Earlier this week on the 27th and 28th  of February DotNetWork user group organized the biggest dot net event in Egypt  "CairoCodeCamp"; it was held in the German University in Cairo (GUC) was sponsored by some leading technology companies as Microsoft the complete list is on the CairoCodeCamp website.

The Camp started with a Keynote by the awesome Scott Hanselman and then was followed by 5 parallel sessions for the two days, concluding 40 awesome sessions.

On the other hand, I had the chance to be a speaker in that awesome event, my session was titled " When MEF meets silverlight " and was mainly an introduction to MEF in Silverlight, and here I share my materials.

In my previous post, I mentioned my interests and things I want to talk about in 2010, the first thing I mentioned is Silverlight, my knowledge about Silverlight now on a scale from 0 to 10 is just 0.5, actually I know nothing except that it I want to know everything, so here by I show all the topics I want to learn; not in any order.

So other than the titles, a small introduction on Silverlight needs to be done then next parts will start the actually good things,

Silverlight Introduction

I thought the best way to introduce what is Silverlight is to ask the usual WH questions and here are they;

What?

Silverlight is a cross-browser (works on any browser Internet Explorer, FireFox, Safari, Opera and recently Chrome), cross-platform (Windows, Mac and Linux) plugin for building and delivering the rich interactive applications for the web. It only needs a plugin to be installed.

When?

Silverlight 1.0 was first released in 2007, in November 2008 the second release of Silverlight 2, 6 months later Silverlight 3 was out there, and now here we are with Silverlight 4 beta

Where?

If you are running Windows install the runtime from here.

If you are on a Mac download and install from here.

How?

To start building silverlight applications you can install the developer tools for Silverlight. If you don't have Visual Web Developer, download both using Web Platform Installer. This will install the SDK, developer runtimes, and Visual Studio project templates. If you already have Visual Studio, download the tools directly (the Silverlight 3 SDK is also available as a standalone download). For additional information, read the Overview and the Silverlight 3 Release Notes. 

For Silverlight 4 download the tools from here 

Until now I have not finalized the plan so I would love to hear whats your opinion. Is something missing? Is something not needed?

First of all, Happy new year to all, hope that 2010 will be more successful that the previous years. It has been almost a year and I haven't wrote anything on my blog, and even more than a year since the last technical blog post, I know it has been a bad year for me; well I have some reasons but mostly just because I got lazy, but I was wanting to get back to the community as I gained a lot from it, I think its time to payback a very small portion of what I have learned from them.

So, I think no time is better than the very first day of the year for this turnover and getting back, after more than a year away from blogging, new technologies have came out, and my interests changed too.

Whats new for Amr Elsehemy in 2010 :

As a starter, I need a new blog theme; I won't let this take my time but I will be working on one these days.

What you will see regularly in my blog (hopefully  ) in general is anything technology related, but specifically one of the following topics:

Silverlight

I was an early adopter of this great new technology I even remember when me and moses where reading the very poor (that time) SDK; oh yes and it was called WPFe for Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere, it didn't even have a Z-index property in Elements. But now all my knowledge about Silverlight that its API's are written in managed  code, rather than Javascript, and also the latest version out there is the Silverlight 4 beta which was announced at the PDC.

I have been looking around silverlight for a very small time now, and I collected some topics or just outlines for me to work on, or you can call this as a learning plan; I will also blog what I have learned along the way with many resources and links which I used and helped me along the way. 

ASP.NET MVC 

I also was an early fan of the great new framework when it came out in its 5 RC's!! :) then betas, I also started a series which unfortunately I haven't finished, I was building a very simple but complete blog engine, it was for learning purposes and not meant to be used professionally. So, my 2010's years resolution is to learn more and more about this framework also finish or rather restart the jBlogMvc series but this time with the new versions of (ASP.NET MVC, jQuery).

As I mentioned I will re-write my small blog engine to get the most of it. 

Mac world

mmm, 2009 I first got my iPhone 3G in February and soon in August I had my MacBookPro, and so fast I am being a fan of ObjectiveC and XCode, and wanting to build iphone apps and Mac Os applications as well, I expect that I blog from time to time the latest things I have known in this great world. 

Information Retrieval

I mentioned many times my Masters studies, I talked about the courses and so, but now I am in a new phase; the thesis phase, so I will also frequently write about topics in my research.

Finally, my next post will most probably be my silverlight learning plan, and the first lesson I learned, so wish me luck. 

Hello all, I know this blog has been idle for a long time, the reason is not I am becoming lazy or I don't have any more new ideas and topics to write about it just so happens I was quite *very* busy and unstable in my work the past few months.

But anyway I am still busy, but I think more stable and its time to manage my time more accurately to come back to the blogo-sphere again.

One year ago, 3rd of January 2008 I decided to buy the domain amrelsehemy.net to be my blog, before that I wasn't an active community member, after this year has gone I might have not participated much towards the community but at least I gained some valuable knowledge from it.

In 2008,

My top posts, I started my blog with a tutorial series to help custom controls developers to give their controls a rich design time support through 15 parts,  I will list them here.

Also, my jBlogMvc small series had some audience and gained a lot of traffic, here are the posts.

2008 also witnessed some big change in my MCP transcript, after working with .net and Microsoft techs for a few years this summer I decided to get some certificates [MCPD : Enterprise and Web Developer] plus 4 other MCTS SharePoint certificates.

(https://mcp.microsoft.com/authenticate/validatemcp.aspx , Transcript ID (758580) and the Access Code (sehemyxx))

Other than studying and self improvement, I finished my post graduate studies and starting my masters point, I am researching around something related to the knowledge extraction from the web which will be very  related to web semantics and web ontology.

