After CairoCodeCamp’10, we’re back to our monthly gatherings.

This month we’ll have Mohammed Moussa & Mohammed Samy will talk about How would you apply Domain Driven Design with Entity Framework 4.0.

This session was planned for CairoCodeCamp’10, but for some GUC restrictions, we had to cancel it then, so here’s your chance to see it & learn some pretty cool stuff!

Want a cool .net Ninja by telerik or a free 1 month or 1 year voucher from tekpub? Pay attention & answer the speakers questions :)

RSVP on Facebook event in here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=357036403158

See you all there!

Back to blogging after organizing & participating in a very successful & exhausting CairoCodeCamp’10 conference. We had the perception that CairoCodeCamp is just a regular Code Camp. It’s a big community event organized by dotnetwork.org user group , the first & biggest offline user group in Egypt.

CairoCodeCamp is the biggest conference dotnetwork is organizing throughout the whole year.

CairoCodeCamp hits multiple birds actually with one stones. It:

• 1. Provides a chance for a large amount of students, professional developers, business owners & software entrepreneurs to meet and socialize, facilitating TONS of opportunities for all participants to help them evolve even more.
• 2. Allows exponentially increasing number of speakers to be in the same place presenting very useful sessions on all of the software’s technical & business aspects, maximizing the learning value for all participants.
• 3. Invites high profile world-class grade speakers to speak at CairoCodeCamp. That gives Egypt a necessary exposure for the global software community and helping us marketing Egypt as a critical Landmark of technology in the Middle East.

CairoCodeCamp’09 was the first big conference we organize. It had 18 sessions presented by 5 domestic speakers & 4 international speakers.

CairoCodeCamp’10 was way bigger. We had more exposure. It had 40 sessions presented by 20 domestic speakers & 7 international speakers.

We have had the best sponsors ever! They have been very helpful in such bad global economy status. For them we are very thankful for helping making this dream come true!

So, we’re talking through the path , but are we there yet ? Not yet! We want more recognition & more people to learn & benefit their society and the world!

We have already started working on CairoCodeCamp’11. Please feel free to contact us through www.CairoCodeCamp.com , if you have any feedbacks, notes, ideas or want to help!

Thank you dotnetwork team, Speakers, all of our sponsors & Big Buddy Society for working as a team, making this event happen!

On 14th of September 2009, it is announced on dotnetwork.org’s official site. dotnetwork.org, the first offline user group in Egypt is to donate 50 brand new shirts to Resala, one of the biggest community-driven charity movements in Egypt.

The donation was in contribution of the “1/2 million Eid cloths” campaign that Resala has initiated in the beginning of Ramadan.

Way to go Resala & dotnetwork!

Another day is up. Entity framework geeks is showing us lots & lots of demos about Microsoft’s Entity Framework. It’s going to be awesome! 

Next Saturday (July 18th 2009), at Del Vento Cafe. Attendance is free, you are not obliged to order a drink or anything. Just do it if you want to enjoy good taste with good technologies!

You need only to subscribe to the facebook event here. No eventbrite event this time.

See you there!

We had a nice & delicious event yesterday. Thanks for everyone who came, & Thanks for Friday's team for hosting us!

Let's hope to see even more next time!

For everyone who won't be able to attend dotnetwork's April'09 Gathering, do not worry, Microsoft has a new surprise for you. An Invitations-only event that will have wonderful technical materials, fun & the best of all, the announcement of winners of the local Imagine Cup contest that would represent Egypt in the global contest that would be held here also in Egypt soon.

The event is going to be at Intercontinental City Stars next Wednesday (April, 22nd 2009), it's mainly done to encourage the development community work , not only in .net but also interoperability between Microsoft and other platforms like Java (through Egyptian Java User Group (EGJUG)). Besides their interest in interoperability, Microsoft also invited dotnetwork.org,  Barmagy, Innovation Hut, ITWorx's Cutting Edge Club, and Egypt SharePoint User Group to be the main participant of this unique event.

The community will participate with speakers as well. Every community would have a short session (How Do I session) that talks about a very focused topic with no presentations or anything, only geek tools. I will be doing dotnetwork.org's session about How To Get Started With Oslo. I will blog it after the event.

Last but not least, Steve Ballmer is the event's mystery guest of honor is going answer the community's most urging questions about Microsoft.

Agenda

Here's the agenda of the event:

How to Register?

