Attending TechEd ME 2011 Dubai

It was been a while since I posted in this blog. I will try to release some drafts I never finsihed although they will look out dated but anyway here is a fresh post.

Last week I traveled to Dubai to attend the well known technology conference  Microsoft TechEd. I tried to attend last year 2010 but I never got my visa until the conference come to its end. This year I did all arrangements early enough – not so early – to make sure to be there. Being there and having the chance to meet and network with more than 2000 attendee and meet many Microsoft insiders  face to face was really a nice experience.

The event started on Tuesday 8/3/2011, there was a pre-conference sessions but you need to pay extra 200$ to attend and that was not one of my options. The opening keynote was nice, Ali Faramawy a MSFT Vice President from  Egypt talked first about TechEd and Microsoft plans for Middile East. He mentioned that they got 1 attendee coming from Libya an forgot to mention me the only attendee from Palestine!  After that S. Somasegar -Senior Vice President, Developer Division- took the stage first using the new Xbox Kinect Avatar then physically and started talking about the  Microsoft’s different product lines and the future vision for them. Nearly each demo have some problems but that was some kind of fun!  not for the speakers for sure

After the keynote I met accidentally with Naseem Tuffaha an amazing Microsoft rockstars from Palestine. We talked a littile bit about the opening keynote, Naseem introduced me to 2 Microsoft executives I don’t recall their names. I talked with them a little bit about my newly created startup AbbMatrix and our project codename “Prunus” .. they liked the idea and I was really happy for hearing that.

After that I went to attend my first breakout session “User Experience Best Practices for Building Applications on Windows Phone 7″ .. Here is list of sessions I attended for the whole 3 days:

Tuesday, 8 March 2011

User Experience Best Practices for Building Applications on Windows Phone 7   – Windows Phone – Mingfei Yan

Introduction BizTalk – Anton Delsink (I am not sure about the title)

Introduction to Windows Azure   – Cloud Computing & Online Services – Ahmed Essayed

Wednesday, 9 March 2011

• Test Automation with Visual Studio 2010: Coded UI Tests and Lab Management   – Developer Tools, Languages, and Frameworks – Brian Keller
• Deep Dive into Razor    – Web Platforms – Scott Hunter
• The Future of C#   – Development Practices – Lisa Feigenbaum
• Applied Software Testing with Visual Studio 2010   – Developer Tools, Languages, and Frameworks – Brian Keller
• Build a .NET Business App in 60 Minutes with Dynamics CRM 2011   – Microsoft Dynamics -Steven Kaplan

Thursday, 10 March 2011

• Changing our Game : Windows Phone 7 and the Windows Phone 7 Application Platform  – Windows Phone – Mingfei Yan
• Conferencing with Lync Server 2010: What’s new, what’s behind the scenes. (UNC310)  – Unified Communications – Mahmoud Badran
• Open Data for the Open Web  – Development Practices – Ronald Widha
• Meet the Visual Studio Team   – Developer Tools, Languages, and Frameworks – Lisa Feigenbaum, Shy Cohen, Brian Keller, Vishal Joshi, Scott Hunter, Jay Schmelzer
• What can .NET 4 do for me? 16 Reasons to Adopt and Leverage .NET 4 – Development Practices – Shy Cohen
• Closing Keynote: Think Small to Build Big  – Samer Abu-Ltaif, Walter Puschner

The event went well, the speakers was generally at a good level of their topics but some of them was not so confident while their doing their speeches. It was really amazing specially to meet many of the guys I know from twitter face to face.

One thing I hate about TechEd Dubai, that Microsoft didn’t give us the attendees any giveaways other than the TechNET subscription .. I envy MIX and PDC folks they always get some nice gift e.g Last Year in PDC they gave all the attendees a new WP7 device!

It was really a great opportunity and I recommend that each techies who cares about the development of his career to attend such event .. for me I will be their next year definitely.