Local Events

Murad Family Barbecue: True Hospitality for IT Community in Egypt

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 15:05:59 GMT

Mostafa Murad, a great UI designer whom I've worked with in two companies, was having a BIG dish party yesterday. Maybe in the occasion of himself recently becoming a team leader in ITWorx or just out of hospitality. He put few simple rules (I'm quoting him here):

It is not solely barbecue anymore, you are free to bring whatever food you like.
You are free to invite your friends or family members. Many people will bring their spouses and children. There is a big clean garden which is very suitable for children.
We'll have football competitions etc

He made a Google Spreadsheet Guest book, where you put your name, your favorite food, whether you have a car or not, how many friends/family members you are getting with you, and, how many kids are coming with you as well.

It was GREAT. The garden was SO BIG. There were over 50+ guys out there: .NET/Flash developers, graphic/web/UI designers, QA, Project Managers, and many other roles, from a number of well known software companies in Egypt, like ITWorx, LinkDev, ITS, SilverKey (myself), and other companies I guess.

All the guys were very cool. The day started with all cars meeting in 2 queues at start place from 10 to 11 AM to pick the guys with no cars (like me) and move together. The queue I joined consisted of around 4+ cars.The guys I joined had good taste in music that I enjoyed selective choices for Mohamed Mounir and Fayrouz along the way to the farm where the party did go. The way itself was pretty interesting and unfamiliar to number of us!

Mostafa Murad, Osama Murad (my ex-team leader in GNS, currently working in LinkDev), and some kind family lady did a superior job in hospitalizing the crud. We had around 5 kinds of breakfast food, then, went to Friday Prayer (Gomaa) in the near mosque, coming back to play word games, some moved better than the rest to play football and Tennis, afterwards, grilling around 4 kinds of meat and 2 or more kinds of flies, while the family ladies were working on some other 4+ other kinds of dishes. It was AMAZING. You can see a bunch of the the hungry near the END of distorting all the food!

After the food, we managed to take care of around 6 kinds of drinks (apart from tea and coffee, those were available all day long), and around 6 kinds of fruit and later some huge amount of oriental sweets and some tasty cake. It's funny to see that we are the same guys who were praying Aasr just before the attack!

Of course this is not all of us. There was number of Christians, number of girls, women and children, and other Muslims who didn't catch this line by the time of the picture.

As I mentioned, we had much fun. We just went mad all over figuring out something to play, playing with each other either word games or sports, and playing with the VERY CUTE little kids that were there (especially Yasine, this little hero rocks!). We had different talks about general stuff in Egypt, and -of course- our software industry and career talk and stuff. It was hard to resist the idea of going in starting our own company having people of all needed roles there already. Some guys suggested that we can call it "El Mazra'a" (the farm) company!

The farm itself was sooo great place to rest in. Very comfortable. I do not know how this can be described, but, they say a picture is worth thousand words:

I think I fell asleep sometime near by "El Maghreb" prayer! It was very great to find this great place to just forget about everything and have some true rest.

Actually, the whole thing was pretty new to me. This is a little near the number of guys we had in the first SilverKey Public DemoDay event. It really felt like an event to me, not only including certain category of people (developers, designers, ..), but, all over the various industry roles. I tend to believe that hardly any other person than Mostafa Murad and his fame (with the great aid of Osama Murad and other Murad family members) would be able to gather all this amount of people in one place. This is such a TRUE community activity going around, and a HUGE step that any community activity in Egypt should consider.

Thanks a lot Mostafa and Osama for this great day and the great hospitality. It was a great day and a very nice move from you all.

Technorati Tags: Local Events,Egypt,Mostafa Murad,designrific,Osama Murad,ITWorx,LinkDev,ITS,IT Soft,SilverKey,SilverKey Tech,Community,dish party,Barbecue

Cross posted from weblogs.asp.net/meligy

dotNETwork 5th Gathering – Really enjoyed that Silverlight & SOA Anti Patterns Mix (Part II / II)

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 01:09:45 GMT

I discovered just now that this blog post was not correctly cross posted from my new weblog to this one.

Trying to copy it manually also does not work (tried in Firefox 3 as well as IE 7). It looks like a timeout or something (warning: yes, it is a big post).

