So here’s the second part of the Tech-Ed Middle East Series. I have some really exciting updates for all of you.

Great Speakers:-
In my last post i shared an exciting speaker lineup with you. Guess what, the best just got better. Now we have added Eric Rudder, Somasegar and Scott Hanselman’s to make this a stellar lineup for first ever Tech Ed Middle East event.

Eric, Soma and Scott all are big names and I expect their sessions to be jam packed. If you are coming to the event (and why shouldn’t you) then you should be looking at the agenda and organizing your sessions as soon as possible.
You can also take a look at running order of the event here.

Great Content:-
There are 96 sessions distributed under 18 tracks. Mix this with partner sessions and instructor led labs and you have a wealth of great technical content to choose from.Look out for some great keynotes and break out sessions.

Great Fun:-
Geeks want to have fun!

Here are couple of pointers that I would like to share with you all:-

Day 1: 1st March 2010
A day full of technical sessions will lead towards fun filled evening. In the evening, welcome reception will make way for some local cultural entertainment. This I am sure will dazzle visiting delegates.

To learn more visit these links:-
http://www.dubaiculture.ae/en/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Kn3k0_tWjw

Day 2: 2nd March 2010
On the eve of Day 2, all the delegates will be invited to attend a party on the beach. Party will be divided in to two different areas:
- Chill out Zone
- Arabic Zone

There will be some fun filled entertainment to go along and i am not going to spoil the surprise right now. However i will be tweeting some factoids on official Tech Ed Twitter account.

That’s its for now, look out for couple of more exciting posts on Tech-Ed. Feel free to ask if you have any specific questions I would love to answer them.

Edit 1: Fixed the event dates.

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Last week I was invited by @RolfEleveld to participate in an Agile development discussion for his user group (TechiesUG) event. It was fun sitting with a bunch of geeks and having an open discussion on what is Agile development and how to convince stake holders (including customers/senior managers) to adapt to it. During the discussion following questions were raised (specially by ZubairDotNet)…

- Which one is the best Agile APPROACH?
- How often should we do Code Reviews, Does it slow you down?
- How does Agile work for Consultancy scenarios?
- What if the client is not part of the team, who acts as a proxy in Agile team?
- Whats the role of an Architect in an Agile team?
- How does estimation work in an Agile practice?

Before I move on to answering these questions, to set the context right, i would like to bring your attention to “The Agile Manifesto“, it says:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

  Working software over comprehensive documentation

  Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

  Responding to change over following a plan

Now let me try and answer these questions, one by one:-

1- Which one is the best Agile APPROACH?
There are a bunch of available methodologies:-
Scrum
Extreme Programming (XP)
Agile Unified Process (AUP)
DSDM
Essential Unified Process (EssUP)
Feature Driven Development (FDD)
Open Unified Process (OpenUP)
Lean software development
etc.

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So those of you who follow me on twitter already know the updates that i have been pushing through on the biggest IT event in the Middle East, yes, you guessed it right, I am talking about Microsoft’s TechEd Middle East 2010.

I thought i should write a series of posts that would highlight the exciting developments and the build up right up to the event it self, scheduled for 1-3 of March 2010 in Dubai, UAE.

In the first post i am going to highlight the most important aspects of the event i.e. the content and the speakers.

Content:
Sessions at Tech-Ed ME is divied into following tracks:

• Architecture – ARC
• Business Intelligence – BIN
• Cloud Computing and Online Services – CCS
• Database Platform – DAT
• Developer Tools, Languages and Frameworks – DEV (11)
• IT Strategy and Business Alignment – ISB
• Management and Virtualization – MGV
• Windows Mobile – MOB
• Office and SharePoint – OFS
• Security, Identity and Access – SIA
• SOA and Business Processes – SOA
• Windows Server – SVR
• Unified Communications – UNC
• Windows Client – WCL
• Web and User Experience – WEB

This definately is a wide-range of categories, which means that there is something in it for all of us techies out there i.e. from Architecture enthsiast to the Sharepoint Junkie to the Security Geek, to the IT Guy, everyone seems to be covered. More importantly these tracks seem to cover the whole spectrum of IT landscape, and thats exactly how IT companies/Enterprises should look at this event i.e. they should see the value of sending their staff to this event.

