Welcome to NED.net User Group

When Microsoft released the .NET Framework 1.0 Technology in July 2000, it was immediately clear that Web development was going to change. The company’s prior technology, Active Server Pages (ASP) launched hundreds of books, articles, Web sites and components, all aiming to make the development process easier than before. However, what ASP did not have, was an application framework - it was never an enterprise development tool. Everything in ASP was code oriented - but it simply wasn't possible to avoid doing work without writing codes.
ASP.NET was designed to counter this problem. Right from its initial release as a preview technology, Microsoft ASP.NET has been a huge success. For those people developing web sites using Microsoft technologies, ASP.NET provides a rich programming model, allowing sites to be easily constructed. There has been a lot of talk since its release, but ignoring all the hype and press, .NET really is a product for developers, providing a great foundation for building all types of web applications. One of the key design goals of ASP.NET was to make programming easier and quicker by reducing the amount of code that needed to be created. This phenomenon operates when one enters the era of declarative programming model, rich server controls, large class libraries, and support for development tools from the humble Notepad to the high-end Visual Studio .NET.

Yup thats an excerpt from my latest contribution for Spider Magazine. See their September 2005 issue, page 47 if you want to read more. Visual Studio Team System, SQL Server 2005 and Smart Clients are on the list for future publications for both Spider and Dawn Sci-Tech. Feel free to share your comments and suggestions.

Today there is a greater focus than ever on reusing existing components and wiring together disparate components to form a cohesive architecture. But this wiring can quickly become a daunting task because as application size and complexity increase, so do dependencies. One way to mitigate the proliferation of dependencies is by using Dependency Injection (DI), which allows you to inject objects into a class, rather than relying on the class to create the object itself.

Read the rest of this article and download the source code from here.

What is .NET Pakistan

.Net Pakistan will initially be a blogging site that will evolve as a .NET Portal and a discussion forum. At .NET Pakistan you will be getting daily dose of technology updates, code snippets, tutorials, best practices, and solutions for their posted problems.

Blogging at .Net Pakistan will be done by experienced .Net Professionals from around the globe. The list of bloggers will increase with time. If you are interested in blogging for us then do write us at (dotnetpakistan@yahoo.com) about your self, experience, and areas you would like to write on.

Behind .Net Pakistan

Wajahat Abbas has worked for the last three years as a Software Engineer. He is currently working as Technical Lead in Kalsoft (Pvt) Ltd, Pakistan, a software consulting firm focused on .NET development and consulting. Wajahat is an Executive committee member of INETA Pakistan. He has also worked for Microsoft Consulting Services for .NET development. He can be approached at wajahatabbas@yahoo.com. For more details visit his blog : http://www.wajahatabbas.com.

Hammad Rajjoub is a Software Engineer by profession. He is a Microsoft MVP for XML Web Services. He is also a MCP. He has been working on .Net platform since its beta release. He is also an Executive INETA committee member and member of INETA MEA speakers bureau. He is currently working as Technical Lead in Kalsoft (Pvt) Ltd, Pakistan, a software consulting firm focused on .NET development and consulting. Hammad has spoken at a number of seminars and conferences. He can be reached at hammad.rajjoub@ineta.org. For more details visit his blog : http://dotnetwizards.blogspot.com.

Where is .NET Pakistan

Right here : http://www.dotnetpakistan.com

International .NET Association Pakistan Chapter and NED.net User Group invites you to attend a free seminar on Whats New In .NET Framework 2.0 by Hammad Rajjoub.

Note:
This event has been delayed. An email will be send to all those who registered for this event about the new date. Agenda and venue will remain the same as mentioned below.

Agenda:
2:00pm - 3:00pm - Talk on .NET Framework 2.0
3:00pm - 3:15pm - Q&A Session
3:15pm - 4:00pm - Refreshments

Event Registration:
Registration is closed for this event.

Venue:
Lecture Theatre - Department of Computer and Information Systems Engineering
NED University Of Engineering and Technology Karachi.