Anyway, if you are interested in my coverage of SOA Anti Patterns session in dotNETwork 5th gathering, you can find it here:

dotNETwork 5th Gathering – Really enjoyed that Silverlight & SOA Anti Patterns Mix (Part II / II)

dotNETwork 5th Gathering – Really enjoyed that Silverlight & SOA Anti Patterns Mix (Part I / II)

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:55:10 GMT

This Sunday, I went to dotNETwork 5th gathering to see how interesting it would be to have some Silverlight fun followed by SOA and Patterns and Anti-Patterns goodness. It was a really fun day, and here comes its writing as I saw it.

Starting Out (No tech – you can skip)

The day started by meeting Mohamed Samy (the SOA guy, and my friend!) at 10 AM, getting some sandwiches (and coffee for me as I didn’t have sleep the night before), then, going to the buses place in El-Sekka club (as neither of us figured out how to go to the Canadian University). We tried to follow the first bus by his car (so that I could hopefully get a front row seat as for my eye sight issues), but we moved too late, got stuck at some traffic signal, and we simply lost the bus after we were already far from the original bus stop.

We tried to continue the way on our own using guidance from dotNETwork guys on the phone and trying to track the university signals. That was around 11 AM. Long story short, we arrived at the university around 12:45 PM, after going to so many places that look very different from each other, and false tries to meet with other guys from dotNETwork in any known place in this area (if “known place” can ever exist in it).

Thankfully, that was the only inconvenience of the day, yet, the only adventure as well.

Silverlight 2.0 – Yasser Makram

Yasser is really deeply technical guy, especially when it comes to Silverlight. He works for a company that does Arabization for Silverlight, so, you can imagine how deep he needs to be to get into that.

Clearly I reached his session 15 minutes late at least (given the session started later than it should). I found him discussing Silverlight competition with Flash, mentioning earlier acquisition Microsoft has made that did not help the competition, and why he thinks Silverlight will make it. He said there're other things

The reasons he believes Silverlight is going make it is that Microsoft is playing well on many roads. For developer reach, it’s very clear having thousands of threads in Silverlight forums while still in BETA. For partners and component developers, there're many controls, some are free, like Devexpress AgDataGrid, a very advanced grid control. In terms of showcase applications, there're cool goodies like Popfly and Silverlight Streaming service (which hosts any Silverlight application not just streaming media with up to 10 GB and streaming is free up to 5 TB of aggregated bandwidth). For public websites (which Microsoft relays on to spread installation of Silverlight). there`re many, like the upcoming Olympics in August 2008. I asked Yasser though whether there`re even rough numbers of how much of a percentage Microsoft expects for Silverlight market share, but he said there’s none.

XAML

Afterwards, Yasser moved from his exploratory Silverlight and PowerPoint slides to the XAML of a basic Silverlight demo, which remained until the end of the session. He briefly introduced XAML, and how every XAML tag is used to instantiate an object of a corresponding class. Also syntax for mapping CLR namespaces and assemblies to XAML namespaces for use with custom namespaces, and said some of them are in AssemblyInfo.

Then he talked about object properties. Those are expressed in XAML as attributes or sub elements for properties of complex (or custom) types. The element name is in format “ComplexTypeClassName.PropertyName”. Silverlight uses “Type Converters” to map the XAML element names (which are strings) to types of objects to instantiate them.

He also showed how VS has the ability to generate event handler method stubs for the events when you type the event name in XAML markup. Small thing we web developers miss with ASP.NET markup :D.

Controls: Data Binding & Layout

The next point was Markup Extensions, which syntax-wise are just other attributes that start with curly brackets “{}”, usage-wise similar to both “$” and “#” i build extensions and data binding in ASP.NET. They are used in builtin implementation for getting data from static resources, but you can use them for any data manipulation, even better (more extensible as per Yasser( than type converters. Talking about data binding, he stated how Silverlight 1.0 didn’t have any input controls or data binding. Silverlight 2.0 has bunch of those.

Silverlight in general has two types of controls, ‘simple control” and “content control”. Actually, most of built in Silverlight controls are content controls. A content control is a template based control, so, you can embed any other control in it even when you think you normally can just add plain text or nothing at all. an example is a tool-tip or a button, in Silverlight, you can for example put an entire grid inside the tool-tip!!

Data binding also works in fashionable way. You basically map the namespaces you need, create a “resource” (which is something like data source in ASP.NET as per my understanding), give it a key, and use that with the control you want to bind to. The last step is to fill the source with any enumerable (list of values). I asked Yasser how the data binding work, whether you have to call “DataBind” manually as in ASP.NET or it works automatically and bi-directionally as in win-forms, which Yasser said it does. Talking about data binding made him mention Devexpress grid as well which has more features than the basic built-in one like built-in sorting, paging, and inline-editing.

