Blog moved to http://gurustop.net

First off, thank you all so much who have attended the very special gathering of dotNETwork user group, Code Camp ‘09, that took place in the British University in Cairo (BUE) during last Thursday and Friday. This has been one of the biggest events I have been talking in, and that was a great honor.

Must Say: SORRY! This post was supposed to be published Saturday or Sunday max. I have been busy making a critical decision and was not sure whether to announce it in this post or not.

You can find the slides for the sessions I have been giving below:

Framework Design Guidelines

Download (PPTX File):

Managed Extensibility Framework(MEF)

Download (PPTX File):

(Note: Links to the source code are in the last slide)

Notes On The Event

The speakers and dotNETwork Team

The event went with a similar theme to Microsoft Middle east Developer's Conference, MDC, which became Egyptian Developers Conference, EDC, which used to take place annually in the beginning of February, but, is yet to happen this year. I’m not sure whether I should be happy or sad for the fact that many attendees came to the event thinking it’s organized by Microsoft as another replacement to MDC/EDC. To make this clear, Code Camp is organized by an independent user group of 11 organizers, known as dotNETwork group (I mentioned a lot in my blog), and was sponsored by Microsoft Egypt, and number of international companies (sponsoring foreign speakers transportation), and the British University in Egypt (BUE, hosting the event). All speakers (foreigners and Egyptians) are volunteers.

Within tow days, with over 300 attendees, and over 10 speakers from both Egypt and world wide, and a great variety in topics, dotNETwork has excelled to make this a GREAT experience for everybody. This is one of the best events I have attended ever in general, which  compares with great improvement to the other best events/sessions I have ever attended/delivered: MDC 2005 (if you skip the Bill Gates pat!) and SilverKey Demo Day II.

Thank you very much dotNETwork and great attendance for the true nice time!

PS. I have notes from the other sessions I have been to as an attendee not as a speaker. Those will be available by the ened of the week or beginning next week (God Willing). Hopefully this time I’ll make it in schedule.

Related Sites

• My Other Presentations on SlideShare
• Official dotNETwork Website
• dotNETwork Facebook Group
• dotNETwork Yahoo Group
• The Event Page On Facebook
• Earlier "Local Events" Posts in My Blogs 

In a response to local company email about IE 8 RC, I took some time to write an email to the internal mailing lists of Raya about testing websites with different browser versions. I found it good to share with the blog readers here, and, I know the company policy in Raya emphasizes sharing knowledge and efforts with the community.

Here is the email I sent:

For developer and QA testing I highly recommend using IE Tester http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/

It enables testing the website against different versions of IE that users may be using to navigate to the website.

For testing Firefox, you can try the latest version only (because FF users usually update their browser and the rendering features are usually not that different), or you can have side by side installed versions, or different versions without installations by using Firefox Portable Edition http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable

For Testing Safari, you can use Safari for Windows http://www.apple.com/safari/, and/or Google Chrome http://www.google.com/chrome/ (it uses the same rendering engine as Safari).

Note that in certain cases, you may not need to do all of these. For example, when the website is set to run on a local company intranet, you may be knowing from the customer that users are using one of two of three versions.

This is probably VERY old piece of information to the most of us, but I hope it can be useful to someone out there!

The “BTW” Announcement

Hey guys, remember when I posted my engagement to Mona, the cute smart kind beautiful super cool sweetie?

Well, we have got married :).

It was on Friday, January 23rd. I’m writing this after the honeymoon vacation, which was practically a honey half moon vacation, due to work conditions in this speed world!

So, how is that going?

Based on my small experience so far, I’d answer a question some friends asked on mobile phone…

YES, marriage is GREAT, but of course only when you marry the perfect person that best fills in all your feelings. It’s very hard to find. Usually, you don’t search for that; you just find THE ONE accidentally. When you do, you know it, and your life becomes just nice, and, all fun. If you don’t, God be in your help.

Thankfully, I have found my one, and I can assure you, life with her is really sweet. I truly feel like I need nothing from this world when we are sitting together at home. This girl just rocks :).

To Mona, The Masterpiece of My Life

Thank you very much Mona for being in my life with all your blesses, and all the increasing happiness they bring with them. I hope we’ll be always happy (God Willing). With you, it feels like an easy wish.

Love you so much. You empower all my abilities.

N.B.

When I look back, I find it very weird that I didn’t submit this to the weblog by wedding time. This facebook thing is making things quite weird, while the whole technical thing is making things weirder. I have found that a facebook event, along with some SMS messages were almost enough for most contacts to attend the wedding ceremony (It was a good way to collect friend pictures afterwards as well – thanks for the cool friends who posted their pictures there).