About Event:
.NET Framework 2.0 has gained quite popularity amongst the professional as well as student developers from the day of its first beta release. With the new additions to the framework like Generics, Partial Classes, support for 64 bit computing and the very famous XML classes, everyone is keen to know what the hype it all about? Your wait is over now as our presentation will cover all the details about the new framework.

About Speaker:
Hammad Rajjoub is working as Technical Lead with Meezan Bank Limited . He holds a BS Computer Science degree from Karachi University and has MCP.NET certification (as well as a number of Brain Bench Certifications). He is member of ACM( http://www.acm.org) since 2002 and was Chairman of ACM-CSKU Chapter(http://www.csku.edu.pk/acm) for the year 2002. He has been working on .Net since its Beta 1 release. His areas of interest include Distributed Computing, Service Oriented Architecture, Aspect Oriented Programming, Design Patterns and Quantum Computation.
He has developed number of enterprise scale applications using C#, ASP.Net and SQL Server. He is a .Net Evangelist and speaks frequently at knowledge sharing sessions. He has hosted number of sessions at local as well international conferences. He has written a number of articles for local as well as international publishers. He has also written a case study for Wrox Publishers (http://www.wrox.co.uk). He also trains people at software houses on .Net and helps them migrate from VB/VC to VB.Net/VC#.
He is also a user group leader of .NetWizards which is an INETA (http://www.ineta.org) chartered user group. He is a member speakers bureau INETA Pakistan, and member of INETA Pakistan Executive Committee. He teaches at Dept. Of Computer Science, Karachi University and PAF KIET as a visiting faculty member. He spends his spare time learning and evangelizing .NET. For more details visit his blog at: http://dotnetwizards.blogspot.com

I spend a wonderful time during my presentation for NED.net on "Master Pages and Themes in ASP.NET 2.0." This is the first time that I am not going to say that "the speaker was absolutely amazing and the presentation was just awesome." I am not being too modest, this is what usally happens when you are speaking for the first time. This was just the beginning and I have to walk a long way to become a good speaker.

I started by giving a very brief introduction about ASP.NET 2.0. Talked about the Visual Studio enhancements, new compilation and code-beside model, new deployment methods etc. Then I moved toward the main topic of presentation "Themes in the new version of ASP.NET." I have shown demos all along the slides to give the audience a better look at how to use these new technologies that are introduced in ASP.NET 2.0 for the first time. I really like the concept of applying themes to the sites which really ease the burden of giving "CSSClass" or "Class" refrences to all the contents of your site. You just have to include <% @ Page Theme="SmokeAndGlass" %> and thats all. All your controls will be given a consistent look to your site.

Then we moved on towards the Master Pages. Master Pages are introduced for the first time in ASP.NET 2.0 and its all about giving a consistent layout to your website yet with almost no line of code at all. You just have to define the looks of your site in the master page with <% @ Mater %> tag, define the layout of your pages in just one file and throw some contentplaceholders which will be used to pass contents from content pages <% @ Page MasterPageFile="Master.master" %>. No more usercontrols for defining the layout of the site and placing the controls in all of you pages one at a time. You can also nest 2 or more master pages together to make the figure a bit more complex yet recommended for big project and portal style websites.

It was a nice start for me today and I have learned one thing. Never throw a bad joke during your presentation, you will loose some pretty looking audiences :) . The audience were amazing, they throwed some really good questions and have rated my 3.5 out of 5 which is not bad for my first attempt. I want to thank Usman especially for working with me in the lab and helping me in setting up the machine for my ugly demos, Sir Saqib Ilyas for allowing me to use his laptop and helping me during the arrangements, Faisal Nasim, Muhammad Yahya, Sarfaraz Soomro, Fahad Majeed for doing all the nasty work behind the scene and arranging the foods and drinks and the feedbacks offcourse. Last but certainly not the least, I would like to thank Hammad and Adnan bhai for being there for my support and helping me in the Q&A session. You guys just are just awesome and this event wouldn't have been possible without your help.

Thank you once again!

You can download the slides from here. I have also included some Theme files along with the slides. You just have to copy them in the Global Themes folder which I mentioned during the presentation and you are all set to go. All previous presentations can also be download from here.

