Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Microsoft Heroes Happens {Here} - Bahrain

Microsoft has been touring the Gulf region to show off and launch the new Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008. On March 17, the launch kicked off in Bahrain at the Gulf Hotel Convention Center. It was great!

The program begins with the keynote, where Joseph Landes, the Director of Marketing from Redmond introduced, with great sense of humor, whats new and whats happening. He also went over who this new technology is already in use worldwide and even in Bahrain - by Batelco.

After that, there were two live demonstrations to show a few highlights and then we were off for a quick break. Later, the stage was set up for the “Who wants to be a Hero” competition. Two people were were on stage and they answered really funny questions and won their prizes. It was fun, and the presenter was no geek but really enjoyed himself up there putting the contestants “under pressure”. The funny part was, when the host asked one of the contestants, what would he do if he won a million Dollars? The contestant responded, “I would buy legal software”.

Now, that was the main event. The rest was a series of sessions that describe whats new in greater details. There was the developer’s track, and the IT track. Of course the people on the IT track got the good luxurious room we were in and the developers were sent off to an adjacent and less luxurious room, where knowledge was how everything was measured. Yes, we have to convince ourselves somehow that were the real deal.

Anyway, at moving to the developer’s track, Amr El Garhy, the well known super hyper super cool Microsoft Developer Evangelist went over everything that was new in Visual Studio 2008 Team System, and showed off several live demos on screen for some features. He went over things like LINQ, SQL, Expression, ASP.NET, MS Project and wanted to go through SharePoint so badly but there really wasn’t time. That would be taken care of in Dubai hopefully early April. What I liked best about this whole session is how they separated every role in project management so that the developer (or team member) doesn’t have to do everything from analysis to testing. It is now possible for him to focus on his own field and therefore be a part of a more “productive team”. This way of team work is already implemented in the Gulf in some companies, like NBK in Kuwait! Anton Belsink later goes into details about the Team System.

After covering it all, everyone was sent out for lunch break to eat whatever the IT track guys had left for them. It was funny. But I decided to stick around the conference room. I did meet the organizers of the first .NET Community in Bahrain that was launched that day as well. You can find out more about them at http://www.dotnetpearl.com

This reminds me, Kuwait officially has the largest and most active .NET community in the Middle East. They have organized a huge event at the end of March. For more details contact: http://www.dotnetboom.net or http://www.prorangers.net

By 2:00pm, lunch break was over and the dedicated developers returned heroically to their seats to hear more of what was there for them. Anton Belsink took the stage and moved us through a series of sessions covering the new features in Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008. Anton switched gears after the break and spoke about IIS 7! Web developers interacted since during this session Anton covered how the web server works and how to get the best out of its security, performance and scalability. He also demonstrated several demos and showed the improved integration of IIS 7 with ASP.NET. He also introduced Power Shell and go a bit into it with a quick demonstration since no one was familiar with it.

The day ended with the developers heading back to the luxurious room and join the IT crowd for the raffle draw. Several winners received their prizes, and the final prize draw was for an XBox. Congrats to the winners!

Microsoft gave away RTM evaluation copies of these products at the event. And a Heroes {Here} photo shoot took place in the lobby which was funny. Because They wouldn’t snap pictures unless you posed as a “hero”. So, it was funny watching them. It was a really great event. Can’t wait for Dubai’s SharePoint conference on April 7-8, 2008 (sharepointconferencedubai.com/)!

I did not cover the technical part of the event because its already covered at Microsoft’s site in great detail. I did upload a few pictures at flickr.com/photos/jonquille and a three minute video of Joseph Landen’s keynote introduction at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YillDabcA_U.

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