The next topic was Silverlight “Layout”. This is determined via a layout manager which as I understand defines how controls are sized (called “Measure”) and located/aligned together(called “arrange”). Three main layouts in Silverlight are the Canvas (sounded like absolute layout to me) the Grid layout (just a table layout), and the Stack Panel (where elements are stacked next to each other). He explained that you can always create your own layout manager by implementing “measure” and “arrange”.

Programmability

Silverlight has support for LINQ-To-Objects. Yasser presented how to use it to apply certain change to all controls of certain type contained in another parent control. I asked him about other 2 LINQ providers, he said LINQ-To-SQL is not supported, but LINQ-To-XML is. I asked him about creating customer providers, he said it is supported given the created provider is built to target CoreCLR (Silverlight CLR) of course.

Yasser also mentioned Isolated Storage (like temporary folder for caching or whatever), which he said we should only use as advanced alternative to cookies. For example in last MIX conference, there was a demo of an email application that used Isolated Storage for keeping a local cache of the email inbox. Note that the quota (max size) for the Silverlight application storage is 1 MB. The user can configure the quota size still of course.

Design

Of course talking about Silverlight wouldn’t be complete without mentioning developer/designer separation having developer using VS and designer using Expression Blend. He mentioned two design terms, styles, which are like property setters that are saved in application level file (while the developer works on the content file), and control templates, that have template contracts (the parts to inject controls in the template), states (like enable, disable, hover, …). He used Blend (in the designer, with no manual markup) to show how you can change completely what a control looks like or hat nested controls it contains.

Next topic was Animations. He said they can be specified in code (called “procedural”). It can be also defined in markup, he showed how those can be created in Blend with the story board designer (similar to time line in Flash I guess). Then mentioed a not about Flash procedural animation libraries being ported from Flash to Silverlight.

He also mentioned DeepZoom. This enables you to make as big picture as you want (he mentioned an example of 6 million pixels), and not download them at once, but zoom and download zoomed part only as needed.

Arabic Support

Silverlight has no support for Arabic right now. This is funny thinking that Silverlight has general good localization support. Yasser showed how you can put Silverlight in a page by JavaScript or an EMBED html tag, and how to pass “culture to it”. It recognizes Arabic and shows the Arabic characters but in reverse order and separated from each others.and from right to left just as if they were English (Yasser showed that via applying the culture on an application with a Calendar control – he mentioned it’s not extensible BTW).

Santeon, the company Yasser works for, has provided free Arabic support for Silverlight.Yasser explained why Arabic is hard to get. You could just reverse the order of all characters but how about numbers and mixed English and Arabic content ? There’s also the issue that the character looks different based on its place in the word, and in some fonts based on what character comes after it. Also word wrapping. Someone hold a side discussion why Microsoft although is known excellence in this in Windows didn’t just use that, and Yasser said any application that supports Arabic well is mainly using system service built into the operating system itself, while Silverlight implementation tries to be not use an OS specific services.

The Arabic support for Silverlight from Santeon is done by creating alternative controls to the ones built into Silverlight. A way I personally don’t like but understand it might be the only way to go. They give out their Arabic support at: http://silverlight.santeon.com.

Conclusion

Yasser is a very knowledgeable guy. He knows much about Silverlight coding and it makes sense as per his work in its Arabization. I think he could make the session last longer though and had much more to tell than he did :). Most of the guys felt he could have improved the way he gave the sessio, but in general it was a good session with a certain depth that I was not expecting to reach in a Silverlight session.

P.S.

I had a discussion with Yasser about Silverlight and DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime), and why there’s a CodePlex project called DynamicSilverlight if it’s included in Silverlight already. He said he didn’t know. We did not agree on him to send me further information or such, but he later found my blog and usedmy contact page to send me the following:

Hi Mohamed,
I have checked the Dynamic Languages SDK project on CodeProject, and I found out that this projects is used to host the following:
IronRuby Silverlight libraries
IronPython SIlverlight libraries
Chiron tool, which is a commandline tool used to package Dynamic Languages applications in XAP files (ZIP file with a manifest which is used to redistribute Silverlight 2 applications)
Source code for IronRuby, IronPython for Silverlight
Dynamic Languages Samples
The tools (Chiron), and the libraries are included in the distribution of Silverlight SDK (by default located at C:\program files\Microsoft SDKs\Silverlight). So there is no need for confusion, the CodePlex project is not a separate project, as the libraries coming with Silverlight SDK is actually compiled from this CodePlex project.

