At the beginning of this week I was at Tech-Ed Middle East. This is the first time Middle East is having its own Tech-Ed! With all the changes to the schedule finally I had three sessions during Tech-Ed ME. The first one was on the first day of Tech-Ed in one of the interactive theater rooms. If you have ever attended one of my sessions you know I’m always fan of interactive sessions whether they are hosted in a big conference rooms or relatively small rooms like interactive theaters. With this in mind actually all of my sessions were kind of interactive ;) So back to the topic, my first session was about the new features of IE8 for developers which includes HTML5 improvements, Cross Domain Request and Messaging improvements, development of web slices, accelerators, visual search suggestion and more. For everyone attended my first session I strongly suggest them to download my IE8 book and the CD content.

My second session was on the second day of Tech-Ed ME and it was about the implementation of the new IE8 features and customization of IE8 from an ITPro point of view. I had some great demos on the implementation of Accelerators, Web Slices and visual search suggestion systems into OWA and CRM. By the way I should thank to our Turkish CRM MVP Baris Kanlica for his help on arranging the backend of my CRM demo ;) Thanks Baris. Again for everyone attended my second session I suggest them to download the IE8 book and hand it out to their coworkers, developers in order to get the tool prepared for your next deployment ;)

Here is a shot from my Multitouch session at Tech-Ed ME!

Finally, my third session was on the final day of Tech-Ed ME and actually it was the final session of Tech-Ed :) The topic was “Multitouch everywhere!”. We started discussing how we can access the RAW APIs both in WPF and Silverlight afterwards did manipulation demos from scratch both on WPF and Silverlight. The session continued with some more complex demos like inertia and pivot. At the end of the session we looked into the future of Multitouch development including Surface development. Below you can find the source codes of all the demos I did in my multitouch session.

Multitouch Session Samples - Source Codes - 06032010_1.rar (3,13 MB)

As someone who experienced both Tech-Ed North America and Europe I can clearly say that ME needs more Tech-Eds! As far as I see the broadband penetration is not that high in MEA overall and this is somehow blocking the fresh content from others continents to reach MEA countries. Europe and North America can clearly manage to keep up with the fresh tech improvements without Tech-Ed (I’m not saying drop the other events :)) but Middle-East benefits more from such physical events.

Middle-East MVPs Together!

In conclusion I would like to thank everyone from Microsoft Dubai for all their effort hosting such a great organization. Everything was brilliant! Personally It was nice to meet many MVPs from all around ME hope to see you soon guys ;)

I’m very happy and proud to announce that I’m awarded with a “Gold Global Impact Award” for year 2009 as a Microsoft Regional Director! 2009 was my first year as a Regional Director in the program and this was a huge experience gain for me. I met great people full of energy, enthusiasm and awesome technical knowledge. It seems Microsoft did an awesome job gathering the best people (in every meaning) around the world in the same program!

I will continue to serve the region as a Regional Director for the next two years (2010-2011) as well. Thanks to every RD and our RD Program Manager Kevin Schuler for all their help getting me through my freshman year.

Finally, I have another happy announcement from Turkey. Last year one of our fellow RDs from Turkey joined Microsoft and we had just 2 RDs left in Turkey. Now we have a new RD, Kerem Ozsu from Turkey! Welcome to the club Kerem and enjoy the program. I know you will ;)

Last week I was at the MVP Summit. Maybe you will find it unbelievable but it was my first MVP Summit visit :) I’m happy to be able to free some slot in my schedule and be able to benefit the opportunity of meeting awesome MVPs from all around the world.

Microsoft Redmond Campus, Seattle

The MVP Summit is a four days long conference hosted for only MVPs and RDs. Especially I found the second and third days very valuable because they are hosted directly at the Microsoft Redmond Campus including all under NDA sessions. Actually below you can find the only slide I can share with you for the moment :)

Do not tweet!!! NO!

Usually when I visit international conferences I do never have the time to hang around the city and visit some attractions but this time I had! In just two days I managed to visit Seattle Aquarium, Woodland Zoo, Flight Museum, Space Needle, Science Museum and Police Museum. I know it sounds bizarre for a geeks travel itinerary but I assure you I didn’t skip Frys, BestBuy and the Premium Outlet as well :) Oh yeah Now I do have a new camcorder to record my sessions in the community and share them on mu blog! Yay!

Finally here is a photo one of our ForeFront MVPs from Turkey, Gokhan Senyuz took from the top of Space Needle. It’s magnificent.