I will drill down on some of the interesting tracks(obviously from my perspective) in the follow up posts, but for now, you can stay up-to-date visiting official track listing at Tech-Ed ME site @ http://www.teched.ae/technical-tracks.aspx

Speakers:

• Rafal Lukawiecki: In his role as Strategic Consultant at Project Botticelli Ltd Rafal is responsible for analysing and forecasting trends in the field of Information Technology.
• Aron Skonnard: Aaron Skonnard is a Microsoft MVP and 10-year columnist for MSDN Magazine as well as co-founder of Pluralsight, an industry think-tank focused on instructor-led training for Microsoft developers.
• Joel Oleson: Joel is a senior product manager and SharePoint evangelist at Quest where he is responsible for product direction and strategy. He is well known in the SharePoint community as an enthusiastic trainer, evangelist and architect and he maintains a popular blog.
• Jason Olson: Jason Olson is a Senior Technical Evangelist in the Developer & Platform Evangelism division at Microsoft, currently evangelizing Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.
• Andy Malone: Andy Malone is the CEO of Quality Training Ltd and founder of both the Dive Deeper Technology and Cybercrime Security events. Based in Scotland, Andy is a popular international event speaker and technology evangelist with over 15 years experience.
• John Craddock: John has designed and implemented computing systems ranging from high-speed industrial controllers through to distributed IT systems with a focus on security and high-availability. A key player in many IT projects for industry leaders including Microsoft, the UK Government and multi-nationals that require optimised IT systems.
• Amish Lukka: Amish is a Premier Field Engineer based in the UK. He has extensive experience working with large enterprise customers around the world providing reactive and proactive services. This includes resolving critical issues on Active Directory which on many occasions has included disaster recovery scenarios for large environments.

These are some of the best speakers of our industry, but if you ask me, my favourtie is Rafal. Having attended his key notes on couple of occassions i can guarantee you that you are going to love his insights on technology!

Obviously, this is not an extensive list and i will try to maintain this speaker list as and when new speakers are confirmed. In the meantime you can also check the line up @ http://www.teched.ae/speakers.aspx

Summary:

So far the content + speaker matrix is looking very interesting. If nothing else, i can promise you that this is going to get better from here on. So, look out for more interesting topics and big names in the industry to present them to you. Also, dont forget that Tech-Ed offers hands-on labs, and i am sure all of you geek-heads know that nothing beats the feeling of learning new things in hands-on lab. For more updates keep checking this page http://www.teched.ae/sessions-and-labs.aspx

Follow Tech-Ed ME’s official tweets @ http://twitter.com/TechEd_ME

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Hi folks, its been a while since my last post. I guess i have been a bit too busy, but no complains thats the way it goes.

Coming to the point, althought i havent been blogging but i have been busy sorting out podcasts for the DotNetMe (Microsoft.Net Middle East) show. Just to give you a head’s up, so far, we have recorded following sesssions:

- Agile Development with Hammad Rajjoub (shameless plug, i know :> )
- Localizing Microsoft Technology Stack for Arabic with Dina Lasheen
- Understanding Micrsoft EPM – Enterprise Project Management with Bilal Okour

We are going to record two more sessions tonight

- Understanding Sharepoint for Developers using C# with Mostafa Arafa
- Inside Sharepoint for Arabs with Ayman el Hattab

We are aiming to go live on MSDN Channel9 15th December with these shows with lots of more shows to follow.

Yes, in the meantime for more ‘real-time’ updates, do follow us on
- twitter.com/dotnetmepodcast
- twitter.com/hammadrajjoub
- twitter.com/ronaldwidha

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I am working on the content for the first podcast series that i promised last week. The talk is going to revolve around Agile Development and SOLID principles.

I am going to break down the content into 4 X 15 min sections so that we can spread them easily depending on the timeline and audience.

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Yesterday we (myself, Pooya and Anton) went to Abu Dhabi to meet Tareq for a quick iftar as well as a discussion on how to run local communities. We also discussed the roadmap (which includes my podcast series) of community activities that are going to take place in near future (Q4-2009 – Q1 2010).

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I am extremely pleased to announce the very first ‘Microsoft.Net focused podcast series in the Gulf’. Let me give you a little bit of background first and then we can drill down into the details of who, what, how and when.

History
Having been in Dubai, on and off, for past 4-5 years and being Microsoft MVP all the while has given me an oppurtunity to work with local developer communities here in the Gulf. In terms of dev communities, Kwait (with dotnetboom http://www.dotnetboom.net) and Qatar (with oryx dev http://oryxdev.com/en/default.aspx) have been successful with setting up their user groups. Unfortunately we dont have similar success story for the UAE in particular and the rest of Gulf in general.

The Motivation
This lack of dev community itself is a biggest motivation for trying to bring all the developers on a common platform. Objectives include empowering regional Microsoft developers with relevant technical content on Microsoft Platform, presenting topics in English/Arabic, sharing ideas, learning from each others experiences/mistakes and above all finding an oppurtunity to get in touch with like minded professionals across the region.

The Idea
From years of experience we have learned that its difficult to get developers to come and attend user group events in the emirates. Generally this is attributed to problems related to ‘commuting’ to and from the event venues as well as lack of well designed event calendar(schedule).
To mitigate these potential issues, initially, myself and Anton (from Microsoft Dubai) agreed on hosting a developer podcast series. The idea was discussed when Somasegar was visiting Microsoft Dubai and hosted local dev community for an informal talk/lunch at Microsoft Dubai office in DIC – Dubai Internet City last month.
Later on Anton introduced me to Ron and we became partner-in-crime and started co-hosting the podcast series.