He sent me his contact info, but I’m not putting them here without asking him of course! Thank you, Yasser.

He also sent me the following information about himself when he knew I was going to blog the event. It’s very interesting info, so, I’m sharing it here:

Hi Mohamed,
I have seen your blog and noticed that you will be blogging about yesterday's session, and also noticed that in a previous post that you don't know about me. So I though to briefly introduce myself to you, and specifically regarding Silverlight. I have been active in the Silverlight community since the beginning. I have been camping daily on the Silverlight official forums, reading threads and answering questions till I became the first to post over 1000 posts and have been ranked as the top contributor. In the last few months I have not been as active, but I still ranked as one of the top 5 contributors in SIlverlight community hall of fame http://silverlight.net/community/recognition/hall-of-fame/ . I have worked on some Silverlight projects, including http://www.ddjsilverlight.com and http://www.nba.com . I am very glad to see bright developers like you in Egypt, after reading through your blog. Good luck and wishing you more success in the future.

Heading to SOA Patterns, OOPS, AntiPatterns (Coming in Part II)

The next session was very enjoying one as well as informative. I have had the honor to see Mohamed Samy putting the following touches on it before it happens, but seeing it in action was completely different. In order to not make you all wait until I finish that other long part, I’m publishing this part right now and will be sending about all the fun great SOA story in a separate part/post. I hope it’ll be as fun and informative to you as the session was to me.

Sorry for taking long to write. I’m already overwhelmed with investigating some other SOA related stuff :D :D :D, and some other less fancy stuff of course.

Stay Tuned !!

Technorati Tags: dotNETwork,Local Events,Egyot,User Groups,Silverlight,SOA

Cross posted from weblogs.asp.net/meligy

Blogging dotNETwork 5th Gathering Today, Silverlight and SOA

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 06:10:32 GMT

Hey all, I’m still blogging about my very interesting trip to dotNETwork 5th gathering, what Yasser said about Silverlight 2.0 and Mohamed Samy said about SOA Anti-Patterns.

This will be coming late tonight (God Willing).

I just had a sudden graduation project documentation help request to have to in its writing to start final printing. But I still have my OneNote pages and those are still going to be converted to blog post(s).

I write this to confirm the writing though latency. This post is likely to be updated or deleted when I post my take on the day.

Stay tuned1!!

Cross posted from weblogs.asp.net/meligy

Egyptian Developers Conference 2008 Videos Available

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 01:37:20 GMT

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:

The video files are not related to specific sessions. They’re just related to conference rooms and then conference days then just numbers. You’ll also find some sessions split into tow videos. you need to watch for this (I don’t know how – in my case, my friend just downloaded al the videos for us).
When you go to a link of a conference room and you want to go to another room, SOMETIMES this will not work. Click the address bar of your browser and press ENTER again to re-navigate to the page (do not try to Refresh (F5)). I think there’s some problem with the conference rooms links being LinkButtons and tryign to AJAify them or.. I don’t know
Ahmed Nagy’s Session about VSTO has no links (Should be Khafraa A Room: Day 02: CD 02, because I see myself in beginning of CD 03 asking Ahmed Nagy about his session after it’s complete :D). I would recommend it if it was there. Not sure what other sessions I didn’t notice are not there.

Technorati Tags: edc,edc 2008,local events,egypt,mdc,soa,saas,coreclr

Cross posted from weblogs.asp.net/meligy

dotNETwork 5th Gathering – Silverlight and what ? SOA Patterns, Yay!!

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:13:53 GMT

The 5th dotNETwork gathering will be: Saturday, June 28, 2008.

The agenda is as follows:

12:00 AM - 01:30: Delivering Rich User Experience Applications using Silverlight 2 by Yasser Makram

01:30 PM – 2:00 PM: Coffee Break

02:00 PM – 3:30 PM: Patterns and antipatterns of SOA by Mohamed Samy

03:30 PM – 4:00 PM: Lunch

It’ll be in: Canadian International College - Busses will be available at: Nady El-Sekka (11:00 AM - 11:30 AM).

~~The gathering being on Sunday not Saturday as usual makes it harder to attend it~~ The gathering facebook event said by mistake it’ll be on Sunday, but it’ll be on Saturday normally like all other dotNETwork events.