Seattle

When I start thinking about TechEd I remember the last TechEd Europe in Berlin. I’m not sure if it was because of TechEd or Berlin, or maybe both! :) (Yup I love Berlin btw) TechEd Europe was an amazing event for me! I had great fun meeting extra-ordinary geeks!

Hope the story will be the same for TechEd Middle-East as well! TechEd ME will be at Dubai next month (1-3 March). I will host two sessions, don’t forget to write them down in your scheduler. The first session is about “New in C# and Visual Basic for 2010” on Day 1. We will look at “what’s new” in both language and luckily we will use the RC version of .NET Framework which means what you will see in the session will be at the RTM! My second session is on Day 2 about “Windows Internet Explorer 8 in the Enterprise: Build, Deploy, and Manage Better Experiences”. We will look at IE8 from an ITPro point of view and discuss how IE8 can leverage your current intranet applications or Microsoft products you are already using. Of course compatibility, deployment and management of IE8 have more details and that’s why you will be there! ;)

If you did’nt register for TechEd yet here is a Discount Code for you ;)

52F42DC3

You will get 15% discount when you use the code above to register TechEd ME! Don’t miss!

Update: With a last minute change I have a third session at TechEd ME! "Create Multitouch Applications on Windows, on Surface and on the Web" ;) Now this will be amazing!

At the end of March there will be a big conference called “MS Days” in Sofia, Bulgaria. And you know what? :) I will be there hosting two sessions for UX fans!

One of them is about Multitouch development both on desktop with WPF and on web with Silverlight. I will have my PDC laptop for multitouch demos ;) The second session is about “Out Of Browser” features of Silverlight including the version 4 additions. I will focus on the development tricks to handle both web and desktop mode together in the same app and the data synchronization solutions.

Go to msbgregistration.com to register and visit the facebook page or tweet something to spread the word ;)

Thanks to the Bulgaria DPE and the lovely SL MVP Emil Stoychev for all the help and invitation. I hope we will have a great time ;)

Happy New Year! Ouch we are already on the second day of 2010? It seems the time is fast so better we start thinking about the future and try to predict what will happen in 2010.

Silverlight 4 will be there for you!

I know it’s not the greatest prophecy as we have the Beta version already on stage but isn’t it a great news to remember that Visual Studio 2010 and Silverlight 4 will be there for us in 2010? This will be an amazing year with especially Visual Studio 2010 build fully on WPF! I have already a full HD screen laptop waiting to enjoy that UI! 2010 will be the year to experience UX not to talk about it.

Not only is the UI getting a step further. You will see WCF and WF getting married and we will use more and more WFs in our project. If somehow you didn’t touch WF yet just do it or you will in 2010. .NET Framework 4 is bringing a lot of fresh new features making WF and WCF easier to use for high level developers here.

And finally “parallel programming”! How many of you already have 2 core CPUs or maybe 4 cores with INTEL i7? Don’t you think we need to use these cores with just some extension like AsParallel? In 2010 we will write a lot of “easy to write” parallel code trust me.

The mobile world!

No no no! I don’t have any predictions about Silverlight on mobile. Actually do you really think we need that? You will see mobile phones with 1GHz+ processors. What about having Atom style processors in mobile phones? And maybe having Windows 7 installed on it? And Voila! You got Silverlight on it :) I’m not joking this will happen soon.

About me..

I will be blogging more on my English blog. Last year I had 189 blog post on my Turkish blog and just 6 in English :( In 2010 there will a fair balance and I will blog more technical stuff in my English. Keep an eye on my RSS feed ;)

I wish you all a happy new year full of joy!

My first English book, actually booklet :) is published. The book contains detailed info about Web Slice, Accelerator and Search Suggestion development. And here is the big surprise! The book will be freely distributed all over MEA in INETA activities and if you don’t get one printed copy don’t worry; you can download all content below including the content of the CD attached to the book.

The Complete Book (3,63 MB)
CD Content

Renewed! :) After being an ASP.NET MVP for the year 2008 I have again the MVP award for the year 2009 and here is my competency: Silverlight!

I’m proud to be one of the first five Silverlight MVPs on the world :)

After months of hard word finally I have my first MSDN Magazine article published! The article is about Internet Explorer 8 features for developers including building Web Slices, Accelerator, Search Suggestion and some extra great AJAX features I hope you will llike.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/tr-tr/magazine/dd458804(en-us).aspx

Enjoy the article ;)

When we plan a web based project we are used to include a designer to the project team. However the story is not the same when we are planning a windows based project. Usually we don’t feel the need of a designer while building windows based apps. This, actually is one the biggest mistakes we do. Unfortunately until WPF arrived we didn’t have any appropriate tool do design our windows apps.