First you need to make sure that you will come. It's a great event and it would be great if you left the chance to someone he would come for sure.

The rest is easy. Send an email to info@dotnetwork.org with IDINV in the subject, add the following details:

• Name
• Email
• T-Shirt Size (only M,L,XL,XXL sizes are available now)
• Company
• Referrer (me in this case)

It's very recommended that you wear the T Shirt on the Innovation Day so people would know that you got there through dotnetwork (There's different color for each community). and also you must bring your invitation with you.

How to get the invitation & the T-Shirt?

Mohamed Gamal El-Din
Friday (April 17th, 2009) , City Stars, from 8 PM to 9PM
Mob: 012-290-3599

Shehab El Hadidy
Saturday (April 18th, 2009), City Stars, during & after dotNetWork April's gathering , 10 am to 1 PM
Mob: 011-122-1849

Shehab El Hadidy
Sunday, (April 19th, 2009),   City Stars,from 11 AM to 3.30 PM
Mob: 011-122-1849

Remon Zakaria

Tuesday, (April 21st, 2009),   Downtown, from 7 PM to 8:30 PM

Mob: 012-2579717

Throughout the past year, we have had great solid support from the Canadian International College (CIC). Unfortunately, due to the global economic crisis and the aggressive expenses cutback strategies for organizations allover the world, the CIC has decided not to open its campus at the weekends for any activities (and that includes us of course).

So, Next Saturday morning, for the first time in .network's history. We are going to make an exclusive event at Friday's City Stars!

We chose Friday's for their known flexibility & their open mind to ideas, and we were right, only in one meeting they were very excited, they have even created a custom menus for non-profit communities that has a very approachable price range, so they can even host more communities like us.

So here's the deal, we'll have our event starting from 10:00 AM till 1:00 PM. we are going to have 2 perfect sessions (See Agenda below). But it's time for the community to star supporting themselves now. You can easily support .network by ordering only one item from Friday's menu, you don't need to order from the original menu, I personally recommend to order from the communities menu they did!

Gathering Agenda

How to reserve ?

Reserve your ticket from here .

Just a note, this event is an exclusive one with limited number of attendees, only 60 attendees, so please do not reserve a ticket if you are not sure you are coming.

See you there!

So, I decided to use Sitefinity as my blog engine as a thank you for Telerik for supporting our user group .network.org by giving us a free license for Sitefinity.

Sitefinity is providing, if we can say, good starter kits for different kinds of usage (that i need all of them actually!). They provide Personal (Blogs,etc…), Company (DashSoft needs a new site) and the one I love the most, the Community Template. I really loved all the modules and the UI all put down & blended together to produce a wonderful site that i needed only to change the default group name and logo to ours.

As the two words Sitefinity and Community started to come together, I really though “hmmm.. Why don’t we see if the community and Telerik can collaborate together?

I have been always a fan of the win-win situations. The idea started to cook and i found that Telerik  can help in the establishing important, market-needed values in the fresh students like commitment, researching the market for new ideas. In return the community would support Sitefinity by practicing those values on creating modules and controls for the Sitefinity platform.

So, Telerik in conjunction with Microsoft and .network would start a contest for the best Plug-in idea(s) and page control(s) that can be used on Sitefinity.

Beside the XBOXs, Free licenses, Internships at Telerik’s local offices, and all the cool stuff from Microsoft & Telerik, Winners would start their own projects on CodePlex, having exclusive internal support from very Telerik team that made Sitefinity. Also Students would be on Microsoft BizSpark’s radar, so these students would earn their opportunity to start new businesses on their own and really make a difference within the world.

I will post more updates soon after everything is finalized between Microsoft , Telerik & .network.

I just learnt yesterday, Microsoft has soft-launched this awesome initiative BizSpark. It’s an initiative that would allow the startups anywhere to have tons of Microsoft support like Software licenses, MSDN, Support Incidents and Visibility to potential customers and investors. check the full list benefits here.

How to join? Easy!

I - Check to see if you qualify – most privately held software development startups in business for less than 3 years that are generating annual revenue under USD $1 million can join. (Some countries has different limits due to their economy)

II- Connect with a BizSpark Network Partner or a Microsoft BizSpark Champ to get your BizSpark enrollment code.

Enrollment is free, just pay a USD $100  program offering fee at program exit.

For more details about BizSpark, see: The Startup Program Guide, which describes the program benefits and more.