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Emad Lotfy, a software engineer in test and fellow developer in my company, discovered yesterday that the EDC 2008 videos are now available on the EDC 2008 official website.

See the videos NOW.

Recommendations

If I happen to choose only one session of those I attended then it’ll be Andrew Pardoe’s CoreCLR session (part 1 end of this file, and part 2 beginning of this file).

Other than that,, there’s Also Ahmed Bahaa’s VSTS 2008 and beyond session (this file), Ahmed Farrag’s SAAS session (this file).

Those are the best of what sessions I attended though . I’ve gone through the videos quick and clearly the other Silverlight videos are good too.

Notes

The videos are released for the 2nd time in developer conferences arranged by Microsoft Egypt. The first time there were problems that made the videos unusable and actually made some of them unavailable at all!

This time, Microsoft Egypt, congratulations. You have done a very good job. My friend could download the complete videos and I can see almost all the videos I was looking for. GREAT!

However, there’re still some issues that I tell here for people to avoid:

Day 1: Session 1 [Arch. Track]: Introduction to Agile Software Development   (By: Ahmed Sidky)

Ahmed introduced himself as one that has a master about CMMI and 1st of those to get PhD in software related stuff i Egypt. He spoke in Agile Egypt event before and works in coaching teams implementing Agile. He’s someone who knows what he’s talking about.

“Agile” means flexibility. “What would you do if the customer came to you saying he can only afford a single day of work ? Hint, based on what you provide, he may find a value in investing in one more day of development”. While many in the audience said that they may provide a prototype (which Ahmed interpretted as non-functional one), he wanted to remind us all what our job is. We are not software developers, as software means nothing to the customer, we are “value providers”. A prototype will not benefit the customer. He’ll not gain/save money out of it! What you want to provide in only a single day of work would be the smallest piece of working software, the most important single feature you can develop in a day maybe. Again, until the software is working, it has NO VALUE. You should start giving you customer true value that he only then can afford another day of development!

Introduction

Hey there. As promised, I’m covering the Egyptian Developers Conference 2008 that took place last Sunday/Monday.

WARNING: I have so many sheets of notes that I don’t know when to write, so, I’ll either stop writing at some point or throw a very big pile of text to you :D.

For the same reason, I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to make well-sized sub titles, also, will relay on referencing to related resources when possible.

DISCLAIMER: This is still a very personal perspective thing. Of course I missed parts of the presentations, forgot some parts, and didn’t care about other some, and even over and under estimated a lot of topics. This is just to open doors for you to read on, NOT MEANT TO BE REPLACEMENT TO SESSION ATTENDANCE but it should help.

When the session videos are uploaded, I’ll sure blog about that as well – God Willing.

The Keynote

Hmm, I find the keynote this year very interesting, especially looking back to MDC 2007′s keynote, with so much cheesy talk and kid-TV-shows-like stands!

A Promise

The day before Microsoft EDC 2008 (Egyptian Developer Conference), I promised to blog about the conference minutes as I see them through my eyes, as I used to do with the MDC (Middleeast Developers Conference, I was the first blogger to write about its minutes and main reference, although I started writing the 3rd year!!!) and any conference I get into as an attendee not a speaker.

Usually, I blog about the conference day at the night of the same day. Once it took me a day after the conference was over. In EDC, although I have explicitly promised to blog about it, I have written none!! Actually, this is because I had so many notes this year (more about that below), I’ve got buried under so many mid-term exams and quizes at universities, had to write another document about Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Messaging for work purpose, and yeah, I had other reasons as well. Still,  I was lazy.