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.