Regarding the sessions

I do not know about Yasser, but Silverlight 2.0 is a fairly new topic and it’ll sure be interesting to come and see it. I think Yasser will bring us a lot of amazement!

For the SOA topic, I want you all to set high expectations starting now. Mohamed Samy is a Solution Architecture (VSTS) MVP who has worked in and talked about SOA patterns more than most people I have met in person as both a personal passion and a job responsibility as a Technical Architect in ITWorx. I know Mohamed in person and believe he’ll be delivering a rocking session. Do not miss that.

Related Resources

Facebook Event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=15523324683
Facebook Group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2409268236
Yahoo!Group: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/dotnetworkorg/
Facebook Fan Page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/netWorkorg/13135685545

Technorati Tags: .network,dotnetwork,local events,egypt,SOA,Silverlight,Mohamed Samy,Architecture

Cross posted from weblogs.asp.net/meligy

dotNETwork 4th Gathering: May 31 - SharePoint & Silverlight

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Wed, 21 May 2008 15:45:52 GMT

dotNETwork 4th gathering will be Saturday May 31st.

Agenda:

12:00 PM - 01:30 PM	SharePoint Development Marwan will give us an overview about SharePoint development. This session will be first session of a SharePoint sessions series.	Marwan Tarek MOSS MVP - Team leader ITWorx
01:30 PM – 02:00 PM	Coffee Break
02:00 PM – 03:30 PM	Introduction to Silverlight Hussien will talk about Silverlight. Silverlight™ is the Microsoft® cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.	Hussien Zahran Development Manager Link Development

The gathering will be in:Canadian International College.
There will be busses available at: Nady El-Sekka (11:00 AM - 11:30 AM)

See the map on the right.

Unfortunately I'll not be able to attend due to exams. A number of students have the same issue as well. However, it is a dotNETwork habit to have a session every month you know.

The official statement on this is:

"Hi Guys & gals,

We're really sorry, but we were already canceled last month's gathering not to conflict with EDC.. We'd better keep it regular for the continuity of our userGroup gatherings.. That u can always get compensated by attending the next months' gathering..

& be sure we will do our best to compensate u soon isA..

Thanks for your passion about dotNetWork.org.. =)"

However, if you can make it, go attend the gathering. I have heard good stuff about Hussien Zahran if I recall correctly. I have also attended a SharePoint session for Marwan Tarek before and it was a very nice one (I wrote about it in my old blog).

Event Links:

This Gathering
- Facebook Event (.NetWork.org 4rd Gathering)
dotNETwork
- Facebook Group (Main Activity)
- Yahoo Group
- Official Website

Technorati Tags: dotNETwork,Egypt,Local Events,Egypt Local events,SharePoint,Silverlight,MOSS,MArwan Tarek,Hussien Zahran

Cross posted from weblogs.asp.net/meligy

EDC 2008 Post 02 : The Agile Way

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:59:59 GMT

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!

Agile is all about this, "value driven". In the 60s when people started to note the major problems of the very limited software at that time, "over budget", "doesn't meet schedule" and "don't meet expectations". Later, Waterfall came to solve this, but still in the 90s we face the same problems. A paradigm shift was needed. People started looking to the industrial process management to learn from. That's where all the stuff like CMMI came from.

Later, in 2001, 17 practitioners started thinking: "What are we doing right". They didn't come with something totally new, but were looking to things that already existed in the late 90 like eXtreme Programming (XP) and Scrum. They introduced what they called "The Agile Manifesto". It didn't aim to be be a silver bullet or a solution to everything, instead, it focuses on "showing us our existing problems early enough".

A Flexible Process

To dig into Agile, Ahmed first introduced the "Process theory". There're two kinds of processes:

Defined Process: Where you guarantee that whenever you include the same input in the process, you always get the same output. This applies to industry, but it -by definition- does not apply to software. If you give the same requirements to different developers or even to the same developer in different years, would you get the same software ??
Empirical: That's just the opposite of the defined process. The output is always subject to change.

Continuing, and in many other parts, I felt we developers were sort of wrong audience for this session, as a lot of talk I believed was for project managers more than for developers, although we had a debate about that point. Ahmed went talking about how most PMs try to treat software as a defined process "Get all specs then build". Don't they try to put fixed estimate for the software? How would you get that unless it's well defined? (A quick note was that there still are ways to get fair close estimate with empirical process as well). He talked about the story of trying to create a house in 4 hours. It was planned for 4 hours but was actually even done in 3.5 hours, but hey, it took 6 months of planning!