The Plan
The plan, as i said, is to host a series of sessions targetting regional developer community. Come up with a clear agenda and share the detailed schedule with the developers so that they can mark their calendars and look forward to the events that they think are most relevant for them. Ideally, try and host these podcasts to MSDN Channel 9 so that the content can be downloaded easily and reaches the broadest possible audience (and yes, be listened to while driving on Sheikh Zayed Road ).

The Schedule
Following shows have been recorded so far:-

1- Agile Development 101 (myself and Ron)
2- Localization in .Net with Dina Lasheen
3- Understanding Microsoft Enterprise Project Management with Bilal Okour
4- Understanding Sharepoint 2010 with Mostafa Arafa.
5- Inside Sharepoint for Arabs Part 1 with Aymen El Hattab
6- Inside Sharepoint for Arabs Part 2 with Marwan Tarek


Whats Next
- Look out for preview release in about week’s time (we will be releasing at least 2 episodes for free public access)
+ Watch out for special Tech-Ed focused episodes
– Hosting key speakers and asking them what to expect in their Tech-Ed talks
– Talking to people who are working behind the scenes and making this event happen.
- A dedicated episode on .Net Community in Jordan
- Follow us on Twitter for instant updates. http://twitter.com/DotNetMEPodcast
- Provide us with your feedback on twitter or this blog post

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i was getting the following error:

The path is already mapped in workspace

Here’s how i solved it.

Theres another way to do it through command line

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The Web Platform Installer (Web PI) is a simple tool that installs Microsoft’s entire Web Platform, including IIS, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition, SQL Server 2008 Express Edition and the .NET Framework. Using the Web Platform Installer’s user interface, you can choose to install either specific products or the entire Microsoft Web Platform onto your computer. The Web PI also helps keep your products up to date by always offering the latest additions to the Web Platform.

get iot here

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You can download VS 2008 sp1 and .Net 3.5 sp1 @

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ab99342f-5d1a-413d-8319-81da479ab0d7&DisplayLang=en

This release offers major improvements in WCF and WF.

Brief overview avaialble @ download page says:

.NET Framework version 3.5 Service Pack 1 provides the following new features and improvements:

ASP.NET Dynamic Data, which provides a rich scaffolding framework that enables rapid data driven development without writing code, and a new addition to ASP.NET AJAX that provides support for managing browser history (back button support). For more information, see What’s New in ASP.NET and Web Development.

Core improvements to the CLR (common language runtime) that include better layout of .NET Framework native images, opting out of strong-name verification for fully trusted assemblies, improved application startup performance, better generated code that improves end-to-end application execution time, and opting managed code to run in ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) mode if supported by the operating system. Additionally, managed applications that are opened from network shares have the same behavior as native applications by running with full trust.

Performance improvements to WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), including a faster startup time and improved performance for Bitmap effects. Additional functionality for WPF includes better support for line of business applications, native splash screen support, DirectX pixel shader support, and the new WebBrowser control.

ClickOnce application publishers can decide to opt out of signing and hashing as appropriate for their scenarios, developers can programmatically install ClickOnce applications that display a customized branding, and ClickOnce error dialog boxes support links to application-specific support sites on the Web.

The Entity Framework is an evolution of the existing suite of ADO.NET data access technologies. The Entity Framework enables developers to program against relational databases in according to application-specific domain models instead of the underlying database models. For more information, see Getting Started with the Entity Framework. The Entity Framework introduces some additional features, including support for new SQL Server 2008 types, default graph serialization of Entities, and the Entity Data Source. This release of the Entity Framework supports the new date and file stream capabilities in SQL Server 2008. The graph serialization work helps developers who want to build Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services that model full graphs as data contracts. The Entity Data Source provides a traditional data source experience for ASP.NET Web application builders who want to work with the Entity Framework.

LINQ to SQL includes new support for the new date and file stream capabilities in SQL Server 2008.

The ADO.NET Data Services Framework consists of a combination of patterns and libraries, which enable data to be exposed as a flexible REST (Representational State Transfer)-based data service that can be consumed by Web clients in a corporate network or across the Internet. The ADO.NET Data Services Framework makes data service creation over any data source. A conceptual view model of the underlying storage schema can easily be exposed through rich integration with the ADO.NET Entity Framework. Services created by using the ADO.NET Data Services Framework, and also compatible Windows Live (dev.live.com) services, can be easily accessed from any platform. For client applications that are running on Microsoft platforms, a set of client libraries are provided to make interaction with data services simple. For example, .NET Framework-based clients can use LINQ to query data services and a simple .NET Framework object layer to update data in the service.

Windows Communication Foundation now makes the DataContract Serializer easier to use by providing improved interoperability support, enhancing the debugging experience in partial trust scenarios, and extending syndication protocol support for wider usage in Web 2.0 applications.

The .NET Framework Data Provider for SQL Server (SqlClient) adds new support for file stream and sparse column capabilities in SQL Server 2008.

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