Second round of The OpenDoors in Gulf just happened in Kuwait this week. I was planning to host four sessions like I did in Qatar :) but instantly I had six sessions to host. Don’t ask why :) So at the end, I hosted sessions about WP7, Windows 8, Kinect, Azure and HTML5. I should honestly say that the amount of excitement around these products were amazing!

Microsoft OpenDoor, Kuwait

Thanks for all the people attended my sessions and for all the questions you shoot during the event. The amount of questions I had clearly indicates the huge interests in these products.

Hope to see you soon!

OpenDoor Qatar : Mission Accomplished and now it's time for OpenDoor Kuwait. Next week I will at Kuwait for the Microsoft OpenDoor Conference. The sessions I will host will be the same as in Qatar so simply :) you can take a look at my Qatar post here to get an idea of what kind of topics are waiting for you there.

Qatar National Convention Center, Doha

Back to the Qatar, Doha OpenDoor, the conference was simply amazing! Thanks to everyone attending my sessions and the interested in Windows 8, WP, Kinect and specifically HTML5 :) So here we go with the HTML5 samples below, as promessed, I'm sharing all the samples I used, free for download ;)

Hope to see you soon in Qatar, just a tip, I will be there for QITCOM ;)

HTML5 Samples from OpenDoor Qatar - HTML5.zip (1.65 MB)

It's been 8 years that I have been working at DEVELOAD Software, the company I founded and oversaw all the phases of software development business. It was an amazing and fun experience to start a company, have early adoption projects, build products and to see them grow and sometimes fail :) But after 8 years of sailing in wild seas it’s now time to switch both styles and challenges.

This is why :) I’m happy to announce that I joined IdentityMine as a Senior Director in MEA Region. And happier to have the chance to work with Laurent Bugnion, Senior Director, Europe (and an epic SL MVP). IdentityMine is an expert interactive design and user experience (UX) company. The company works on leading-edge digital applications and software solutions for multi-screen, multi-touch, multi-platform, and multi-hardware devices. These include Windows Phone, Surface, Kinect, Xbox, iPhone, iPad, Android and others. Visit IdentityMine’s website to learn more.

I know.. and here is the answer you are looking for. I’m not moving anywhere. :) I will still be in Istanbul but traveling a lot in MEA (although this obviously is not a change).

It's time to start the OpenDoor series all over Gulf region again! :) This time with Qatar, Doha! I will be at the OpenDoor Qatar next week to host the four sessions listed below. In case you did not register yet :) here is the link;

http://www.microsoft.com/gulf/opendoor/qatar.html

See you next week!

7/2/2012 | 13:30-14:30 | DV02 | Room 104 | Level 200
HTML5: The Future of Web Development with IE9, IE10 and Windows 8
"HTML5 is with us now and Windows 8 will be putting HTML 5 front and center, literally. IE9 and 10 allow you to make use of a lot of the best bits from HTML5 and CSS 3 today. This session will take you through some of the new Web API's and techniques made available as part of IE9/10's support for HTML5. "

7/2/2012 | 16:00-17:00 | DV04 | Room 104 | Level 200
Cutting Edge Mobile App Development with Windows Phone
This session is intended to introduce developers to Windows Phone. It isn’t your boring old level 100 intro session. This session assumes that you know how to develop applications and skips past the “hello world” stuff to talk about tools, navigation elements, the back stack, phone controls and the marketplace.

8/2/2012 | 13:30-14:30 | DV08 | Room 104 | Level 100
Building The Apps of the Future on Windows 8!
The future of application development is here! Attend this session to get a comprehensive view of app development on Microsoft's latest client platform - Windows 8!

8/2/2012 | 17:00-18:00 | DV09 | Room 104 | Level 100
Throw away the keyboard - Building Natural Experiences with the Kinect SDK
Kinect brings brand new ways of engaging users. It is set to revolutionize our industry as every developer will now be able to build apps that aren’t tethered to a mouse and keyboard, but rather to the human body and the environment around us. Join Dan and Jordan as they explore this new paradigm computer to human interaction and what it means to your users. We’ll then explore the Kinect SDK and get you on your way to building Kinect experiences using tools (VS2010) and Platforms (.NET) that you already know. Kinect is set to change the world, are you ready?

