EDC 2008

Many did ask me about the timing of Microsoft EDC (Egypt Developer Conference) - previously known as the MDC- , so I'm publishing it here
The EDC will be on 13-15 April in intercontinental City Stars, The Reservation is still closed but I'll put the link as soon as it's available in shaa Allah..

Open Sourcing - Image Package

During the past days, we were delivering our projects for this semester after long days of working & coding..
At the end of these days, I started to think with my friends "what are we going to do really with this code?" .. I thought a lot about the end of previous years projects & I found that all of them are just resting in a folder called "projects" on my PC .. so I had a different idea this time.. "what about making our projects open source for anyone to learn from it??".. my friends approved & that was the beginning..
so here is the link for our image processing package (version1) on Google Code ::

Image Processing Package

(Image.cs (contains most of the implementation) & the exe uploaded only till now, Full version will be uploaded immediately after some bugs fixing in shaa Allah)

VS 2008.. reasons to upgrade

I came through a document about the top ten reasons to upgrade to Visual Studio 2008, so I thought about sharing them here:

Top Ten Reasons to Upgrade
1. Work with data in a unified and integrated way.
2. Work with user interface designers.
3. Employ the latest web user interface techniques.
4. Build stunning applications for windows vista.
5. Build higher quality applications with integrated unit testing.
6. Enjoy great support for designing web applications.
7. Build applications that runs on multiple versions of the .net framework.
8. Build office-based applications
9. Use workflow & communication tools.
10.Benefit from performance & stability across the board

For more details, read here...

ANARC 2007

The Past days were the 10th Arab & North Africa Regional Contest (ANARC)..
My Team participated in it (Why Not!? Team).. Although we didn't get a good ranking (21th), yet it was a very good experience & that's why I'm writing about it here..

I'd like to mention the mistakes that I feel we did.. I'm writing them for anyone to learn from:
- Time ran so quick that we didn't notice the time except when there were only 2 hours left..
- We didn't read the problem statement of one problem very well which lead to getting WA for one test case..
- 75% of Regional contest problems are trivial adhoc problems & the other 20% are dynamic ones.. we focused on other algorithms before traveling, but that wasn't helpful in the contest.. we should have practiced testing silly adhoc problems maybe !!
- In some cases, Don't use strings, use character arrays instead..
I don't remember more now, but I'll update in case I did..

I won't talk about personal feelings here, but all I can say that I truly feel that if we participated next year, I think it will be different in shaa Allah..