I know it’s a bit late to blog about this, it’s just that I was busy during the last few days (and wasn’t able to manage my time properly) and I finally got the chance to write this now while sitting in the Train on my way to Alexandria.
Anyways, if you don’t know, Cairo Code Camp is a yearly event organized by a group called “dotNetwork”, this is the second year for this event, it was held in my University “The German University in Cairo” (GUC) in the 27th & 28th of February (last year it was held in the BUE), in this event a lot of speakers form around the world (usually MVPs) come to talk to us (mainly) about the new Technologies made by Microsoft, so this year there were sessions about the ASP.NET 4.0, C# 4.0, Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint 2010.

There was an Agenda on the website for the sessions held in these 2 days, there was different Trail of Sessions each discussing a different technology, in each time period there was 5 different sessions held at the same time in different halls which was a bit of a problem for me because I was interested in a lot of Trails (VS2010, ASP.NET 4.0 and C# 4.0) so I had to skip some sessions in order to attend others.

There was a lot of speakers there and they’re all great, but the ones that I really liked are “Scott Hanselman” (@shanselman) (the one I’m pictured with in this Post’s Image) and “Miguel Castro” (@miguelcastro67).

Scott Hanselman has an incredible sense of humor and his sessions were the complete opposite of boring, he was always making funny comments on whatever he’s showing us, too bad I had to skip his “How to make your Blog suck less” session because I wanted to attend the C# 4.0 session which turned out to be not that useful because I already knew most of it’s new features.

Miguel Castro is a very smart guy and is a huge fan of Design Patterns and Code Extensibility like me, that’s why I really really really enjoyed his “Code Extensibility and Reuse” session, it was basically the story about an application he was making for an Oil Company in the US which started as a very simple application and then gradually his annoying boss started asking for more features which finally led him into implementing the Modules Pattern so he can later add more features just by making a new C# Class Library Project and writing some new Classes (that implement a certain Interface) and write the code to implement the new features in these Classes and copies the compiled DLL into the application’s folder, then simply add a few lines the App.config file so the next time the application runs it will automatically load the Classes in the new DLL into their respective Extension Points and the new code runs in the specified step.
You might thins it’s not interesting but that’s because I can’t explain it properly here, but actually the result was Jaw-Dropping !

One of the hilarious moments I spent was when Miguel Castro talked about his experience with an Egyptian Driver, he told us “Back in the US, I have a Ford GT car, …” (everybody WOWed) “… but I never seen anybody drive like this, the proximity is CRAZY!” (everybody laughed) “… and the Road Lanes are like Optional! It’s as if the Government says “we prefer that you drive here but you can do whatever you like” !” we laughed even more, and I was hitting the table in front of me from laughter, the poor guy is used to normal people who follow the rules and it’s the first time for him to see such Chaotic Traffic and Driving, and I have to admit people here in Cairo are really crazy when it comes to driving (more than any other city in Egypt).

At the end of the second day there was an ending session were the Top Tweeters (the people who tweet using the #CairoCodeCamp hash tag the most) were announced and they distributed some cool T-Shirts and I got one (the one I’m folding in this Post’s Image), and then everybody started taking pictures of the speakers and of themselves with the speakers, and Scott Hanselman kept making very funny poses with people in front of the cameras, but not in mine because he was very tired at the end :(
There is a FaceBook album uploaded by somebody I don’t know that has pictures of the event and the second half of the album has photos of a trip (that I don’t know of) to the pyramids which they made with the speakers.

Overall, these were the best days I ever spent for years, and I’ll do my best to attend next year’s Cairo Code Camp, I just hope that they don’t make it in a University too far away from New Cairo
BTW I tried to posted this while sitting in the train through my mobile’s 3G internet connection (ie: use my phone as a Bluetooth Modem), but I had a problem with the Bluetooth connection between my phone and laptop, and the battery died before I fixed it, so I publishing it now from my home in Alex.