Techies.ae session Notes Open Coffee

Techies have met at Caribou Coffee Times Square Center on April 18th 2012. Discussions were all over the IT-stack. A few hi-lights:

• Zubair demonstrated his Open Source Pet Project RSS Reader, Downloaded it, demonstrated it, took it through a few paces on the tablet… Nice work! Good to see Hammad on this project as well. seems two similar creations have come together to build a hub of feeds on Windows Metro.
• Chris is playing with Virtual Machines on Hyper-V on bare metal. Not being able to console view the machines as the Hypervisor does not have an interface. Ideas were to run Virtual Machine Manager  against it as it can be downloaded as a Virtual Machine and run up quickly.

A snap delivered courtesy of @Zubair.

Techies.ae session Notes Open Coffee

OK, OK a bit later than usual, at least it’s in before the next Open Coffee comes around….

Good in-depth conversation on Entity Framework, performance metrics and performing of execution POCO first and Database First Entity Framework implementations. Still drilling down on deletes of a bunch of entities returned from a select. Or shall we do a custom built delete where (list of identities) CRU(D) function in our code with custom coded SQL. Actually we saw test runs with analytics courtesy of Chris and it seems that at the moment delete goes off, the selects to get the data for the delete also goes off. Party present could not crack it now… Any suggestions are welcome!

Also great conversation about 2 wheel devices that make lots of noise as well as running it around a circuit… some prices and consumer preview bits of Windows 8 and surely SQL 2012, Visual Studio 11 beta.

Looking forward to seeing you at the next event, or at the #opendoorgulf!

Full Disclosure of Sponsorship from UGSS

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Techies.ae session Notes Open Coffee

Thanks to all you techies for showing up! Very good in-depth topics about Visual Studio Lab management, and virtualization in common, comparing notes on various virtualization platforms. VDI, RDP to Virtual Machines, and Application Virtualization. We have had a discussion on how to build this up and where to watch for, as well as what impact hardware choices have in this context.

We talked about Rizky’s project on SmallTalk with real time queued message processing. Chris shared the WCF option and BizTalk options on Message Bus, architectures and reasons for going to the cloud. Since @AntonDelsink was present we left well informed on Azure options. @zubairdotnet snagged up the Pluralsight prize again this month, next month he’ll work for a company that has a membership.

Looking forward to seeing you at our next event! Photo courtesy of @zubairdotnet.

Techies.ae session Notes Open Coffee

Thank you Techies for making tonight, awesome! Great discussions and welcoming a new Techie member Usama Khan. Please extend the welcome message to him. We expect him to present on his love for Windows Mobile development.

We had a broad conversation all over the spectrum. Memorable topics: @zubairdotnet presented his tool on Windows Mango to arrange for a Cab in Dubai Based on your geo-location. The service however is not running on TRA side. @gurshinder proposed to develop a parking service instead, however there is no central repository of parking pay terminals to math them with the nearest of your geo-location. Thoughts bend around place, and duration. nice features would be a reminder and add-payment options… @gurshinder displayed on his iPad a nice application FlightRadar that shows all air-traffic movement in UAE, the application would also show movement in Europe however Asia and Americas are blocked, and do not disclose this type of information.

Usama shared when he worked with the cosmos virtual area projection on a 10’ wall of live data feeds from the military field. similar direct data using avatars. @zubairdotnet won a card from PluralSight for one Month of prepaid access to their learning content! I heard most of you came a week earlier as well! I appreciate the interest! Please note that the Open Coffee is every third Wednesday of the month at Time Square Centre Caribou coffee shop. Feel free to socialize outside of these moments, and please let me know the attendance, perhaps we can raffle off some sponsor goodies!

And traditionally let’s have the snap of the brave staying long enough to have a snap taken courtesy of @zubairdotnet, and a nice enough lady (no handle) to snap it.

Techies.ae Session Notes on MEF with Mair

Thank you Mair for showing the developers in the Techies community the basics and some advanced capabilities of MEF. Please see Mair’s blog for a step by step follow up on the session on MEF! Thanks to Jumeirah for hosting the event, we had a packed meeting room, standing space only!

Techies Shared the goodies from PluralSight with @antondelsink (T-shirt) and @magdyroshdy (one month membership).

Thank you @webnoel, @misrtophiles, and @rizvinazish for taking part in the raffle. All attending Techies Thank you for making this night a very fine tech MEF night! Find more on Mair’s Linked in profile.

Deep Dive: Quick Response Code–QR-code with Rizky Farhan

Thank you Rizky for your insights into QR codes. Never knew one square of squares could have that much flexibility Thanks to Jumeirah to allow us into their Headquarters Boardroom with lovely sights of the greenery and excellent finger-food and beverages!

