Pooya's place (in the Gulf) : uae

UAE University and Jebel Hafeet

pooyad — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:10:00 GMT

What an interesting day. Spent the day at UAE University, one of the largest and most prestigious universities in the UAE meeting some of the professors and getting a tour of the labs there. Dr. Nikolaos Mavridis (who runs the lab) showed me around the Interactive Robots and Media Laboratory (IRML) where I saw some of their research projects including Ibn Sina (the world's first Arabic-speaking Humanoid Robot) and a Microsoft funded project called FaceBots (Facebook + Robots), which is just fun and could be expanded so much more (think twitter). I also met Dr. Hesham El Sayed, who I need to thank for giving me an orientation on education in the UAE and also for introducing me to the Entrepreneurship center at the university. Finally I met Dr. Leila Ismail who runs the High Performance Grid Computing Lab at the university and has been an Imagine Cup mentor for some successful teams from UAEU.

Some of the highlights were seeing Dr. Nikolaos’ monitor which is an idea I hope to copy soon,

seeing a camel in the back of a pick-up truck

and then getting to finally go to Jebel Hafeet.

I’ve been living in Dubai for 3 years and have visited Al Ain several times (the Zoo is a must), but had never gone up Jebel Hafeet. Well, today was the day, what a great drive up,

seeing the sunset from the top and enjoying Iftar at the summit was fantastic.

SOA Day at Microsoft Dubai

pooyad — Thu, 08 May 2008 19:12:00 GMT

I hosted severl of our customers for an "SOA Day" at Microsoft Dubai today. It was an interesting discussion focused around SOA that also touched on specific areas where Microsoft has great technology enablers of SOA, Biztalk, WCF, ... . I'm posting the session slides here for the attendees and anyone who missed today's session. I'll be doing more of these around the region, if you're interested in attending, drop a comment on the blog or send me an email and I will add you to the invite list.

I held 3 sessions:

1. What is SOA, Why SOA - What is it and why are people interested, what is the value

2. Real World SOA - Microsoft's approach to SOA, not top down and not bottom up, but a hybrid model

3. How do you get there - Methodologies and Tools that can help you start on the road to SOA

Popfly: Building simple and quick apps - Sharjah Airport Arrivals

pooyad — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 22:12:00 GMT

As those who've attended my sessions will know, I really like Popfly, I think it's the future of how people will build applications, and it's also incredibly cool to demo. It qualified as one of PC World's top 25 most innovative products of the year.

I had some extra time this weekend and built a quick application using Dapper and Popfly. This basically takes the Sharjah Airport Flight Information available as an HTML table and converts it to XML and RSS (using dapper) and then gives it a user interface and process using Popfly.

It was very simple to build and didn't require any code, you can check out the Popfly project yourself. I made 2, one is a silverlight based gadget that filters the list for all "Arrived" flights and shows them in a gadget. The 2nd takes the flight number as user input and returns the status of the flight(s).

Anyone can sign up for Popfly with a LiveID, my projects are shared so you can take them and improve them.

P.S. Anyone using Facebook should also check out the Facebook block in Popfly to create very simple facebook applications, I've already built a few to get my pictures out of facebook and embed them on my personal blog and am working on a slightly more complicated one to bring the richness of Silverlight animations to the slideshows.

Geeks II: SOA presentation

pooyad — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 16:50:00 GMT

Geeks II was a great success and thanks to everyone who attended, the best part for us is to get to interact with the developer community in our region. You can see some of the coverage of the event already.

I've had some requests for the SOA presentation that I did at Geeks II last week, so I've posted it along with this entry. For those of you that attended the Architect Forum preceding Geeks II, you'll recognize the first part of the presentation on how to get started with SOA. The second part differed as I focused on the concrete steps a developer should take on how to actually implement the services since the audience was more developer than architect.

update: all presentations from Geeks II are now posted

Microsoft Architect Forum: Enterprise Search

pooyad — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 09:27:00 GMT

Beat Schwegler discusses the topic of Enterprise Search.

Please check back soon for Beat's presentation.

Microsoft Architect Forum: Web 2.0 and Semantic Web

pooyad — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 09:23:00 GMT

Daniel Akenine gives some thought provoking insight into Web 2.0 and semantic web.

Microsoft Architect Forum: SaaS session

pooyad — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 09:21:00 GMT

A great overview of Software as a Service (SaaS) from Kevin Sangwell.

Microsoft Architect Forum - Dubai March 27th

pooyad — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 08:56:00 GMT

Thanks to all for attending the first (of many) Microsoft Architect Forum in Dubai last week.

As promised, I'm posting the slides from the sessions for everyone who attended and for those who did not have a chance.

Each session is posted seperately, most are already online (see attachment to each blog entry covering the session), the others will be soon. Below is the opening by Arvindra Sehmi and Pooya Darugar.

Geeks: Return to the code

pooyad — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 16:51:00 GMT

We're hosting the 2nd annual gulf developers conference next week, and it should be an exciting 3 days. This year we've added a student day (March 27th) and 2 full days for professional developers and architects. I'll be presenting on March 28th on SOA, along with a great set of speakers; so please join us at this event.

The conference is free for attendees and registration is open now.