conducted by Wajira and me.VC Mr. Chandra Ambuldeniya and most of the heads of departments and Lectures of other departments ware among those who were present, with an audience of about 70.The Presentation was on MS technical communities and where the SC community stands and the activities carried out by the student champs. When the question was raised who want to be a student champ? Almost all of them wanted to be a student champs .VC was impressed and he gave us his fullest support by expressing his valuable ideas and congratulated us.
The second session was on Introduction to 2.0 Introduction .Net Frame work & creating a simple .Net application conducted by Wajira. This session included Framework 2.0 and its components and a hands on lab session building a basic windows application. This was pretty cools for group of students who have never worked with the .net IDE before. Wajira explained about the IDE and the about the windows with in it. In all the sessions we were careful not to go beyond their reach so that the session would be useful to them.
The next session was ASP.net 2.0 lab sessions on “How to develop a simple web application” which was conducted by me. Although some of them have experience in VB6 Win applications it was the first time they were building a web application on ASP.net. The basic components of the ASP.net were explained. Then created a basic web application by using the tools and position them, validation controls, Sessions and quarry strings were some of it.
The Last Session was Opportunities of the ICT Industry which was conducted by Kelum, which VC himself participated and was kind enough to share his own thoughts which the students. Explanation was given about the carrier paths that one could follow in the ICT Industry, the exams one could take to build up the professional qualifications. All of us shared our own experiences in the industry with the students. The Session whet over the schedule and went till 6.30pm
The next day started at 8.30am, the first Session was on “Introduction on SQL Server 2005” which again Kelum did a wonderful job by giving the theoretical knowledge as well as the practical knowledge by using the SQL server management studio. Creating DB, Taking backups, Transaction logs were some of the things explained.
“Hands on session on Data Handling” was conducted by Wajira which he did for both the Win apps as well as the web apps. He explained about the data binding components and handle data within those components.
The next session was on “Advance web applications with AJAX” by Bashitha Where he explained how to use AJAX in the web applications and the cons and pros of using Ajax. The concept of partial page updates was also discussed on this session.
“Stepping to the new world: .Net 3.5 / XAML” was done by me. This included an introduction about the VS2008 and the Framework3.5, new futures of the VS 2008, WPF and the expression blend. Then demonstrated basic application on WPF and Silver light and couple of built in samples. They were thrilled to see that they can do FLASH and 3DMasx things in .net. Although one of us was doing the session our team was always there to back us on the lab sessions helping the students in difficult situations.
I must thank Mr. Candra Ambuldeniya VC Uva Wellassa University for his great suppot on the event. The lectures of the computer science department for providing us the lab facility and helping us on the technical issues. Special Thanks Mr. Suneth Pathirana and the Computer Science Society and all the other who have worked hard to for making this happen. I must also thanks Prasad, Sandarenu , Shanka, Anushke and Tishan form (FIT UOM) for the who helped us a lot in preparing the session materials. Thanks to all the event coordinators Primal(MSSA), Wajira(MSSA), Tihsan(SC), Kelum(SC) and Suneth(UWU) Big thank the student champ team Wajra(MSSA), Bashitha(SC), Kelum(SC) and Madhuranga(SC) who were willing to travel such a long distance sacrificing their time and effort.