Rizky did more than just cover QR-Codes he showed what it can do:

• B-card
• V-card
• website link
• geo location

Read all about that on sites like Wikipedia. The true nature was understanding it’s structure and how and where we could apply the QR-code. Rizky Covered:

• Decoding: image -> decode -> parse -> text
• Encode: text -> parse -> encode -> image
• Android development
• Android SDK
• Eclipse -> SDK extensions
• Think about explicit uses-permission (camera, read contacts, write external storage).
• Development experience is a bit more complex than VS

Rizky also did a great job on detailing the thoughts behind running on a mobile device, covering events such as:

• onCreate
• onPause
• onResume

But also paying attention to the contextual system (mobile phone) for:

• Tomb Stoning (you may not be around to do much when a call comes in)
• Intent (what does the user want to do with the app/plug in)
• Activity (when I do get processor time what should I do)

I have had a blast, it was on a Saturday! I hope you had the same take-away I have had! if not feel free to comment!

Web Camps: Dubai April 16th

Dear Techie, a message from Microsoft: Microsoft is pleased to announce the availability of Microsoft Web Camp in Dubai.  This is a worldwide event that teaches individuals how to build websites using ASP.NET MVC, WebMatrix, OData and more. This Web Camp will cover the following: Opening Address, Michael Mansour Development on Internet Explorer 9, Shaymaa Al-Terkait Building an eCommerce Site in 13 Minutes with Web Matrix, Asli Bilgin Creating Cutting Edge Websites for Phones, Slates and Beyond with WebMatrix and VS2010, Ronald Widha and Zubair Ahmad Q&A with Pizza Dinner and drawing for a free Windows Phone 7! Please prepare yourself for some hands-on experience (don’t forget bring your laptops!) and be ready to walk away with some new and useful skills that you can share with your colleagues and friends. What: Microsoft Web Camp – Dubai When: Saturday, April 16 16:00-20:00 PM Where: Dubai Internet City, Bldg. #8, GEMs Seminar Room What to bring: Your PC and your registration slip Please feel free to bring your friends and ensure that you register HERE.

News: IE 9 is available with a challenge!

IE 9 is available for download and for us Techies IT comes with a challenge, a good one this time! The following Text reached me in MSDN Flash mail this morning: “Push HTML5 to its limits and compete for over US$40,000 in prizes. Participate in the IE9 developer contest today, and follow us on Twitter @IE and #devunplugged for the latest information and updates.”

Good Luck Techies, and hopefully some of that money will go to the UAE!

Techies.ae session notes Deep Dive Prepare for Tech-Ed ME 2011

Thank you, all attendees, for making a good night Great! Talk was in-depth to the point and I think we all left wiser than when we stepped in. that’s not just great that is excellent attainment of the goal of a deep dive. Thank you Natasha and Amory for bringing the knowledge! We really enjoyed the stay at Lime Tree Cafe – IBN Battuta, Excellent carrot cake! and a fine selection of teas and coffees! Sad thing is we got booted at 21:05, as this mall closes at 22:00 when it’s not Ramadan. We will look for a venue on the regular event, I think Times Square Mall is a great contender, expect it to be there!

Main topics of the night were:

• If you wish to present on Tech-Ed 2011 you need to get your proposals in ASAP as track owners @ Microsoft are choosing their speakers for the slots right now.
• You can improve your chances on getting a slot by:
• looking at the Tech-Ed 2010 Europe notes and pick from the popular sessions on your topic
• Send the track owner a video of your earlier presentations
• Show your track record
• Have held a slot and it was graded high
• Many people present have experience talking on Tech-Ed talk to them on the how to and what their experiences were.
• Suggestions are to find an earlier event to trial your presenting/teaching skills.
• Find a local event (close by at least) where you could present in a less-risk involved way
• See if you can present for your/a user group nearby
• Techies will try to organize a deep dive end of the month where you can have a 5-10 minute brief session on what you wish to present on at Tech-Ed. there will be a recording and the raw-format data you can post-process to share it on you-tube or send it to the track owner.
• Community lounge
• We would like to have community lounge white-board (big) where people can share thoughts, ideas, designs etc.
• Let’s organize a Techies T-shirt with your name on the front and Techies logo front-and-back
• there will be monitors where you can hook up a laptop to and display your code/program to others
• Use this for networking share your couch to get a colleague user group leader/member into Tech-Ed ME 2011, might be the beginning of cross-border networking kicking off!
• Raffles and discounts
• Watch the twitter sphere on the leaders site  bit.ly/Techies and in the Linked-in bit.ly/in-TechiesUG site!

Of course we discussed all over the map social aspects of Techies.ae and the individuals attending. I did think of getting a photo, sorry Natasha you could not be in this one as you had an appointment in Redmond. Hope we can organize the deep dive this month still on sharpening and trying out Presentations. The snap follows…