This is what we (I think he means PMs) try to do with software. But it doesn't work. A great situations Ahmed told is that he once said to a customer "Do you want to 6 months to get you something you don't want or wait 2 weeks to give you something you don't want ??". Because we all know the very first release of the software will not be what the customer really need. Adaptation to change is by default. The key is: "Inspect and Adapt (change to fit)". Ahmed confirmed, this is just a different mind set. You could be doing Agile while still using existing process like CMMI.

The Principles

Ahmed went first on more detailed talk about the Agile Manifesto. The manifesto says:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

A point highlighted was that the right part after the word "over" in every line is still valued, it's just values less vs. the left side. He asked, when the deadline is getting close, and you are missing features and specs for them, would you focus on documentation or working software?? The point is, we all already follow this manifesto, but we normally only follow it "IN CRISIS MODE".

Then, Ahmed moved into the key principles behind Agile (sample details). First, the highest priority should be customer satisfaction. After all, that's the one who pays for the software :D. You achieve that by keeping a value stream, that means keeping an early continuous delivery of valued software.

Another principle is welcoming requirement (plans / expected results) change - eve if late in development! Of course it should be understood and even communicated to the customer that this does not come for free. If the customer accepts the cost of change (time/money), then they should be welcomed. To know about the change as early as possible, we get to the next principle, deliver "working software" frequently (2 weeks to month), with preference to the shorter timescale. Also, another related principle is that business people should work daily throughout the project. Of course business people does not mean the customer here, but the business analyst

The next one is interesting; Build around motivated individuals, the motivation is expected to a result of the team's self management nature. Also, another principle almost already mentioned is that working software is the primary measure of progress. The key point here is that your progress is not where you are in the plan (requirements, documents, design,...), if your plan says you have 2 months to finish and the actual takes 4, this means you were at 60% of progress, not 80%. Other principles are abut promoting sustainable development, and simplicity.

Then Ahmed went on confirming, this is all best for self-organized teams. The whole team reflects what's gone wrong / right and realizes the need to change. The paradigm shift to "Value Driven" approach makes you consider delivering the highest value at the beginning. Sometimes up to 45% of the features in some projects are almost never used. In agile, the client tells what he wants to be developed for the next iteration. He knows better what makes best value to him. Of course there still should be a planning iteration.

Afterwards we saw a picture of 15 or more developers sitting on their desks in a cube-less office with dual monitors per desk (the dual monitors reminded me of the office in SilverKey!) and having a big data show monitor. On the walls so many sticky notes with different colors, one is red. That was room for Ahmed to explain the value of pair programming, code review, and the very interesting walls thing. The sticky notes on the walls were actually work items, yeah, features and bugs. A manager passing by can easily see the walls as a real-time graph of functionality vs. quality (feature progress vs. amount of bugs). This is the point here, visibility and communication vs. cubes! It's that developers are people, not resources, which even inspires the point that people have good days and bad days as well.

Of course agile promises that this can achieve customer satisfaction as well as team moral. It comes when all the developers have enough common understanding (remember, the developers altogether put the estimates) of the risks, system design, and have a common perspective about the whole project.

The last thing was promoting again practices like automated unit test (yeah, and TDD), and pair programming. and reminding that agile is all about minimum process, yet, maximum value.

I think the session was one of the good sessions in EDC, mainly a very quick skimming and introducing practices. Some areas I felt targeted PMs (who are not intended audience of this conference), but maybe I say that as I'm over concerned with "delivering process to developers" since my dotNETwork session (also on agile), "Scrum For Developers". I think in general Ahmed is a very heavy speaker. I'll love to attend a session he presents, hopefully on more advanced level topic (God Willing).

Technorati Tags: EDC,EDC 2008,Agile,Scrum,Ahmed Sidky,Local Events,Egypt

Cross posted from weblogs.asp.net/meligy

EDC 2008 Post 01 : Starting up writing (You may skip this post!)

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:59:00 GMT

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!

It started with some sort of making-of videos of the guys who worked on organizing the event. That included few advices like "keep mobiles silent" and "Don't sleep :D" and such in a very friendly funny way. Then was simulating the decision to get a celebrity to the keynote, simulating failing tries with some famous sportsmen and singers :D, and then choosing Michael Koester from Silverlight team instead :).

The Silverlight Guy

Michael is a very interesting guy. You love to talk to such person. He was focusing in his keynote speech on students which was weird because neither the conference nature as we know it, nor the nature of topics this specific year target students, but that clearly Microsoft Egypt guidance. To target students in the keynote and professionals in the sessions!!