Long story short, last month we started with a WPF / Multipoint application for our local Ministry Of Education. Multipoint SDK is a tool providing multi-cursor/mouse-device programming platform. Our mission was to develop a Paint! for little kids where more than one children can use separate mouse devices and paint together on the same PC.

Scary developer design!

Above you can see our first kind of finished WPF application! Ah yeah, I hear you :) Yes this is a “developer made” WPF app! I guess you will never want your child to see this interface and be scared of computers for the rest of his life!

Below you can see the same project after the touch of a magical designer staff!

Designers Magic!

The most important fact here is that the developer did nothing! While the designer created a nice make-up. We did not change even one line of code while the design process was happening. This is the designer/developer workflow we needed! Actually we don’t need to find a way to communicate developers and designers. With WPF they don’t need to communicate! (Except they don’t have an experienced project manager :))

This week-end we will be at Eastern Mediterranean University, Cyprus hosting the INETA Week-End event for three days. We will start Friday with the Openenin Ceremony and go on with technical lectures and labs. Here is the plan;

16 January
13.00-14.00 Opening Ceremony
14.00-15.00 DreamSpark and Imagine Cup Launch
15.30-18.30 ASP.NET Dynamic Data

17 January
10.00-12.30 3D Business Applications with WPF
13.30-16.30 Multi-Core Parallel Programming
17.00-19.00 LAB: Parallelize Your .NET Applications

18 January
10.00-12.30 Online Business Applications with Silverlight
13.30-16.30 Programming for High Performance Computing
17.00-.19.00 Light up your data on the web with Silverlight!

I will be hosting the Silverlight and WPF sessions and Tayfun Akcay from Microsoft Turkey will host the Parallel, HPC sessions. Thanks to our MSP from Cyprus, Görkem Güngor for his help in the Launch of Imagine Cup and DreamSpark programs.

Prepare for the huge info bombardment, see you soon ;)

This week-end we made a long visit with a team of developers/designers to Izmir, Dokuz Eylul University. Week-end events are the ones I love most. Why? Because both students and developers from industry can be part of the audience and this mix creates the most suitable social environment for experience interchange!

We did host sessions about SL 3, WPF, IE 8 for developers, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, LINQ and XNA! Thanks to our MVPs and local User Group leads for all their help hosting those sessions and providing support in the mean of activity announcement.

Finally a huge 10X :) to our MSPs from Dokuz Eylul! You ROCK!

Here is it. The first game we build at our Silverlight 2.0 Game Programming session at Microsoft Turkey! Go ahead, try it ;)

Not only the game itself, I’m sharing the source code of this wonderful game :) as well. Unfortunately the source code contains a lot of Turkish variable names. Hope you can figure out the way it is working. Not all the implementations are great, keep in mind that we just finished this game in 45 minutes (except the graphics which we barrowed from another tutorial on the net.)

Game Source Code - 30112008_2.rar (1,85 MB)

Game Programming is a fascinating topic for young students and equally hard in the mean of programming and mathematical calculations. Microsoft Turkey just started a Game Programming Tour where I’m hosting a session called “Game Programming with Silverlight 2.0”. Each day of the tour contains another session called “Game Programming with XNA”.

Microsoft Game Programming Tour, Istanbul

In the first session I’m building a little Silverlight 2.0 game which can be published over the web and in the second session our XNA expert starts coding an XBOX game which can connect to a WCF service :) What is the meaning of this? Actually that’s a child’s play to connect an XBOX game and a Silverlight game to a server with sockets and build an interactive game where people on the XBOX and on the internet can play together online.

Unfortunately the sessions are Turkish and all the code we write contains Turkish variable names :) I will try to share the game with the source on my blog. But before doing that I need to modify the code a little bit in order to extract the WCF logic out of it and provide online random play.

Last week-end we organized an event we call “INETA Capital Hit”. The event took place at the capital city of Turkey called Ankara :) and one of the local universities, Cankaya University been the host.

INETA Capital Hit

I had a great time with 4 of our speakers from different INETA User Groups and a total of random 300 people attending the seminars during the week-end. LINQ, ASP.NET Data Services, WPF, WCF, Silverlight, IIS7 are just some of the hot topics we discussed and hosted technical sessions in collaboration with MSPs and MVPs.

