Guru Stop

Most of you already know I have moved recently from Cairo to Abu Dhabi. What only a selected set of you are aware of, is that I am still having my heart all set for the developer community in Egypt and still communicating with many of them via Twitter; not only that developers in Abu Dhabi are not into spending time in gatherings or anything than doing work and surviving, but also because I have made the only long lasting and fulfilling friends relationships with the key persons that I see in the different communities, especially my old friends from Microsoft MDC and ArabTeam2000, Demo Day attendees (who still talk to me since 2007), and - of course – dotNETwork, admins, speakers, and participants (who are much more than just attendees).

Fridays City Stars 23rd of May 10:00 AM - 01:00 PM

This Saturday isA I’ll be giving a session that relates to one of my beloved topics in development. Here is the information of the session:

Session Title

Lesser known .NET Enterprise Patterns & Practices

Tag Line

Is your mind ready? Booting up journey in enterprise patterns & practices in .NET

Session Summary

Through an illustration and a thoughtful discussion we are going to see how to go with our applications to the next level, leveraging ease of maintenance, integration points, and scalability out of the box; showing sample enterprise patterns and best practices that are very popular in many development platforms but are rarely used or even known for typical .NET developers

The session will be like April’s session in Fridays City Stars, Nasr City. If you want to know what that is, this is because the Canadian University in Egypt  has stopped all activities in Saturday temporarily for reducing cost; you know, the crisis!

Agenda, date and location

• Lesser known .NET Enterprise Patterns & Practices
  by Mohamed Meligy - Information Analyst, .NET Technologies – (Injazat Data Systems, Abu Dhabi)

• A lap around Visual Studio 2010
  by Mohamed Samy - Technical Architect (iSource Egypt)

Fridays City Stars 23rd of May 10:00 AM - 01:00 PM

Have you noticed something? Yes, my closest friend and one of the most lasting / oldest friend in this life, and in the field of course, Mohamed Samy, will be giving a session the same day. HE is such a true guru, and I fear everything ‘m going to say may look very pale compared to what he has to say about VS 2010.

By the way, the attendance will require you to only pay 19 EGP or so– for a sandwich or meal that YOU eat (they have discounts for attendees). This is the host requirement and dotNETwork has NOTHING to do with it. After all, the only available host is now a commercial place. If you can help dotNETwork host the sessions in a completely free place, please contact anyone from dotNETwork and help get that done. PLEASE.

Anyway, I think 20 EGP for something YOU get within the day is not very little but not much also. I saw guys paying the same to the cafe near the University when it was hosted there.

Please be there. I know everybody was too busy to do right publicity of this event, and I myself am writing this very shortly before the event day, but, I’ll not be able to come back to Egypt even every few months, so, this time is very rare for me. Please let me meet the most of you who can make it. This is a personal request, to my true friends. period

Related Sites

• Event Registration Page – Register Now (Optional)
• Official dotNETwork Website
• dotNETwork Facebook Group
• dotNETwork Yahoo Group
• Earlier "Local Events" Posts in My Blogs
• My Other Presentations on SlideShare

Check the add-ins you installed before Visual Studio 2010 if you enabled VS 2010 integration in them. Particularly TestDriven.NET is the problem. Go to “Add Remove Programs” / “Programs and Features”, find Test Driven.NET, click “Change”, and then modify it to remove VS2010 integration from it.

Also, if you are using AnkhSVN, make sure to download a new latest daily update build and use that, otherwise, you’ll get an exception when starting VS 2010.

I’ll be writing more about VSTS 2010 and .NET 4.0 in the next coming months (if God will), since now I can run it :D (before, I did not have the fix that extends the Virtual Machine expiration after January 1st, 2009).

BTW, for R# deep lovers (like me), Resharper for VS 2010 is expected next month.

Have fun, please!

Typemock guys, the guys behind the only mocking framework that can apply mocking in complex environments like Microsoft SharePoint, are releasing a new Product,, ASP.NET Bundle.

Here is what they’re saying about it:

Typemock is launching a new product for ASP.NET developers – the ASP.NET Bundle - and for the launch will be giving out FREE licenses to bloggers and their readers.

The ASP.NET Bundle is the ultimate ASP.NET unit testing solution, and offers both Typemock Isolator, a unit test tool and Ivonna, the Isolator add-on for ASP.NET unit testing, for a bargain price.

Typemock Isolator is a leading .NET unit testing tool (C# and VB.NET) for many ‘hard to test’ technologies such as SharePoint, ASP.NET, MVC, WCF, WPF, Silverlight and more. Note that for unit testing Silverlight there is an open source Isolator add-on called SilverUnit.

The first 60 bloggers who will blog this text in their blog and tell us about it, will get a Free Isolator ASP.NET Bundle license (Typemock Isolator + Ivonna). If you post this in an ASP.NET dedicated blog, you'll get a license automatically (even if more than 60 submit) during the first week of this announcement.

Also 8 bloggers will get an additional 2 licenses (each) to give away to their readers / friends.

Go ahead, click the following link for more information on how to get your free license.

Of course you know what to do to spread the word! I hope no one minds this post ;-) ;-)

the AjaxControlToolkit has a new release, the release includes bug fixes and new HTMLEditor, ComboBox, ColorPicker controls/extenders.

• Check the release

• Try the live demos

HTML Editor

I liked the HTMLEditor control so much from first sight. Pretty lightweight and customizable. I still need to check whether it works fine inside UpdatePanel and whether it can be used with RequiredFieldValidator or so.

http://www.asp.net/AJAX/AjaxControlToolkit/Samples/HTMLEditor/HTMLEditor.aspx

Color Picker

The ColorPicjker is just an extender to TextBox control. This means a lot of opportunities and promises less problems with validators, etc... It’s a very nice one too.

http://www.asp.net/AJAX/AjaxControlToolkit/Samples/ColorPicker/ColorPicker.aspx

Combo Box

The ComboBox is a control that is like a DropDownList with auto complete except that the user can enter a new text that is NOT in the existing items. This is good or bad based on your sole use.

I did not like how it’s not well styled in the example page. This means it’s going to be headache to style in my sites as well, which is one of the biggest problems with AJAXToolkit in general.

http://www.asp.net/AJAX/AjaxControlToolkit/Samples/ComboBox/ComboBox.aspx

Just in case you missed the news, Yahoo has created it’s own query thingy. No, no LINQ provider, it’s a “query language”. Check it out!

http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/

Quote:

What is YQL?

Yahoo! makes a lot of structured data available to developers, primarily through its web services. These services require developers to locate the right URLs and documentation to access and query them which can result in a very fragmented experience. The YQL platform provides a single endpoint service that enables developers to query, filter and combine data across Yahoo! and beyond. YQL exposes a SQL-like SELECT syntax that is both familiar to developers and expressive enough for getting the right data. Through the SHOW and DESC commands we enable developers to discover the available data sources and structure without opening another web browser.

How Do I Get Started?

1. Check out the YQL Console.
2. Read how to access YQL from your application.
3. Get your Access Keys to sign your requests if you need them.

Usage limits

YQL has the following API usage restrictions:

Per application limit (identified by your Access Key):

• 100,000 calls per day.

Per IP limits:

• /v1/public/* 1000 calls per hour
• /v1/yql/* 10000 calls per hour

All rates are subject to change. In addition, you may also be subject to the underlying rate limits of other Yahoo and 3rd party web services.

Try the console Read Documentation Download PDF Documentation

Update:

You can also check this for more details.

Yes, I’m thinking about a LINQ provider to encapsulate this.

Happy YQLing ;)