Event started with opening word from Ahmed Adel, Chief DE, Microsoft Egypt as welcome kit, hence Samer Chidiac, DE, Microsoft Lebanon started his keynote and overview about the event and introduced: Mike Soucie, Electric Rain Inc. CEO, Blaise Arcas, Microsoft USA, Carrie Longson, Microsoft UK and Sherif El Touny, Microsoft Egypt. Samer showed a really cool presentation to show the timeline of development evloution of graphics on web applications, mobile applications, games, the Windows OS and standard applications. I enjoyed the show so much. Samer is an old friend I know before the event, I was so glad to meet him for the first time in Egypt!
After's Samer's keynote, we had 30 minutes break where again I met Mohamed Wahby, Academic DE, Micosoft Egypt, I met Samer and greeted Carrie and gave both Samer and Carrie my business card. I was over the moon. Carrie also is a friend I know before the event and I was so glad to meet her in Egypt.
Then next session started, it was for Mike Soucie to present his amazing presentation named Presnetations with StandOut where it's a very cool software that makes it rich and easy for persons to create professional presentations.
After that Carrie soon started her session I was waiting accross the whole event, actually I was sleepy because I was up for more than 24 hours and once Carrie came, I was almost sleepy. If it wasn't for her, I'd be sunk in dreams! I resisted and really enjoyed her session about Microsoft Expression Blend. Carrie really should be titled: "The Blender".
We had a break soon and suddenly we got change in agenda when Steve Ballmer decided to make his keynote earlier 2 hours! Live show started a bit slow due to bandwidth issues, Steve looked funny as usual and I remember when he forgot the last name of the german man who was going to present next show, Ahmed Adel had to accelerate the show when the connection started to act much worser and Steve no more speaking.
Blaise Arcas is the next, he's a nice american Microsoft employee that was interested about Microsoft Research for desingers part with the Microsoft Live Labs: Photosynth software, In my opinion I think this software is an old idea shown in Microsoft Codename MAX. I liked the idea so much and I had chance to introudce myself to Blaise, I'm keeping his nice business card (I gave him extra card of mine and he torn it into 2 pieces and wrote down his e-mail giving it back to me as his business card
).
Later Sherif El Touny (Microsoft Egypt) and Mostafa Kamel (LINKdotNET) started to show an application based on Silverlight on a music site completely based on Sliverlight cross browser and WPF technologies. It was real fun egyptian flavor.
Finally, the whole team set together and Ahmed Adel started to ask them questions and we were all ready to have Iftar meal (breakfast) and I said goodbye for Samer and Carrie before I go.
I won't forget such great event in my life where I met far away friends (Samer, Carrie and Mo Wahby and Sherif) and introduced to new friends (Sara, Shierf El Touny, Tina, Beky and G.G).