GuruStop.NET

Name Change: #EgyGeeks

Our first meeting on Friday, or technically the first hours of Saturday (starting 12 AM), we found technical difficulties in establishing the conversation on Skype, with around 25 attendees, and the need to share desktop view with the entire group, for the first part of the gathering (Ayman’s session).

That’s why we decided we may have rushed it by including the word “Skype” in the name. I don’t know why we needed a name and all that anyway, because the idea is simply some friends who have common interests (all do .NET related stuff) that meet together online weekly talking about their common interests.

Methods of Communication

For twitter, since this gathering used another tool “webex” for conferencing, and we haven’t determined yet how we’ll manage the next gathering, we changed the twitter hash tag to just “#EgyGeeks”.

Also, we created a Google group to enable us to email everybody when we settle on how the next gathering will be. The group has the same name”EgyGeeks”

My first DotNetwork Cairo Code Camp in 2009 was a great experience, because it was one of the biggest events I’ve spoken at (in terms of audience count, similar to SilverKey Demo Day II). However, Cairo Code Camp `10 had a much different taste!

Not just that I met Scott Hanselman, one of the most popular Microsoft guys, and hold him down as you see in the picture (which I’ll never forget), the great person and popular guru…

Not just that I met so many great other speakers, many of them are my friends and some of my friends talking for the first time in such event or after long pause…

But also because we all (speakers and organizers – both volunteers) met so many great attendees. Some of them were interesting people I’ve followed on Twitter for some time and haven’t seen them yet. Some of them were old lovely faces that we meet very rarely (especially I no longer work  in Egypt). Some of them were totally new faces, bringing a lot of ideas and very useful discussions….

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).

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

As ever, there’s

The usual intro …

The .NETwork day for December that took place this Saturday as the 10th group gathering/event was pretty much worth being the day that makes a whole year for .NETwork group, which started December 2007. The day was pretty much different than usual, maybe similar to the very first gathering in organization, and some other days in topic, but the style and taste was a bit different. Pretty much concentrated, although on a variety of topics.

The day was just a couple of sessions. Love it or hate it, no parallelism there. The sessions were given by a single speaker, Omar Besiso, a half Egyptian senior Architect living in Australia, a consultant, Tech Ed presenter, book editor and reviewer – a very great guy as I’ll explain later :).

Actually I really enjoyed the first session. Really want to attend / give many similar sessions in the future.

Warning:

I have not been very honest while writing this! Since I have a similar interest in the topics discussed during the session, I have written some parts of the post that were not said during the presentation the same way,a and provided some examples and such that represent my own understanding which may or may not be the same as Omar’s.