Techies.ae session Notes Open Coffee

Starting this month we are really on the road. We have tried out Times Square Center. I decided not to try International Airport as the only affordable coffee would be a Metro ride away , I tried having a coffee and was surprised at the end of the hour that it had been AED 65 for coffee and parking, I should have checked the parking, glad I tried it. We do like the Times Square Center venue (apart from having a large Sharaf DG, and Toys ‘R Us, and some interesting cafes), we may return for a coffee sometime in the future… Next stop ibn battuta mall.

Discussion was broad again, as always on an Open Coffee, many topics passed especially broadband and ancient internet technologies: Usenet, IRC, Kazaa, Torrent, etc. Congrats go out to Ronald, as he now is a dad, Cheers!. Plans were made for next sessions. We will start doing Deep Dives again. Starting this month with a session on Testing in Agile by Khalil Shalalfeh. We shall post the session shortly. Expect a session on SQL 2008, and SharePoint 2010 to come in this year still. We are still looking for people who want to present and people who would like to Enthusiast IT professionals and developers by hosting an in-depth event.

All techies present agreed that 1 invite for a whole year on every third Wednesday does not really work for Techies.ae. we will split these up into separate events you can sign up for. Sorry if you had signed up before, you will have to do that ever single event. Added to these will be Deep Dives as the Ad-Hoc events.

As always we came late, primarily due to getting fined and again forgot to take a snapshot this time so a random snap in it’s place…

 

Techies.ae session Notes Open Coffee

Having visited places in DIC the last week we decided to keep it at the regular Starbucks Jadaf JBR venue. Most places were very quiet every night visited! Could be a Ramadan thing! So from Next month we will take a road trip! Be prepared for venue location changes! We are looking to have an Open Coffee Next Month in or around the Dubai International Airport.

Discussion was broad again, as always on an Open Coffee. Special this time was having three visiting students doing a research paper in assignment from Microsoft. The students talked to Natasha and came to our Open Coffee with questions on what we talked about. They got their hearts content as we covered the full Techie environment: Hosting, Server configurations, Connectivity, Cloud, On-Premise versus Service-based. Development strategy, methodology, Application Life Cycle, Internet Explorer 9, Graphic cards, GOM, and all the smaller conversations that did not reach my ears, or I failed to remember. We shared our insights nabbed from some cakes and had a beverage. The new oreo cake we can do without… definitely not our favorite.

As always we came late, primarily due to Ramadan and left late. and again forgot to take a snapshot this time so a snap of the venue’s location in it’s place…

Techies.ae session Notes Open Coffee

As per request we have had a special Open Coffee this week. Thanks to Starbucks to let us use their first floor, and the Jazz music was at acceptable levels this time!

Discussion was broad as always on an Open Coffee. Major topics covered were Multi tenancy on SharePoint 2010. How to separate the user base in that multi tenancy environment. Short demos on how to create SharePoint 2010/2007 Solutions with Visual Studio 2010, we love this tool. Short discussion on Office 2010, demonstrated Outlook 2010 features and gadgets, placed some time on ability of using multiple Exchange Accounts in Outlook 2010. Lastly we discussed Hosting facilities of SharePoint 2010 versus the BPOS solution offering from Microsoft.

As always we came late and left late. and totally forgot to take a snapshot this time so a snap of our host in it’s place…

Techies.ae Session Notes Business Process Management

Thank you Jumeirah for hosting this event @ Emirates Academy. Really appreciated that Floor Bleeker, group director of IT for Jumeirah Group in the UAE opened teh session and making us understand IT is important also for hospitality.

Muhammad Ahsan gave a very enticing speech on BPM and it’s implications for the Information Worker and Business where and how to apply it. Find slides here. If you are inclined to this topic please vote on the event review to request for more info. The hint is on that this overview session will get more depth next time we see Ahsan present on BPM.

The snapshot of the attendees this time thanks to Alaa Sahmarani

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Local Launch Event @ Cinestar Cinemas Mall of the Emirates!

I received an email from Microsoft inviting all Techies to the Mall of the Emirates for the VS2010 launch! Hope to see you there.

Join Microsoft and the local developer community at the Cinestar Cinemas Mall of the Emirates for exclusive presentations on Visual Studio 2010, fun giveaways, and a viewing of Iron Man 2!

NOW SHOWING: /*LIFE RUNS ON CODE*/ – Cinestar Mall of the Emirates, Dubai
REGISTER FOR THE PREMIERE: 02:00 PM – 08:00 PM | May 2nd 2010

Techies.ae session Notes Open Coffee and VS2010 launch

Thank you all for your support and your refreshing input to make the Techies night an event. Let’s digress in the order things took place:

The evening started out by the right question! Anton was asked what all was new in Visual Studio, and by the time coffee and  water’s were getting dry the air cleared for other topics to be covered. So what all was discussed on VS2010 as major milestones: ALM, UML, Layer diagram, architecture validation in build process, Test lab, TFS2010, WPF editor and design surface, Extensibility and plug-in model, and maybe 1 or 2 I forget…

We also covered the redesign of Techies.ae User Group:

The main outlet for information will become this blog and the page associated with techies leaders. Also we will have an open accessible sign-up page that does not require you to have a membership: techies.eventbrite.com I will try to populate every event there. Apart from this methodical change we will also change the way the group operates. as I have seen in the past I wish to address the need of a developer community. So as of this month the Developer community has a separate place with a separate event schedule. Also the IT-pro community among the techies will get their own event schedule. We are still looking for owners of these groups. So if you are so Inclined please feel free to take charge, I’ll help you make it a success. I will help plan sessions and will make sure that there should not be more than one event a week, as we all have some business and private life outside of Techies.ae. Finishing this redesign off, we will have regular meetings each third Wednesday of the month and it will be in the Format of Open Coffee, about any geek/tech topic. you can have the floor if you have a topic you wish to program, I will make the event known. In basis this is high-level and should not conflict with the IT-Pro or developer groups.

