My trip was fully sponsored by Microsoft India. I was under the impression that MS will be  taking care of tickets, hotel bookings, etc by default. When there was just 10 days for the  conference, I sent a mail to my lead at MS just to enquire whether all needful things have  been done. Only then the process was initialised. Since I am having a multiple entry visa to  USA valid up to 2005, there was no hitch  in that front. I was starting from Bangalore and  Seattle/Redmond is almost at the west of USA. Hence it makes better sence to travel via  Singapore/Hong Kong. I prefer this sector over the western sector for two reasons -I get  good Indian food and the treatment from Singapore Airlines or Cathay Pacific is excellent.  But since I initiated the process at the last, moment, the travle desk at MS could not get  tickets in this sector. Finally I went via Mumbai and Amsterdam. Mumbai-Amsterdam- Seattle and return journey was not good. The food was bad and the treatment was bad. This  is the second time I am experiencing this. Northwest Airlines look down at Indians, may be  because we insist on Indian food (what is wrong in it? Afterall it was mentioned while  booking the ticket). 

Now let me come to the good part. For my surprise, there was a chauffer driven car waiting  for me at Seattle airport. The hotel booking was also there. I reached Homstead Studio  Suites at about 1:45 pm on 17th. This hotel is very close to MS campus The distance isjust  about a mile from the conference centre. It was raining at Redmond. I had informed Akhil Karkera, a friend  of mine working at MS Redmond about my trip. He promptly called me at 3 pm and came to  the hotel at 3:15 PM. This hotel is quite good for we Indians. It has a MW, fridge, cooking  range, utensils, coffee kettle, electric iron, etc. But they don't provide milk powder, tea bags,  shampoo, body lotion, etc. like most hotels. I went with my friend to a super market and  bought milk, tea bags and sugar. I had carried MTR's read-to-eat bisi-bele-bath, pongal and  pulav for dinner. My friend drove me to the venue of the conference and made me  familiar with the directions so that I will know where exactly I should go next day.

On 18th morning I got up tooooooooo early due to jet lag. I finished bath, ate Kelloggs (yep,  I carried that also from India) and was ready at 7:30 am. The registration was supposed to  start at 8am. The weather was not at all attractive with mercury at about 3 C coupled wtih  rain. I wore jacket, a woolen head-gear, hand-gloves, took umbrella, put the laptop bag on  sholder and started walking. Not a memorable thing. I reached the venue at 8 am sharp.  Registration formalities finished within 2 minutes. Breakfast was present at the venue. I just  took tea. It was very difficult to find out proper tea was many flavours were present. Everyday  I tried a different tea and till the end of the conference, I could not arrive at a tea which has a  taste and flavour close to what we take here in India.

While in the breakfast hall I met Cathy Wissink, Michael Kaplan, David Hsu, etc. 

Excellent keynote by Russ Rolfe. He also introduced most speakers. Breakout sessions started after keynote. I just wonder why do these organisers keep breakout sessions at all. I  wanted to attend all sessions. I am finding this problem in almost all seminars including  TechEd. Session-A was on encodings, developing international applications on Win 32,  cultures, locales, etc. Since I know these very well, I attended Session-B which was on  making use of Office 2003 features in a multilingual environment and the international  features of Office. Most of the time was spent on explaining basic features of Office 2003  and XML (I am already familiar with these as I had given TechNet presentation on the same  topic at Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune and Hyderabad). Almost 80% of the time was devoted to  this. Towards the end of the time, internationaliztion was explained. That included  SmartDocs and XML solutions. This is what I was looking for. As in any seminar, always one  learns something new. 

There was a conducted trip to MS Home. It was really a memorable experience. This is a  showcase of MS technologies as applied to home. The home is a hi-tech one. At the entry  the authentication is by finger print or by the eye-scan. After entering the home, all the  technologies as employed for the home were demonstrated. Some interesting things were  the RFID usage, voice recognition and voice commands for the home, telling stories to  children, etc. No more details here as I have signed a NDA :-)

I went back to my hotel at about 7:30 pm. It was again raining, the temp was at about 2.5 C. 

On 19th, the sessions started at 9:00am. I attended the sessions on culture, locale, etc. Developing International applications using Visual Studio.NET was the main topic of this  session. I came to know from the speaker (Russ Rolfe) that .NET Version 1.1 is based on  Unicode 4.0 for codepoints (character charts) while the collation (sorting) is based on  Unicode 3.0. Definitely this is not a good news to me as Kannada sorting was perfected only  in Unicode 4.0. Another observation -the OS (XP, Server 2003), .NET, and databases  (Access, SQL Server) all use their own collation tables and the bad news is that they are not  in sync. Rostislav Shabalin's talk highlighted one important point -use System.Globalization  class only when you need it. He also explained how to derive a custom culture from a parent  and culture and make use of it. Suppose there is a language not supported by the system  (OS, .NET), then there is no way you can input it (bad news for Malayalam, Oriya and  Bengali speakers at present. MS is working overnight on these languages). Has anyone  observed this feature (or is it a bug?) -the Resource Editor of .NET is non-Unicode? The  resource fallback in .NET reduces the performance by about 30%. This problem is solved in  Whidbey. Another info I got from this presentation is that direct interface with Uniscribe APIs  is not possible from .NET.

Evening I went to MS company store with my friend Akhil Karkera. I wanted to buy a laptop backpack which is not available in India. I spotted one such item (a .NET merchandise) but I did not  like it. I bought "Rise of Nations" game and two .NET pens. Actually, I did not pay to these. These were gifted by Akhil Karkera.  My friend took me to CircuitCity  from there. I bought a good laptop backpack, Targus make, from there.

On the last day, ie, on 20st, also, the sessions started at 9am. I could walk somewhat easily  that day because of the laptop backpack :-). I attended the sessions on developing  International web solutions. The topic was good. the presentation was not great.  Knowledgebase: UTF-8 is not supported by most mobile devices, ASP.NET is always UTF- 16 internally, tag with language tag for Google indexing by language, langauge tags are  used by screaan readers, below IIS 5.0 uses ANSI and not Unicode, etc. I could not attend  the session on SQL Server as it was going on parallelly. One important session on  Sharepoint localization was cancelled. The concluding session by John McConnell was very  enlightening. 

Apart from the technical sessions, there was an open house on 19th. That day, many persons working at different departments of MS related to Internationalization were present  at the venue. We could walk into any group and discuss any related issues. I discussed the  small bug that crept into the Kannada sorting table of Unicode 4.0 after they included two   more characters in Unicode 4.0. I also discussed the "arkavattu" (reph) issue of Kannada.  The other issues that I discused related to Indic numerals not being present in the Windows  locales. 

I had taken my camera with me. But could not click many snaps as the weather was bad.

On 21st, I came back to India, reached Bangalore on 23rd morning. 

Overall a good experience.

Thanks to MS for sponsoring.

Regards,
Pavanaja