MEA DotNet Podcast # 01

Just completed the slide deck for my first Agile Developer series talk and sent it across for a review. Looking forward to the dry run in next couple of weeks. All the podcasts should be available for download on MSDN's Channel 9 (http://channel9.msdn.com) . I will also be publishing the date + dial in details as soon as things are finalized.

Working on the first talk right now

I am working on the content for the first podcast series that i promised last week. The talk is going to revolve around Agile Development and SOLID principles.

I am going to break down the content into 4 X 15 min sections so that we can spread them easily depending on the timeline and audience.

Met Tareq, Pooya and Anton

Yesterday we (myself, Pooya and Anton) went to Abu Dhabi to meet Tareq for a quick iftar as well as a discussion on how to run local communities. We also discussed the roadmap (which includes my podcast series) of community activities that are going to take place in near future (Q4-2009 - Q1 2010).

Gulf Developer Podcast series 09

I am extremely pleased to announce the very first 'Microsoft.Net focused podcast series in Gulf'. Let me give you a little bit of background first and then we can drill down into the details of who, what, how and when.

History
Having been in Dubai, on and off, for past 4-5 years and being Microsoft MVP all the while has given me an oppurtunity to work with local developer communities here in the Gulf. In terms of dev communities, Kwait (with dotnetboom http://www.dotnetboom.net) and Qatar (with oryx dev http://oryxdev.com/en/default.aspx) have been successful with setting up their user groups. Unfortunately we dont have similar success story for the UAE in particular and the rest of Gulf in general.

The Motivation
This lack of dev community itself is a biggest motivation for trying to bring all the developers on a common platform. Objectives include empowering regional Microsoft developers with relevant technical content on Microsoft Platform, presenting topics in English/Arabic, sharing ideas, learning from each others experiences/mistakes and above all finding an oppurtunity to get in touch with like minded professionals across the region.

The Idea
From years of experience we have learned that its difficult to get developers to come and attend user group events in the emirates. Generally this is attributed to problems related to 'commuting' to and from the event venues as well as lack of well designed event calendar(schedule).
To mitigate these potential issues, myself and Anton (from Microsoft Dubai) agreed on hosting a developer podcast series. The idea was discussed when Somasegar was visiting Microsoft Dubai and hosted local dev community for an informal talk/lunch at Microsoft Dubai office in DIC - Dubai Internet City last month.

The Plan
The plan, as i said, is to host a series of sessions targetting regional developer community. Come up with a clear agenda and share the detailed schedule with the developers so that they can mark their calendars and look forward to the events that they think are most relevant for them. Upload all the podcasts to MSDN Channel 9 so that the content can be downloaded easily (and be listened to while driving on Sheikh Zayed Road ;)).

The Schedule
I will be posting a detailed calendar in next 2-3 weeks but tentatively we have agreed on following dates and topics:-

1- Agile 101 presented by Hammad Rajjoub on 7/8th October 2009
2- Win 7 for Developers by XXXXX on 27/28 October 2009
3- Whats new in WCF 4.0 by XXXXX on 17/18 November 2009

Ofcourse this is an initial draft and we would like to get the feedback from the community and let them choose the content thats most relevant for them.

Whats Next
- Watch out this space for more details as we finalize the plan and confirm the content/date/speaker tuples.
- Follow us on Twitter for instant updates. http://twitter.com/DotNetMEPodcast
- Provide us with your feedback on twitter or this blog post

Code7: win a trip to LA for PDC09 and up to $17,777 in cash!

Got Windows 7? got some cool ideas for nifty apps? Then 'now' is the time to register yourself @ https://www.code7contest.com/ and participate for a developer contest that will see winner raking up to 17,777$ cash!

Take three minutes to video yourself describing and demonstrating your application idea for Windows 7 and you could win big. We'll choose one uber talented finalist from each of the following seven geographic regions:
•China
•Europe and United Kingdom
•India and Southeast Asia
•Japan, Korea, Australia, Antarctica, and New Zealand
•Middle East and Africa
•North America
•South and Central America

The path is already mapped in workspace

i was getting the following error:

The path is already mapped in workspace

Here's how i solved it.

Theres another way to do it through command line

WCF Rest Starter Kit

You can download WCF Rest Starter kit from codeplex.

The WCF REST Starter Kit is a set of features, Visual Studio templates, samples and guidance that enable users to create REST style services using WCF. The CodePlex Preview 1 release provides new features that enable or simplify various aspects of using the http capabilities in WCF, such as caching, security, error handling, help page support, conditional PUT, push style streaming, type based dispatch and semi-structured XML support. The WCF REST Starter Kit also provides Visual Studio templates for creating REST style services such as an Atom feed service, a REST-RPC hybrid service, Resource singleton and collection services and an Atom Publishing Protocol service. In addition, there are samples, documentation and other guidance that help to use these new capabilities.

http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet/Wiki/View.aspx?title=WCF%20REST

Microsoft Web Platform 1.0

The Web Platform Installer (Web PI) is a simple tool that installs Microsoft's entire Web Platform, including IIS, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition, SQL Server 2008 Express Edition and the .NET Framework. Using the Web Platform Installer’s user interface, you can choose to install either specific products or the entire Microsoft Web Platform onto your computer. The Web PI also helps keep your products up to date by always offering the latest additions to the Web Platform.

get iot here

Office Development with VS 2010

Get up to date with office development on .net platform with Somasegar's post here

My personal favourite is simplification of .net's integration with COM's OM.

As per the example posted in Somasegar's blog.

Instead of doing the following

object fileName = "Test.docx";

object missing = System.Reflection.Missing.Value;

doc.SaveAs(ref fileName,

ref missing, ref missing, ref missing,

ref missing, ref missing, ref missing,

ref missing, ref missing, ref missing,

ref missing, ref missing, ref missing,

ref missing, ref missing, ref missing);

You can do with VS 2010

object fileName = "Test.docx";

doc.SaveAs(fileName);