This all is a way to make Techies more versatile and hope to pull more interest between peers. If you have any suggestions or wish to part-take a role in the Techies.ae community, feel free to dos so. The User Group is made by it’s members so it does not hurt to contribute!

We ended of talking about performance of Entity Framework and Linq2SQL so much so that we want to pull out the laptops, brains and brawn and have a new meeting this week Wednesday, go to techies.eventbrite.com to sign up for the event.

I have had a few weeks of playtime with Microsoft ICE, a tool to create panoramas. now the camera on my mobile phone is really bad quality (640×480 fixed focus), but find below the result of 4 images I snapped and ICE-d them together. The bad image quality is not because of ICE

Office 2010 RTM

Techies, Just read the blog post that Office 2010 was announced and giving you a heads up on it:

Our Volume License customers with active Software Assurance (SA) on these products will be one of the first to receive the 2010 set of products. They will be able to download the products in English via the Volume Licensing Service Center starting April 27. Customers without SA will be able to purchase the new products through Volume Licensing from Microsoft partners starting May 1.

So that and the release of VS2010 will mean end of April will be focussed on rebuilding my OS with all tools on it. This is also great to check with your customer who want to start using the tools ASAP.

Let’s share the tools we put on our systems a la Scott Hanselman’s tool List. Only let’s separate out these tools for an Office 2010 and VS 2010 developer desktop and the same fro an IT-Pro desktop. Let’s not forget we need to maintain legacy as well!

Looking forward to your tool chest, entries I will add comments as I collect my tool chest.

Techies.ae news from our sponsor O’Reilly

To All User Group Members: Josette Garcia sent me the following text for all of you to enjoy the benefits of having O’Reilly sponsoring the user group.

Welcome

Good news 1!
When you purchased a printed book on O’Reilly using your promo discount on the UK Shopping Cart, you can now purchase the ebook for $4.99. To do so, go to O’Reilly, find the book your purchased and register your purchase. You can then purchased the ebook quoting promo code 499up to benefit from this great price.

Good news 2!
O’Reilly is now offering 45% discount on all ebooks to all User Group members. To claim you discount please use promo code DSUG.
Have you noticed our new $9.99 ebook of the day on O’Reilly. Check it out!

That’s all for now!
Josette

Feel free to start using these codes to get a discount and help the Techies.ae User Group at the same time.

Techies.ae session notes: Tech-ed ME 2010 Revival

Contrary to the published event schedule we have had an event /@ Microsoft Dubai Internet City building # 8. Natasha Zaza and Pooya Darugar were having Michael Koester talk on Expression Silverlight 3.0 development. An awesome discussion of iterative incremental growth apps building apps in Blend using all sorts of automation from a library… Then a short speech from ASP.Net hosing with Windows IIS, where bandwidth is unlimited for a 500MHz core for US $ 217/month (valid for two moths), and finished off with a demo of test scenarios using test suite from the visual Studio 2010 release where testing users were launching their virtual infrastructure and running their tests on top of it. Running through the whole scenario of build environment, deployment environment from Lab Manager, running the environment for the test, running the test, grabbing the contextual info such as machine state; user actions videos; test steps; and system snapshot, then the developer fixing the bug replaying the circumstances as well as the processor state while executing the code. In short awesome technology! Follow Pooya’s blog for more details on these topics!

Then we had a short Tech-ed middle east 2010 revival session about what we liked: definitely liked the whole event took place! we agreed that it needed an ending ceremony. Tech-ed ME 2010 is a very different beast than the North American or European one. Here there should have been more hands on labs seats. Or teh labs should be available throughout the day and people should be allowed to come in and try the LAB anytime. The sessions should be more focussed, one topic in very much depth and a real guidance on how to do it yourself so basically from 100-400 on 1 topic. Based on feedback of the speakers evaluations.

Lat but not least we had a giveaway, the one digging deepest got the best price! Winners in photo below: Muhammad (Windows 7 Ultimate & TFS), Romin (Windows Mobile Development SDK), Chris (Windows 2008, System Center Operations Manager …) and Andrew (Visual Studio 2010 RC). We closed off being invited to Nando’s Greens where we enjoyed Chicken in all kinds and flavors, with excellent sides. Courtesy of Pooya, while taking talks to a whole new level.

Techies.ae session notes: “Agile Methodologies Compared”

Richard Nielsen launched the idea of finishing up the streak of Agile sessions we have seen with the Techies User Group, however a stomach illness got the better of him and he could not make it out in person. Rolf has taken his presentation, tweaked it a bit and gave it a twist with images. You can download the deck here.

The evening was moderately attended and we had a good interaction going about why to apply either methodology. Concluding that each project type has an appropriate methodology. To use agile requires active client involvement and waterfall is best when all tree corners of the project triangle are fixed. And using Agile does not mean you can’t fail.

Food and venue were  provided by Infusion, for which we are thankful for their continuous support of Techies. Again as always I did snap off a photo, found below.