Winning TSQL Challenge 12

It’s a source of great pleasure for me that I am included in the winners for TSQL challenge 12.

Here’s my post describing my solution and here’s the analysis by Jacob Sebastian, the founder and president of TSQL Challenges.

I am back

I was on vacations for around 3 weeks and am I glad to see some great news awaiting me: I am pleased to announce that I won TSQL challenges 7 and 8. By the grace of Allah, this makes me a 3 times consecutive winner for TSQL Challenges. Here’s a certificate I received from the BeyondRelational team for being an outstanding challenger:

And yes, TSQL Challenge 11 is about to close. So hurry up and submit your entries before Monday.

Victory in TSQL Challenge 7

I am really glad to announce that my solution to TSQL Challenge 7 was chosen among the winners. I briefly described my solution in this post. For result, have a look at http://beyondrelational.com/blogs/tc/archive/2009/06/17/tsql-challenge-7-winners.aspx, and get prepared for the upcoming challenges at http://beyondrelational.com/blogs/tc/default.aspx

I won a Silverlight competition

I am very glad to announce that yesterday, 4th of August, I stood first in a silverlight competition held at Sir Syed University of Engineering and Technology. In the 8 hour competition, the participants were asked to make a custom control “Drag and Drop Shopping Cart” in Silverlight 2 Beta 2. Here were the prizes I got:

• MSDN Premium Subscription for 1 Year (Total Market Value: $10, 939)
• 10,000 Rupees cash

It was a very wonderful experience. You can download my code here. Be sure to rename the file as a zip for extraction.

I am now a Microsoft Certified Professional

Its a long since I last updated by blog. Reasons were my exams and ofcourse, my usual laziness. But now I have come with a thrilling news.
Oh…I cant believe it.. I have cleared the Microsoft certification, “Developing and Implementing Windows-Based Applications with Microsoft Visual C# .NET and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET” (Exam 70-316), by securing 940/1000 marks on 29 December 2005.
The questions were much hard but thanks God, I was able to do that.

Victory in Softec 2005

We got 3rd position in All Asia Dynamic Programming Competition. My other two team members were Faisal and Usman. We were first upset to know that C# was not allowed, then we starting coding in VC++ and yeah, we were able to beat 50+ teams in a tough competition of 5 hours.

PROCOM 2005

I went for PROCOM with two of my fellows, Usman and Faisal. On the first day, there were two trial sessions. We stood 8th in the very first session but then we gathered our distributed skills and yeah, we stood 1st in the 2nd trial session. On the second day, there was only one session of 3 hours. All the participating teams including us could solve only 3 problems out of given 6. We were the first one to solve those 3 problems but Ah…. Some penalty points kept us far from first 3 rankings. We were not much upset and InshaAllah we’ll make a remarkable victory in the upcoming Softec Competition in Lahore.

Participation in Procom 2005

I have registered to participate in the Software and Programmming competetion organized by “Fast”. I registered myself with Faisal and Usman for Programming competetion while with Sajjad, Asad, Tanveer and Zeeshan for Software competetion. Lets see how well we do there.

Some words about my programming in early stages

I started to do programming when I was 12. At that time, I used to program in BASIC. Then, I learned some COBOL by seeing my brother programming in COBOL and a little VB as well. When I was 16, I participated in the National Software Competition held by CSP(Computer Society of Pakistan) in collaboration with Phillips. Alhamdulillah, I got 1st prize in it. Then I was sent to Singapore by CSP along with two other fellows, Zeeshan Zia and Ashar Akhtar. We participated in the ISSC(International Schools Software Competition). That was a nice trip, although we could not get any good ranking there.