GDC- Gulf Developers Conference 2005 - Riyadh
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I have Just come back from the first Conference for Microsoft developers in the Gulf Area Conference GDC Riyadh - Saudi Arabia. Attending this conference was very comforting and informative experience. These three days were very comforting in the essence that I ,personally, took it as an assurance that my investment in the dot net platform ( locally) is also backed up by the software Giant Microsoft. And Microsoft is committed to helping the developers in this area. I believe the majority of the conference participants share this thought with me. I am being frank here when I say that I was worried that I would see too many *TIRE-Kickers* in the conference however, I am glad I was wrong. the quality of the skills and the knowledge level of the participants was clearly visible. Despite the fact that a large percentage of the audience were from the Universities students, the over all knowledge of the participant was quite high. The conference covered the topics such as Windows Longhorn Connected Systems , Web Development ,Smart Client ,Application Security ,SQL Server ,Architecture Portals & Collaboration. The number of booths for the advertising companies was a bit low. Most of the venders were local companies. However, this is the first conference and I bet it will be more in the future. The speakers included: Ammar Abuthuraya from Microsoft , Goksin Bakir from Yage Ltd.,(MS Regional Director) , Hans Verbeek from the EMEA .Developer Platform Evangelism Group. Abdellatif Tarhine from Netopia Solutions, Abdelmalek Kemmou from Arrabeta, Ahmed Badr Eldin from ITWorx, Clemens Vasters CTO of the Germany-based developer services firm newtelligence AG,Mohammad Junaid Ahsan from MS, Esendal Yasin from MS, Ihsan Anabtawi from MS, Vaqar Khamisani , Paul Filmalter , Murat Lostar and other respected speakers. I have taken few picture and will be posting them soon. :suss: The only disappointing moment was that :(( I did not win the free round trip to Amsterdam, The Netherlands to attend Euro TechEd this summer :) Cheers Ghazi It is Illogical to define an inventor by his invention