Career wise, I worked for SCS for three quarters then left to ITWorx . In parallel I also became a teaching assistant at my faculty (Faculty of Computer and Information Sciences - Ain Shams University), I thought till now 2 courses one on Digital Image Processing and the other on Basic Data Structures using C++, I also learned alot during this semester and built some basic data structures which I will find some time to share what I learned also built an image processing package a mini photo shop which also I will share one day.

About 2009,

The first thing on my mind is to get a new theme, to stand up with the new me.

For the time being, I think whenever I start blogging again it would be something near ASP.NET MVC or jQuery which both are considered the new kids on the block of the .NET web world.

I also have an application in my mind, I wish I have the time to do it and share my experience.

Happy new year all, and happy birthday my blog.

NOTE: In this series I build a blogengine using ASP.NET MVC and jQuery from scratch in order to learn more about these new technologies. If you haven't read the first post in this series, I would encourage you do to that first, or check out the jBlogMvc category. You can also always subscribe to the feeds.

jBlogMvc is converted to be used on ASP.NET MVC Beta 1 if you haven't downloaded it yet you can find it here, to read about the changes and additions in the beta 1 I do recommend reading ScottGu's asp net mvc beta1 announcement if you haven't already read it.

This part had witnessed a big change in project structure hence the new release of the beta1 and building a themable folder structure as shown in the pic.  More...

NOTE: In this series I build a blogengine using ASP.NET MVC and jQuery from scratch in order to learn more about these new technologies. If you haven't read the first post in this series, I would encourage you do to that first, or check out the jBlogMvc category. You can also always subscribe to the feeds.

What about new features this part will cover :

1. Configuration is saved in the database.
2. Managing Posts (Editing, Deleting).
3. Posts are now paged.
4. Some jquery magic is used.

So, lets have a tour in the project one more time. More...

NOTE: In this series I build a blogengine using ASP.NET MVC and jQuery from scratch in order to learn more about these new technologies. If you haven't read the first post in this series, I would encourage you do to that first, or check out the jBlogMvc category. You can also always subscribe to the feeds.

In this part of the series, I build the administration area of the blog engine I am building using the ASP.NET MVC and jQuery, in this part I will cover more basic features used in any blog engine, so lets get started.

What will part 1 cover ?

Basically it will cover how to build an administration area, I chose the wordpress blog engine and tried to clone its structure and some look and feel of it, the operations I will implement in this part will be :

• Visitor
  • Login -- I will just reuse the code available with the default project template for membership stuff.
• Admin
  • Logout
  • Add Post

The stuff I collected and used all over the net from blogs and used in this part can be summarized in the following,

1. Using membership for validation
2. Using the Authorize attribute
3. Using Model Binders
4. jQuery Client validation
5. Small validation framework for business rules and server side validation.(originally written by scott gu)
6. Using nested master pages in ASP.NET MVC
7. Applying the "Post/Redirect/Get" (aka PRG) pattern.
8. Applying some css to make it look nice (based on wordpress blogengine admin layout) More...

Long time no posts, well I was studying Sharepoint 2007 technologies and actually started a series for development a while ago I just managed to write two  introductory posts and didn't write more I have some ideas I'd love to share in sharepoint development which I hope to write about them some time in the future and complete the series. However, recently the new ASP.NET MVC framework has gathered some fame and actually I too got attached to it and I am keen to learn new technologies and so, also the jQuery javascript library has been the choice of most the .NET web developers community.

Its Time to Learn

So, I have read alot of blogs and articles on ASP.NET MVC which has a massive amount of resources (while not being beta yet), I also read the excellent book "jQuery in Action" and learned a lot from it I do recommend it for learning jquery. Now its time to utilize this learning in a simple application that experience the stuff I read about, then I stumbled across this article Want To Learn Web Programming? Write A Blog Engine so be it, I will build a (Simple-Fully featured) blog engine in order to learn more and use these two new kids on the block.

Of course, I will use ASP.NET MVC, jquery and finally I will use Sql Express as the datastore and Linq to Sql for dal.More...

NOTE: If you haven't read the first post in this series, I would encourage you do to that first, or check out the Sharepoint category. You can also always subscribe to the feeds.

The Sharepoint 2007 System introduces two types of pages the first type usually called Application Pages and other type called Site Pages.

As a sharepoint developer you should know both of these types of pages and when to use them, so let me define them here briefly and show some differences between them to help you decide which type of pages you will want to use when developing in sharepoint.

Application Pages

Application Pages are non customizable and are found in  the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS, its worthy to note that this physical directory is mapped to the virtual _layouts directory whenever WSS/MOSS creates a new Web application in the IIS. By using this mapping scheme along with some additional processing logic, the WSS/MOSS runtime can make each application page accessible within the context of any site in the farm.

When building custom application pages you should use the Microsoft.Sharepoint.LayoutsPageBase as a base class and should be content pages that reference to the ~/_layouts/application.master master page, Application Pages might include in line code or have a code behind file compiled in a dll, to deploy application pages they should be the LAYOUTS directory and all custom code dlls either in the GAC.More...

A new feature in the Sharepoint 2007 is the "Feature" development style which means that every tiny and huge development task in the sharepoint is considered a "Feature".

Features can be activated or deactivated through a site administrator, which enables the very simple turn on/off of anything in the site.

Features are used for developing anything starting from a small button to a full site definition and tons of files and functions including webparts, workflows, lists, pages, content types, document libraries and others. I will try to include the development of all these topics in this series wish me luck and provide feedback. More...