Thanks to all the attendees. Hope to see you soon again ;)

Yay! Silverlight 2.0 is out! Go to www.silverlight.net/getstarted and download all the tools you need. We have got some fresh news for you, first of all there is no more Blend 2.5! Silverlight 2.0 support for Blend comes with the SP1 for Blend 2. We have a new Silverlight Tools for VS to download and a new DeepZoom composer.

Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (72.1MB)
Microsoft Expression Blend 2 Service Pack 1 (17.8MB)
Deep Zoom Composer (3.8MB)

Such a great day! Gogogo ;)

A new year and welcome to a new group of MSPs. I guess you heard about the “Microsoft Student Partner” program. A bunch of talented students are chosen each year and they do work intensively in co-operation with local MS office to promote the academic existence of MS tools.

MSP Bootcamp, Istanbul

This year as I’m the Turkey Lead of INETA, I attended the MSP Bootcamp in Istanbul in order to be in close relationship with MSPs. I hosted a little session about “What is INETA?” and “What we do?” The reactions were great, thanks to all the MSPs who are eager to help and want to be a part of INETA events.

Keep in touch ;)

Today I took the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 – Windows Presentation Foundation Application Development Exam (70-502). I’m happy to get a score of 952 over 1000 and pass the exam successfully. Finally I got MCTS with WPF competency. Unfortunately this exam is not on the pathway to the .NET 3.5 MCPD:Windows. This is completely independent from current ProDev certifications. Now I will be waiting for the upgrade exam to release ;)

Regarding the WPF exam, the most confusing question was about a 3D pyramid! The question asked me to choose the right XAML code from a list of choices. However the only difference between choices was the coordinates! This has nothing to do with WPF J this is pure math! Anyway, it was fun! :)

Good luck if you wanna try the WPF exam and tell me about your experiences ;)

Yesterday I hosted a Silverlight session at RIATalks event sponsored by Adobe in Istanbul, Turkey. I know it sounds strange :) Take a look at the video below ;)

Last week-end as INETA Turkey we organized a fresh summer developer event called INETA Summer Hit 2008. The event has been held at the Yildiz Technical University in Istanbul starting from 9.30 in the morning to 18.00.

At the beginning of INETA Summer Hit I presented a session about Silverlight 2.0 and then we had a discussion panel hosting two MVPs and two MSPs. Thanks to Kadir Camoglu, Eralp Erat, Ali Riza Babaoglan and Ali Servet Eyupoglu for their contribution to the panel. At the end of the first day Eralp Erat hosted a TFS session including the installation process with hands-on-labs.

The second day started with “IE 8.0 for developers” session where I was the speaker again. We talked about the new features of IE 8.0 including Web Slices, Activities, AJAX innovations :) After the lunch Ali Riza Babaoglan hosted the “Web 3.0” session where our attendees were eagerly asking lots of questions about the future of software development on web. Finally, Ugur Umutluoglu introduced the new era of data layer development through LINQ and I helped him about XLINQ and Inline XML in VB :)

Of course we did some little interviews during and after the event. Below you can watch the little movie ;)

I’m just back from Dubai. Out of credit card limits! :) and I’m not joking. Anyway back to the subject, why I’m in Dubai? I hosted a Silverlight 2.0 training for Microsoft Dubai. We had a lot of Flash Masters among the attendees (which is dangerous for a SL trainer :)) however at the end of the day they were all exciting about the new features of SL 2.0 Beta 2 including VisualStateManager and the .NET base.

Microsoft Dubai, Silverlight 2.0 Training

Special thanks to Arlette Braganza from MS Dubai for her help during my trip and thanks to all the attendees who left me alone with 3 big coffer of croissant :)

For the last three days I was in Qatar, Doha hosting a Silverlight training for Microsoft Qatar at Aljazeera TV IT department. We had a lot of fun including all the bugs we found in Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2 especially for VB.NET :)

Qatar, Doha, Nightshot

After my Qatar visit I guess I will never whine about the hot weather in Istanbul. During my visit the lowest temperature I saw was 45 degree. Even my nighty trip to seaside didn’t help.

Thanks to all the friendly people from Aljazeera TV and Microsoft Qatar for their hospitality, hope to see you soon ;)

It’s out! It’s out! :) So let’s take a look at what’s fresh in the bag with Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2.