He started by telling brief of his prof. story, the companies he shared in creating - the most that survived and the few that didn't go well. He pointed out himself as a sample of the effect of technology in people's life, being from a farmer family, the only one to join univ. in his family actually, and now working for Microsoft.

Afterwards, he turned into what drives technology. That's the "experience" as he identified - referring to the user experience. He pointed it out as the fundamental multiplier of technology. A sample was how Google's new experience and "clean competition" they caused changed Microsoft's thoughts of technology, and the "Dragons" book talking about such kinds of effect. He also highlighted the importance of "connected" "global" natures of experience.

Afterwards, he went to the different mindsets in work, from "getting the task done" to "delivering experience". An example was how many needed to know mechanics when cars first appeared, and how many need to know now to drive them. Another example was demoing (With Ahmed Adel from Microsoft Egypt) the use of XBOX controllers to navigate through Virtual Earth map. It was very fun demo, the 3D features for going to streets in US was very impressive :D.

The he went into the nature of the industry. It's a mix between telecommunication and software that form the "Technology" industry. Somehow that let to the S+S (Software + Service) shine. He focused on the variety of clients existing today (Win, Web, WPF, Silverlight), and tools (VS, Expression). He was also very passionate about PopFly. He thinks it's now just a mash-up tool, but this is as it's still a new baby, that he believes will later become a development enviroment that lives on services. A sample usage of it he mentioned was connecting to concert tickets data source or so, combining that with a map, and putting all that as a mashup in facebook or myspace.

The message he wanted to deliver although he knows sounds little cheesy is to "Never underestimate the power of technology. It changes lives, and nations. "And it starts with you", he added, "Students".

The Egyptian Catalyst

After Sherif El Touny (Microsoft Egypt) introduced the sponsors, he gave the talk to Hanan A. Mageed from LINK.NET. I recall Hanan from the developers conference last year when she talked about developer communities. Although I believed she was underestimating any community effort by any non-profit group or any corporation that doesn't have her company's name in it, she was very convincing and impressive even to a guy like me who would argue all the relations she mentioned in her talk. This time I totally agreed with her in everything she mentioned, so, she was even more impressive.

Hanan went to the local side.She started her presentation with pessimistic phrases about local situations in Egypt that started to appear lately in online communities. Her point was to go against such, as she titled her presentation "iHOPE" (where "i" stands for IT :D). She spoke in numbers first, showing how IT revenue of 40 to 50% increase in hope to reach 1 Billion (starting from 250 Million), It was interesting to see her mention companies that last year have either came to or expanded their work in or recruited from Egypt, like many Indian companies, Microsoft, and Google.

Continuing the talk in number, she mentioned that we have 300K graduates, 17K of which are engineers, including 2400 IT ones - Not all are ready to be hired. Skills are what brings investments. She highlighted communication skills and team collaboration, and professionalism and avoiding dealing in personal way, respecting differences whether in opinions or whole culture (like traditions that might sound very weird to us), adaptation, and willingness to learn new things.

Finally, she spotted, "It 'sounds' very simple, very basic to handle", and ended her presentation with a statement contradicting the main negative statement of the ones she started showing. Very inspiring, Hanan :).

The EDC Logo, "Fodoooly"!

The last part in keynote before demonstrating the day agenda was announcing a new way to win prizes. You tell in the EDC website what sessions had the EDC logo in one of the slides. There's one or more in each track. This reminded me of similar thing in old children magazine called "Maged" where you would look for the face of a cartoon character called "Fodooly" in the drawings of every issue :D :D.

Side Talk: The Registration Process

Before the keynote, I met Mohamed Wahby, one of the guys who carried out the work that made the event possible. We talked about the new registration process they had for the event this year.

The process is as follows:

You go to the EDC site, get the mobile phone of a contact in a delivery/shipping company you call to get an "invitation". You can use it during normal business days/hours only of course.
You wait for 3 to 4 days to get the "invitation". Actually the name is very ambiguous. It's like a "ticket". You pay the conference fees to get the "invitation".
You go back to the EDC site to register for the event using the registration code. without this, you have done nothing (although you paid already).
The dead line for the process was a week before the event date. The process stared about 10 working days or before the deadline.
Once you teach the conference, you look for the desk that has the first letter of your first name to get your fancy name tag :).

I told Wahby that so many people thought that it was a weird process, very manual process for the biggest software company in the world!

