Disaster Recovery - If you fail to plan, plan to fail

The CuttingEdge Club will organize a two hours session about "Disaster Recovery". The session will be in Wednesday 8th April, 2009 - 5:30 PM, ITWorx - Free Zone. The speaker is Nahla Osman, Quality Team Leader, ITWorx.

CuttingEdgeClub is an ITWorx technical seminar club for technology enthusiasts. Its mission is to provide an easy gateway to pertinent and updated technology information for a growing audience in a simple, pragmatic and accessible way.

MIX09 Sessions Videos

MIX09 is a Web Design and Development Conference which is considered one of the most popular events for web professionals. The conference this year has already been launched in the last March 18th and will end in March 20th. To catchup with the event, you can watch the sessions through this link: MIX09 Sessions

[Update] 29th March, 2009
MIX stuff collected all their videos in one page: Click Here

[Update] 21st March, 2009
Guy Burstein collected all the sessions in his blog post and made available for download. So that you can watch MIX09 videos offline: Download MIX09 Sessions and Watch Offline

Software Security

In the world of Facebook, E-Commerce and Email; modern threats have emerged exploiting application level vulnerabilities more than ever, A simple bug in a web or desktop application could lead to hundreds thousands dollars loss and sensitive information disclosure. Hence the need for security measures on the application level.

The CuttingEdge Club will organize a two hours session to discover the modern applications threats together with the mitigation techniques, discussing the different activities that should be done throughout the different phase of the software development life cycle to end with a more secure software.

The session will be in Wednesday 25th March, 2009 - 5:30 PM, ITWorx - Free Zone. The speaker is Ahmed Saafan, Information Security Engineer, Raya Security Services.

CuttingEdgeClub is an ITWorx technical seminar club for technology enthusiasts. Its mission is to provide an easy gateway to pertinent and updated technology information for a growing audience in a simple, pragmatic and accessible way.

Stories From A Gaming Startup

CuttingEdgeClub organize a seminar in ITWorx to elaborate a story about how gaming startup can emerge. The seminar is scheduled to be on Wednesday, 11th March, 2009 at 5:30 PM in ITWorx - Free Zone. The session will be provided by Mostafa Ashour - Managing Partner, Khayal Interactive Entertainment.

CuttingEdgeClub is an ITWorx technical seminar club for technology enthusiasts. Its mission is to provide an easy gateway to pertinent and updated technology information for a growing audience in a simple, pragmatic and accessible way.

Code Camp '09

dotNetWork will organize a day called: "Code Camp '09". The day will allow the development professional to introduce several technologies and new Microsoft products. dotNetWork is promising that the day would be one of the biggest events they have ever organized before.

Code Camp '09 is a two day event. It will be held on: Thursday, February 19 and Friday, February 20, 2009. To have more information about the event and the agenda, please visit the event website: Code Camp '09

.network.org user group is a group of youth who share the same passion for the development on .Net platform in Egypt. The group started in the last December 2007 with several technical events during the last year. For more information about the group, visit their website here.

On Finding the Arabic Needle in the e-Haystack

Lack of information is an issue, but lack of ability to reach the information is a much more serious issue. With internet getting appended everyday with million of new information pages, search engines become unconsciously mandatory to use.

CuttingEdgeClub organize a seminar in ITWorx to elaborate how search engines operates and to highlight the status of the rapidly growing Arabic-Web in particular.

The seminar is scheduled to be on Wednesday, 19th November, 2008 at 5:30 PM in ITWorx - Free Zone. The session will be provided by Hany Abdelkawi - Project Manager, Link Development.

CuttingEdgeClub is an ITWorx Club aims to share information about the latest technologies among the IT community by organizing technical sessions and seminars in a regular base.

.NETWork.org 9th Gathering - Coming Out This November

.NETWork.org announced the next 9th Gathering to be held in 29th November. The event will be in CIC - Canadian International College and four speakers from ITWorx and Raya Software will be giving the sessions. Here is the list of the topics and speakers:

BizTalk - SharePoint Integration. Hossam El-Deen M. Barakat Senior Software Developer | Raya Software	Information Architecture Mostafa Mourad Team Leader | ITWorx
IIS 7 Hossam Kamel Senior Software Engineer | ITWorx	Applying Domain Driven Design on ASP.NET MVC Mohammed Meligy Senior Software Developer | Raya Software

.network.org user group is a group of youth who share the same passion for the development on .Net platform in Egypt. The group started in the last December 2007 with a total of eight technical events during the last 10 months. For more information about the group, visit their website here.

Google Code Jam 08 - Registeration Started

Google Code Jam is a coding competition in which professional and student programmers are asked to solve complex algorithmic challenges in a limited amount of time. The contest is all-inclusive: Google Code Jam lets you program in the coding language and development environment of your choice.