• More control embedded inside the runtime. This means from now on we will be able to use more controls without worrying about the size of our main application.
• Go-Live License. Go your way up to the production, now you got your license to go live on the internet with your current work!
• TabPanel Control added. Fresh controls hmmmm!
• Modifications in Calendar control. Multiselection enabled.
• Control Templating support in Blend 2.5. This was really needed. Nice to get it on July Preview.
• Adaptive Streaming, DRM…
• Support for more keyboard keys in full-screen mode.
• Visual State Manager. This makes really easy to build transition animations in controls. Hope we will get it soon in WPF as well.
• Cross-domain Request support.
• Duplex Data Transfer over WCF
• LINQ 2 JSON
• Column based ordering in DataGrid

And more and more …. Silverlight rocks! Here are the download links.

Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2 Runtime (4,66MB)
Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 2 for Visual Studio 2008 (84,3MB)
Expression Blend 2.5 June Preview (32,3MB)

I’m experiencing a very strange relationship :) I mean… Silverlight! I’m in a very interesting relationship with Silverlight. We do not sleep together :D we don’t have the time. Actually what I do like about being a developer is, I always have new techy-toys, new stuff to learn and new challenges while implementing new tech in real life projects. Silverlight is my favorite toy for the last 1 year and on. You can’t imagine the enthusiasm I have while I’m facing Expression Blend 2.5 and client-side VB on my code-behind file.

That’s why I hosted more than 50 academic seminars wide around Turkey in the last 1 year and more than 200 hours of free training all in INETA events.

So, I explained all about my Silverlight relationship and why I’m crazy about it. Now is the time to introduce you my next revolutionary design of a “Silverlight Tie” :)

the Silverlight Tie

We are not on a wholesale manufacture, neither retail; this is just a prototype :) Now my love is around my neck! ;)

After a heavy loaded year with lots of AJAX and Silverlight projects, please welcome my second AJAX Book :) ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX.

The book covers a wide range of topics including JavaScript frameworks like MooTools, jQuery, Prototype, server-side frameworks like AJAX.NET, Anthem.NET and of course all the client-side and server-side features of ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX!

A total of 700 pages will provide you the path from start-up AJAX development to the high-end performance tricks. AJAX enabled WCF apps, LINQ2JSON are just some of the fresh topics in the book.

I would like to thank to Goksin Bakir from Microsoft MEA for his valuable review.

Writing an English book is one of my dreams :) however for the moment ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX is in Turkish.

Yup, you got it right :) If you are not on my RSS feeding farm you already saw the MVP logo on top of my blog. Starting from the 1st april (it’s not a joke :)) I’m an MVP in ASP.NET competency. I would like to thank to all the people contributing to this process, especially my MVP Lead, Mehmet Emre from Microsoft Turkey.

I will be there with my second ASP.NET AJAX book asap ;)

Just a rush! Again my Turkish blog is ruining the English one. I'm mostly spending all my time blogging in Turkish and yes, that's an excuse for all of you :( Actually I got some really cool content waiting for an urgent translation but for the moment I’m working hard on my ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX book. No, that’s not all, ordinary projects and development work is on a steady rush too.

Hey! Got some fresh news for you :)

I guess most of you already know about the INETA (Internation .NET Assocation). I was already contributing about 3 different INETA User Groups and leading one of them in Turkey. Now I’m the Turkey Lead of INETA. We did our first event in Cyprus, Easter Mediterranean University. From now on I will be more aggressive about .NET community events ;)

I did present a lot of Silverlight training for Microsoft Turkey in the past 4 months. Those are all partner trainings. One of them was build on top of the Students2Business program. I had like 15 students selected by Microsoft from all over Turkey. The training was a pack of fun for me.

Today I have an incredible mail from one of my students; Ozgur Arman. He did a fascinating job and build a Silverlight 1.0 game! Not SL 1.1 or 2.0! Be carefull! I said 1.0, this means he did all the nasty work with JavaScript.

You can visit the web page and see the game online at the address below. Great work Ozgur!

http://www.ozgurarman.we.bs/SoloTest_4_0/index.html

I would like to introduce you a great open source project called Slide.Show. Slide.Show is an easy to use and “to install” tool providing very rich slideshow and photo gallery features. You can download the Silverlight 1.0 project source files from the address below and dig into it.

http://www.codeplex.com/SlideShow

I just downloaded my copy, made some very little modifications and here I got my photo gallery in my blog :) A long time dream comes true ;) Hope I will have more free time to add some of my custom “non-IT” shots as well.

For the last three days we were in total “light” :) I hosted a 3 days Silverlight Training for Microsoft Turkey, Students 2 Bussiness Program. The audience was full of .NET developers including many MSPs from Turkey. One of the most passionate MSPs, the MSP Lead Murat Duman caught me in a break with an anonymous cameraman :) Click here to watch the spare shot ;)