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 ;)

I'm at Jordan again :) If you are following me on twitter or facebook you already saw the announcments I made about the next Azure Camp at Amman. We did our first day yesterday with a total of six sessions covering introductory level Windows Azure, SQL Azure, AppFabric, Service Bus, Access Control and Caching! As I promessed below you can find a links to download some of the samples (not the simple ones :) you can create them on your own anyway) and the presentations as well.

Azure Camp, Amman, Jordan

Today we are continuing the Azure Camp with the "Hands-On-Labs" sessions and next week will have a full week of "Proof Of Concept" development days. It's always fun to be in Jordan :) (ok I will make this short) The Food is great! :) The best homous all around MEA :) I will stop here and share the links. Thanks for everyone who helped this Azure camp being a success and thanks for all of you being there with us ;)

Sample Codes - 30012011_3.rar (422,69 KB)

Presentations - 30012011_2.rar (13 MB)

For the last three days I was in Sophia, Bulgaria speaking at Microsoft Days’10. You can’t imagine what a fun I had from all the sessions there! :) My first session was right after the Keynote the first session in the UX Track. The session content was pretty fresh for me, actually this was the first time I delivered this session called “Silverlight 4 Unpackaged” which is all about Silverlight but outside the browser. We started discussing the new SL4 OOB features and how developers can build both online/offline apps with Silverlight while implementing different patterns to sync data through different scenarios. An additional environment discussed was stand-alone CD/DVD interfaces, the new silent installation mode and of course the mobile platform as Silverlight is kind of OOB when it’s on mobile. My second session was about Multitouch both on the Web, Desktop and Surface. We looked at some of the APIs exposed by Win7, the APIs in Silverlight and the main differences between a Surface app and a WPF Multitouch Win7 App.

MSDays Sophia, Bulgaria

At the second day of my visit the fantastic Bulgarian Silverlight MVP Emil Stoychev invited me to host a session at the Sophia University. Actually Emil and Miroslav Miroslavov they are hosting a course included in the official curriculum in the University. They just gave me on of their lessons there. I’m very thankful to both of them for the opportunity. It was awesome! Both the students and the reactions I had from my presentation. Thank you guys!

Sophia University

Finally, let’s talk about Sophia :) I had the change to hang around the city for about just 3 hours but it was enough to notice the history kind of embedded inside the city. Each building I saw was another masterpiece! I was like a Japan tourist (no offense) got crazy taking photos everywhere! Thank you for all the trip and the help guys.

Sofya'da Cumhurbaşkanlığı Binası.

Let me sum up with the “thanks” here :) A huge thanks to everyone from Microsoft Bulgaria for hosting such a great event, a huge thanks to Emil and Miroslav and of course thanks to Coskun Sunali (ASP.NET MVP) helping me discover the most bizarre parts of the city which I can’t talk about on this blog :D

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!