Techies.ae Leaders's space

As per request we have had a special Open Coffee this week. Thanks to Starbucks to let us use their first floor, and the Jazz music was at acceptable levels this time!

Discussion was broad as always on an Open Coffee. Major topics covered were Multi tenancy on SharePoint 2010. How to separate the user base in that multi tenancy environment. Short demos on how to create SharePoint 2010/2007 Solutions with Visual Studio 2010, we love this tool. Short discussion on Office 2010, demonstrated Outlook 2010 features and gadgets, placed some time on ability of using multiple Exchange Accounts in Outlook 2010. Lastly we discussed Hosting facilities of SharePoint 2010 versus the BPOS solution offering from Microsoft.

As always we came late and left late. and totally forgot to take a snapshot this time :( so a snap of our host in it’s place…

Thank you Jumeirah for hosting this event @ Emirates Academy. Really appreciated that Floor Bleeker, group director of IT for Jumeirah Group in the UAE opened teh session and making us understand IT is important also for hospitality.

Muhammad Ahsan gave a very enticing speech on BPM and it’s implications for the Information Worker and Business where and how to apply it. Find slides here. If you are inclined to this topic please vote on the event review to request for more info. The hint is on that this overview session will get more depth next time we see Ahsan present on BPM.

The snapshot of the attendees this time thanks to Alaa Sahmarani

I received an email from Microsoft inviting all Techies to the Mall of the Emirates for the VS2010 launch! Hope to see you there.

Join Microsoft and the local developer community at the Cinestar Cinemas Mall of the Emirates for exclusive presentations on Visual Studio 2010, fun giveaways, and a viewing of Iron Man 2!

NOW SHOWING: /*LIFE RUNS ON CODE*/ - Cinestar Mall of the Emirates, Dubai
REGISTER FOR THE PREMIERE: 02:00 PM - 08:00 PM | May 2nd 2010

Thank you all for your support and your refreshing input to make the Techies night an event. Let’s digress in the order things took place:

The evening started out by the right question! Anton was asked what all was new in Visual Studio, and by the time coffee and  water’s were getting dry the air cleared for other topics to be covered. So what all was discussed on VS2010 as major milestones: ALM, UML, Layer diagram, architecture validation in build process, Test lab, TFS2010, WPF editor and design surface, Extensibility and plug-in model, and maybe 1 or 2 I forget…

We also covered the redesign of Techies.ae User Group:

The main outlet for information will become this blog and the page associated with techies leaders. Also we will have an open accessible sign-up page that does not require you to have a membership: techies.eventbrite.com I will try to populate every event there. Apart from this methodical change we will also change the way the group operates. as I have seen in the past I wish to address the need of a developer community. So as of this month the Developer community has a separate place with a separate event schedule. Also the IT-pro community among the techies will get their own event schedule. We are still looking for owners of these groups. So if you are so Inclined please feel free to take charge, I’ll help you make it a success. I will help plan sessions and will make sure that there should not be more than one event a week, as we all have some business and private life outside of Techies.ae. Finishing this redesign off, we will have regular meetings each third Wednesday of the month and it will be in the Format of Open Coffee, about any geek/tech topic. you can have the floor if you have a topic you wish to program, I will make the event known. In basis this is high-level and should not conflict with the IT-Pro or developer groups.

This all is a way to make Techies more versatile and hope to pull more interest between peers. If you have any suggestions or wish to part-take a role in the Techies.ae community, feel free to dos so. The User Group is made by it’s members so it does not hurt to contribute!

We ended of talking about performance of Entity Framework and Linq2SQL so much so that we want to pull out the laptops, brains and brawn and have a new meeting this week Wednesday, go to techies.eventbrite.com to sign up for the event.

I have had a few weeks of playtime with Microsoft ICE, a tool to create panoramas. now the camera on my mobile phone is really bad quality (640x480 fixed focus), but find below the result of 4 images I snapped and ICE-d them together. The bad image quality is not because of ICE :-)

Techies, Just read the blog post that Office 2010 was announced and giving you a heads up on it:

Our Volume License customers with active Software Assurance (SA) on these products will be one of the first to receive the 2010 set of products. They will be able to download the products in English via the Volume Licensing Service Center starting April 27. Customers without SA will be able to purchase the new products through Volume Licensing from Microsoft partners starting May 1.

So that and the release of VS2010 will mean end of April will be focussed on rebuilding my OS with all tools on it. This is also great to check with your customer who want to start using the tools ASAP.

Let’s share the tools we put on our systems a la Scott Hanselman’s tool List. Only let’s separate out these tools for an Office 2010 and VS 2010 developer desktop and the same fro an IT-Pro desktop. Let’s not forget we need to maintain legacy as well!

Looking forward to your tool chest, entries I will add comments as I collect my tool chest.