The reason for this that not many noticed - Wahby said, is that the regular registration process used to require very large lines/queues that were very annoying and remain the same size for hours. This is because the on-site payment, and having to "print" the nametag on-site as well. Both billing and printing took so long, and Microsoft Egypt wanted to take the hassle of those hours to be split over two weeks instead.

Actually, when you think about it, it really makes sense. There were very small waiting lines this year :). Wahby agrees that the big mistake about that is starting the process to last for only two weeks, and that it should take longer than that. I've suffered from this myself as I and my fiancee paid the fees very soon and few days after registration got FREE invitation code that was totally useless by then :D (well, not exactly, I gave it away to a friend who was about to miss the the deadline for registration).

Technorati Tags: MDC,EDC,EDC 2008,Local Eevents,Egypt

Cross posted from weblogs.asp.net/meligy

EDC 2008, Do you remember? (Because late always better than never) - Post 00

Mohamed Ahmed Meligy — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:34:02 GMT

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.

The Notes

One of the reasons for not writing is that in EDC 2008 I had so many notes. More than I had in any conference ever. I have around ONE HUNDRED small sheets of notes. Most notes are very small reminder bulletins, some of them consist of one word, because those are meant to be the "compressed" version of the notes. Typically I read a word or more in my notes, and this turns into a statement to a a paragraph in the blog post.

I don't really know how come I got with this huge amount of compressed notes that I found it'll take me ages to extract in this blog. Maybe because my beloved fiancee was there this year. Sure this made me more enthusiast about the event, and gave me more power. BTW, she's a very clever/smart fun developer too.

Late Better Than Never, Or, Now What?!

So, I have decided to keep my promise. I know it's over 10 days since the EDC is over and maybe nobody is interested in the topic any longer, but I'll bet on it. Please if you are interested, encourage me to extract more notes by sending an email or writing a comment out here.

The EDC videos are not released yet. Microsoft Egypt has kept the promise to publish the videos only once of 5 MDC rounds, and it was a weird story. The notes are not meant to replace the videos though. Those are VERY PERSONAL TAKES on the conference minutes the ways I saw them. The target of posting them is sharing different personal opinions with you friends and the rest of the community, and to provide "keywords" for those interested in the session topics to use when googling the topics online.

This is how the game will be:

Instead of the usual style of one post per conference day day, it'll be one post per session of group of few sessions. I'll add a new tag "EDC 2008" to the blog tags besides ("Local Events" and "EDC") so that you can find them easily in one place. I'll make a post every day or so - God Willing.

Hope this may have use to anyone around :).

Technorati Tags: local Events,MDC,EDC 2008,EDC

Cross posted from weblogs.asp.net/meligy

Local Events

Murad Family Barbecue: True Hospitality for IT Community in Egypt

dotNETwork 5th Gathering – Really enjoyed that Silverlight & SOA Anti Patterns Mix (Part II / II)

dotNETwork 5th Gathering – Really enjoyed that Silverlight & SOA Anti Patterns Mix (Part I / II)

Starting Out (No tech – you can skip)

Silverlight 2.0 – Yasser Makram

XAML

Controls: Data Binding & Layout

Programmability

Design

Arabic Support

Conclusion

P.S.

Heading to SOA Patterns, OOPS, AntiPatterns (Coming in Part II)

Blogging dotNETwork 5th Gathering Today, Silverlight and SOA

Egyptian Developers Conference 2008 Videos Available

Recommendations

Notes

dotNETwork 5th Gathering – Silverlight and what ? SOA Patterns, Yay!!

Regarding the sessions

Related Resources

dotNETwork 4th Gathering: May 31 - SharePoint & Silverlight

dotNETwork 4th gathering will be Saturday May 31st.

Agenda:

The gathering will be in:Canadian International College. There will be busses available at: Nady El-Sekka (11:00 AM - 11:30 AM)

Event Links:

EDC 2008 Post 02 : The Agile Way

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

A Flexible Process

The Principles

EDC 2008 Post 01 : Starting up writing (You may skip this post!)

Introduction

The Keynote

The Silverlight Guy

The Egyptian Catalyst

The EDC Logo, "Fodoooly"!

Side Talk: The Registration Process

EDC 2008, Do you remember? (Because late always better than never) - Post 00

A Promise

The Notes

Late Better Than Never, Or, Now What?!

The gathering will be in:Canadian International College.
There will be busses available at: Nady El-Sekka (11:00 AM - 11:30 AM)