You were developing a project incorporating ACS for a long time now and deployed it to your personal azure account or maybe to a trial account only. Now is the time to deploy it to your corporate azure account and get it running but the moment you try to switch to ACS portal from Windows Azure's Management Portal you get a weird error :) like the one below;

An error occured while processing the rules for relying party WindowsLiveID.

I know, it really looks like an internal error of the Windows Azure Management Portal and honestly this is strange but what you need to do is to define ACS administrators separatly than the Azure Management Portal administrators. So someone with admin privilages needs to log in to ACS portal and define your LiveID as an admin for the ACS portal as well.

Assigning admin privilages to a LiveID Account for ACS

The admin of your azure account needs to log in into the ACS portal and navigate to "Portal Administrators" page. There you will see an "identity provider" list, make sure you select "Windows LiveID" there. Down the page you will need to fill in the e-mail address of the LiveID account which you want to grant admin rights. Finally, hit the "Save" button and you are done.

A day saved! Hope this helps ;)

I’m very happy to announce that our book "Real World .NET, C#, and Silverlight: Indispensible Experiences from 15 MVPs" is now available on Wrox official web site and on amazon as well. It’s been close to two years now when we started working on this book with a great team of 14 MVPs + ME! And finally the book is live, ready for your reading pleasure :)

Wrox was always one of my favorite publishers as a reader and now I can honestly say it provides the same quality of experience stack to its authors as well. I feel honored beeing part of the huge author community Wrox has. Thanks to everyone being involved in the making of our book, specially Bill Evjen for being the leader who is the true hero who made this book real! Thanks Bill!

Finally, here is a list of topics covered in the book!

David Giard - ASP.NET and jQuery
Bill Evjen - ASP.NET Performance
György Balássy - Ethical Hacking of ASP.NET
Gill Cleeren - How to Build a Real-World Silverlight 5 Application
Jeremy Likness - The Silver Lining for Line-of-Business Applications
Daron Yöndem - Tips and Tricks for Designers and Developers
Kevin Grossnicklaus - MVVM Patterns in Silverlight 4
Alex Golesh - Windows Phone "Mango" for Silverlight Developers
Christian Weyer - Pragmatic Services Communication with WCF
Dominick Baier - Securing WCF Services Using the Windows Identity Foundation (WIF)
Jeffrey Juday - Applied .NET Task Parallel Library
Vishwas Lele - The WF Programming Language
Christian Nagel - Practical WPF Data Binding
Scott Millett - Driving Development with User Stories and BDD
Caleb Jenkins - Automated Unit Testing

The time for TechEd Africa is comming. This year it will October, 17-20th in Durban, ICC. The super early bird has already closed so move fast to catch the early bird now!

Speaking at TechEd Africa 2011

I will be there as a speaker hosting the sessions below, so keep in touch and give me a hug when you see me around ;)

Microsoft Silverlight, WCF RIA Services and Your Business Objects
Level: 200 - Intermediate
You already know how to start with Microsoft ADO.NET Entity Framework and WCF RIA Services. But you feel like it never fits into your own architectural design or maybe you have already an extensive investment in your own business objects and can’t imagine how that will fit into the scene. This session focuses on communicating your Silverlight application with your own existing business objects using WCF RIA Services.

Social Gaming with Windows Phone and Azure
Level: 300 - Advanced
This session will help you to quickly get started building new social games in Windows Azure. The social gaming market continues to grow and become more profitable, and predications tell us it will increase to $1.32 billion in revenues by 2012 (up from $856 million in 2010). To help you quickly tap into this market, Windows Azure can help you build social games on Windows Phone 7 storing user profiles, maintaining leader boards, in-app purchasing, and so forth. The Windows Azure platform provides game developers with on-demand compute, storage, content delivery and networking capabilities so that you can focus on your game development not the underlying infrastructure.