Google Code Jam begins in July and continues in August, when you will compete in online rounds against contestants from around the world. The Top 500 participants will advance to onsite competitions at a local Google office to compete against those in their region (Asia Pacific; Europe, Middle East and Africa; and the Americas). The Top 100 will participate in the final round at the Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California on Friday, November 14.

Google offers more than $80,000 in cash prizes for the winners. Don't be left out! Make sure to register between June 17 and July 17, and show your coding creativity in Google Code Jam.

Inversion of Control & Dependency Injection

In the last Thursday, 28th Feb. 2008, we had our internal demoday in SK. The day was really informative. We had many interesting topics in different fields. My topic was an introduction about the inversion of control and the dependency injection. You can download it from here:

Download: Internal_Demoday_28_2_08_IoC_DI.pptx

N.B: Most of the examples in the presentation use Sprint.NET as a DI framework.

If you want to go deeper in the topic, I recommend the following article: Inversion of Control Containers and the Dependency Injection pattern. The author is Martin Fowler - Chief Scientist, ThoughtWorks - and the article is considered to be the ideal reference for the topic.

SKDD2 - Windows Workflow Foundation Session

This is one of the sessions held on SilverKey DemoDay 2 - Cairo Conference Center. The session was an introduction to Windows Workflow Foundation and how it can help you in automating you business process in an entire organization. The session was in Arabic language. If you're interested, you can download the session materials to try out the demos and check out the slides. I will try to keep track of all other videos of SKDD 2 and link it on this post as soon as being available. So, keep watching!

Updates:
SOA via WCF Part 1 and Part 2 - By Mohammed Hossam

SKDD II - Another Success

Today, we had our SKDD 2 event on Cairo Conference Center. The day was really amazing. We discussed many topics and technologies. My session was about "Business Automation Using WF". We discussed how Windows Workflow Foundation can help you in automating your business process in an efficient and transparent way. For interested people, the materials, videos and demos will be available on demoday.us soon. Feel free to add your comments and feedback about the day and the sessions. Thanks for all people who attended this day and thanks for all SK stuff who made this day that great.

Update: Download Demoday Materials

Propagation of Trust & Distrust

Yesterday, I presented my session in SilverKey Internal Demo Day. The topic title was: "Propagation of Trust And Distrust". There is currently a great interest in maintaining and building trusting networks between the communities members so that you allow users to get the "high" quality of information before acting on it.

Many variants of algorithms and techniques introduced. The techniques of trusting propagation are applied in many well known websites such as Epinion and eBay. In my session, I presented a mathematical approach which introduced by IBM researchers and applied in a wide range of data in Epinion

My Post on OpenXMLDeveloper.org

My post about Generating Dynamic OpenXML Docx Files is now on OpenXMLDeveloper.org - The Official Microsoft site for OpenXML. Check the post on OpenXMLDeveloper.org

MDC07 Review

As you know, MDC07 started in last 4th Feb. and remains for 4 days. The conference in general was very good, however some faults and management drawbacks affected its ultimate success.

Actually, I didn't attend Day 0, which has some problem in registration process (depending on attendees comments in this day). So, I will start talking about Day 1. In this day, The Keynote was so bad for a big conference like MDC. They have interviewed some young children who have basic programming skills, introducing windows vista and office features, interviewing with some business guys from ITWorx and Investment Ministry. The keynote wasn't informative at all as most of the attendees are developers and they are not interested in such stuff.

Afterwards, I attend "Patrick Hynds" session. The session was talking about some tips for ASP.NET. Although, Patrick is one of the most popular speakers, in this MDC, he wasn't that good in choosing his session subjects. I felt that he didn't have anything new to talk about.

I attend also "Agile Methodology" session, one of the most exciting and informative sessions in this MDC. The speakers was two members in "Microsoft patterns & practices" in Microsoft HQ. The session was discussing the Agile Methodologies, XP Methods and Pair Programming.

Then, attending Delving into VSTS for Software Testers. It was nice to see the Microsoft investment in Testing Module in VSTS. Not only API testing, but also some interesting testing techniques for the load and performance of your applications.

In Day 2, some sessions were cancelled or removed, which was so confusing! I attended a session about VSTS tools for System Architects. The speaker was Microsoft guy called "Abhishek Mathur". So interested session. Afterwards, attended another session about ASP.NET AJAX-Style Server Controls for "Patrik Hynds". It was interested to know how to build your own ajax-style server controls if the current one doesn't fit your requirements. Then, I attended a session about Workflow Foundation. It wasn't so informative. Only some introduction. We expected more than that.

The conference as overall was above average, not so perfect. However, the organization was better than the last years. The place - Cairo conference center - is better and perfect for this large event. Very nice ideas introduced in this conference such as encouraging students to join ImagineCup competition and supporting the online Egyptian communities. I think the sessions needs to target more the developers needs, removing all the propaganda stuff. We hope for better organization in the next years.