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 ;)

Following a successful Silverlight Seminar at Eastern Mediterranean University in Cyprus yesterday I hosted an Expression Studio seminar with full of WPF demos. The code-behind coding logic, 3D animations were some of the most attractive parts of the seminar. Again I had a great time answering imaginative questions :) about WPF and memory management. Thanks to all the attendees.

You can download the presentation slides below.

Expression Studio Seminar Slides - 28122007_2.pdf (2,72 MB)

Again I would like to thank to Arif Görkem Güngör from EMU ACM group and all the ACM members for their great effort in organizing the event and handling all the logistic support. Here is another shot of a happy ending.

Eastern Mediterranean University Expression Studio Seminar

Yesterday we had an amazing day at Eastern Mediterranean University in Northern Cyprus. I hosted a 3 hours Silverlight seminer with lots of real-life examples including manufactured products in Turkey. The reactions were really very cool and indeed right; “So we don’t need to learn ActionScript? This is great!”. Oh yeah it’s really great! In addition, Silverlight 2.0 demos with Visual Studio 2008 integration really rocks! I love to host such successful technologies.

You can download the slides below.

Silverlight Seminar Slides - 27122007_2.pdf (1,3 MB)

Finally, here is a photo taken at the end of the seminar. Thanks to you folks, I had a great time. Especially thanks to Arif Görkem Güngör from EMU ACM group. He did a wonderful job in organizing the event.

Eastern Mediterranean University Silverlight Seminar

Below you will see the link of a greetings card :) Really very nice video for Silverlight minded geeks like me :D

http://mason-zimbler.com/festivegreetings/

I didn't have the time to blog for a while but I did some good job on "spreading the word Silverlight" :) I talked in 3different academic seminars at Istanbul University, Istanbul Technical University and Galatasaray University in Istanbul. Of course the subject was “Silverlight” :)

The audience was pretty big and interested in RIA development. Students were mostly shocked and had a hard time to believe that Silverlight works on any kind of server operating system, basically it works on client side so it doesn’t matter what you have on server. Thanks to all the people attended my talks and here are some photos from the events.

Istanbul Technical University Silverlight Seminar

Istanbul University Silverlight Seminar

With the launch of Visual Studio 2008 RTM version we are all experiencing the Multi-Targeting feature of the new IDE. The little problem on the ASP.NET development side is that AJAX Extensions are integrated to ASP.NET 3.5 and we don’t have such a choice for ASP.NET 2.0 which we already had in Visual Studio 2005 with AJAX Extension 1.0. Actually there is no problem developing further an ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extension 1.0 application on Visual Studio 2008 which is build with Visual Studio 2005 but what if you want to create new ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Enabled Web Sites?

Here goes the solution: Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Templates for Visual Studio 2008

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5c7df430-1c34-40d2-b6ec-81353b5fcf2e&displaylang=en

Download the package from the address above and after having it installed on your PC you will get your “File / New Web Site” menu targeted to .NET Framework 2.0 having a new choice named “AJAX 1.0 Enabled ASP.NET 2.0 Web Site”.

AJAX 1.0 Enabled ASP.NET 2.0 Web Site Project Template in Visual Studio 2008

Hope it helps.

For the last 4 days I was in Cairo, Egypt for a special Expression Studio training at Microsoft Egypt served to Egyptian Department of Education. We had a total of 24 hours of training, however when the subject is Expression Studio it’s never enough :) Like in all the Expression trainings the attendees were shocked when they saw how easy it is to animate 3D objects in WPF with Expression Blend. We had a lot of web designers in the audience. So they appreciated all the work done over FrontPage and the nice integration of Expression Web with ASP.NET

Expression Studio Training in Cairo, Egypt

Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to travel around and visit some touristic places during the day. But I was able to attend a lightshow on the pyramids at my second night after the training. So here I'm sharing with you what I got with my pocket camera :)

The Pyramids, Cairo, Egypt

The Sphinx, Cairo, Egypt

Thanks to all the attendees for their interest in Expression Studio and special thanks to Mohamed Wahby from Microsoft Egypt and all the Microsoft stuff :) They did a good job and took care of me :) Finally I would like to thank to my friends from New Horizon, Cairo. They really helped me a lot with their support.