Debugging HTML5 Websites with F12 in Windows Internet Explorer 9
Level: 300 - Advanced
Are you a web developer or designer already started with HTML5 development? Or are you just someone who is curious when a web page doesn’t act appropriately? Take advantage of your curiosity and use the developer tools that are available for free in Internet Explorer 9 with a simple stroke of the F12 key. Learn things like why document mode is important and its effect on a rendered page, how to un-minimize and debug a gaggle of JavaScript, as well as how to use the tools to do quick changes to a page as you prototype.

“Blogging” is a long story for me. When I first started blogging here my only intention was to share some of the stuff I discover during daily development. Actually it is still the only purpose of this blog but as I started writing in Turkish and started a Turkish blog I found myself focusing on Turkish content more than English. Of course the reason was obvious. The English content on the web is much richer comparing to localized Turkish content and what I wanted to do is to help the poor in some meaning.

During the last 6 years I used “DasBlog” as my blog software and it was amazing! It never crashed or caused any problems both on my English and Turkish blog. It was incredible to have thousands of posts and comments saved in XML and still have the same great performance! Thanks for all the help DasBlog! But now it’s time for some fresh upgrade!

I’m starting with a new blog that I wrote! Yes! I had some free time during my summer vacation and started coding the blog you read at the moment. (and I know it sounds geeky to code during the summer vacation but it’s fun and yes I do have life :)) As you see I’m pretty inspired by the Zune software interface and Metro UI. Hope you like the new look!

Just a little reminder about one the great features of my blog. When you navigate to the archive you will see that the list contains Turkish blog posts as well. I know I have a lot of readers on my Turkish blog who can’t read Turkish but figure out the topic through screenshots and code snippets. Now you will find an in-site Microsoft Translator :) who can help you. Give it a shot and tell me what you think!

Last year with the release of Internet Explorer 8 I wrote a booklet to help both designers and developer to catch what’s new inside the new version. Today I’m happy to announce that my booklet for IE9 is ready for free distribution!

Internet Explorer 9 Booklet

The booklet is published and distributed all over MEA thanks to Microsoft local office in each country and now you have the chance to get a free PDF copy of the book.

Hope you will find the content of the book helpfull.

Internet Explorer 9 Booklet - 30082011_1.pdf (7,9 MB)

Again it's TechEd Middle East time! Last year we had the chance to meet with some of you at TechEd ME and this year I have some awesome news for you all! First of all, yes, I do have sessions to present this year as well. So let's go through the list first.

Stepping Outside the Browser with Microsoft Silverlight 4 - This is one of my popular sessions I hosted around some conferences during the last year. It was always a top session with top scores ;) This time I have some additional tips and tricks to show off. In short, the session is all about Silverlight but on desktop! Which means we will be going through the desktop capabilities of Silverlight and add some more features with some magical touch ;) The session is at the first day of the conference.

Microsoft Silverlight Performance on Windows Phone - Did you ever tried to deploy an app on WP7? No? I know a lot of us had only the opportunity to work with the emulator only. So here comes the truth! WP7 hardware is different than the one you have on your PC. We all know that Silverlight is the same Silverlight on both WP7 and PC but the environment is different. In this session we will dig into some of the performance tricks and optimizations of Silverlight development on WP! The session is at the second day of the conference.

Web Developers Community Chat - This is not a regular session :) This is a private gathering I will be hosting for all the web developers. You will be able to shoot your questions to the experts and meet with the people in love with WEB! All user groups leaders, web developers and designers will be there! YOU are invited!

At the end of these two lovely days I will need to fly back to Istanbul. TechEd ME is a three days long conference but I will need to leave the third day because we have OpenDoor in Istanbul on Friday and I have sessions there as well.

Let's meet at TechEd ME 2011!

All in all I hope this will a fun gathering with a lot of geeks and full of tech chats. If you will be there at TechEd ME let me know ;) Maybe we can have a snack together ;)