Autodesk DevDays 2009 – Part 1

Today I find myself in a hotel room in the garden city of Bangalore. I am here to attend the Autodesk DevDays 2009 event to be held tomorrow at the ITC Windsor Manor. I was here last year as well and got to meet Jim Quanci of Autodesk and members of his team in person, after corresponding with them through email for years.

Although there is a “Part 1” in the title of this post, I must warn you there may not be a “Part 2” because DevDays is an event for Autodesk partners only and everything said and shown is strictly confidential. For those who are interested the agenda is here. As you can see, among the things that will be discussed are new features of the next release of AutoCAD and other products. Actually the focus is more on the API’s related to the new features, not the features themselves, since the target audience is basically developers that extend Autodesk products by means of plug-ins and other integrated solutions. The DevDays events are meant to give Autodesk partners a heads up on the new functionality as well as receive feedback from them.

Tomorrow’s event in Bangalore will be followed by similar events in two other Indian cities, Chennai on 10th January and Pune on 13th January of next year. The US will have only one DevDays event which will be held on the sidelines of Autodesk University in Las Vegas. China and Japan have two events each, whereas Israel, Russia, UK, Sweden, Germany, Italy, France, Australia, Singapore and Korea will have one event each. That makes India the country with the largest number of DevDays events this year. Not exactly sure what to make of that.

I was thinking of live tweeting the event. But like I said, I don’t think there will be much that I could tweet about. Let’s see.