Aurora XAML Designer is another free designer after XAM3D available for developers to get their hands dirty with XAML for Visual Studio 2005. It can also work in a stand-alone environment) .

Aurora for Visual Studio 2005 integrates seamlessly into the Visual Studio environment to provide a visual designer for XAML content. Developers no longer have to spend countless hours manually coding simple XAML content. Now the equivalent content can be created visually in minutes within the Visual Studio environment using the integrated Aurora XAML Designer. Aurora for Visual Studio 2005 improves developer workflow by allowing the developer to maintain their XAML documents visually within the Visual Studio 2005
environment; an integrated development environment that is familiar to millions of developers worldwide.

Recap of important features:

1. Aurora integrates into Visual Studio 2005
2. XAML content created visually within Visual Studio 2005
3. Content created in one environment improves developer workflow

Mobiform is the first company to provide visual designer software for maintaining XAML documents. Now Mobiform is the first company to provide a visual designer that integrates directly into the Visual Studio 2005 environment.

Downlaod the free designer from here.

International .NET Association Pakistan Chapter and NED.net User Group invites you to attend an hour long seminar on Master Pages and Themes in ASP.NET 2.0 by Zeeshan Muhammad on July 23, 2005.

Event Registration:

Registration closed for this event.

Venue:

CIS Lecture Hall, NED University of Enigneering and Technology, Karachi.

Date and Time:

Saturday, July 23, 2005 at 2pm.

Seminar Details:

Almost all websites use a similar graphical layout for all their pages. This doesn't happen by chance, it grows out of accepted guidelines for design and usability. For some websites, the layout consists of the header, body and footer; for others, it is a more sophisticated aggregation of menus, buttons and panels that contain and render the actual content. The question is, how can you effectively build such Web sites? Both classic ASP and ASP.NET 1.x provide good workarounds for this type of issue, but neither tackles such a scenario openly and provides a definitive, optimal solution. ASP.NET 2.0 faces up to the task through a new technology "Master Pages" and basically exploits the ASP.NET Framework's ability to merge a "supertemplate" with user-defined content replacements.

In our seminar we will discuss how ASP.NET 2.0 aids in the design and consistency of sites. From the development perspective, generating a site that is consistent isn’t so hard, and there are plenty of ways it can be achieved. However, these are all custom solutions, not part of the underlying .NET Framework. ASP.NET 2.0 brings a solution that not only improves ways of providing UI reuse but also aids in maintenance of the site.

Note:

• Registration is necessary for you to avoid enterance issues at our campus. Current NED Students and Faculty members do not need to register for this event.
• Registration closes on July 18, 2005.
• Give-aways for audience.
  

Looking forward to welcoming you at our event.

INETA Pakistan arranged a Speed Programming Competition named "Code Run 2005" for NED Students. The competition is a huge success. Students participated from both BCIT and CIS departments of NED. In the beginning we received about 20 registrations for Code Run from which we selected senior most 15 students from both departments. Later on with the availability of more computers in our CIS Computational Lab, we selected 2 more teams, giving chance for junior students to participate and prepare for such future events.

The event started at about 11:15 AM with the introduction by Faisal Naseem on the contest. I then followed by introducing the prizes for the winning team and the runner ups. Questions papers were given to the teams and the clock start ticking. They were given 2 and a half hours to solve 5 mind juggling questions to prove their skills to be amongst the best coders in NED.
Pizzas and Sodas were served to the participants and teachers during the competition. 3 judges were assigned to moniter and approve/reject the enteries send by the teams. The competition ended at 1:45 PM. The remaining enteries were checked and the winners were declared. The team which end up in solving 4/5 questions were from Third Year CIS Department. BCIT ranked 3rd in the competition. In the ending ceremony we gave Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 and ASP.NET Web Matrix Book to the winning team. VS Beta 2 were given to the runner ups and all volunteers. It was an exciting event and I am sure everyone enjoyed whether they were writing codes, judging enteries or serving the lunch or completing their last minute assignment :) .

I would like to thank Sir Saqib Ilyas - Country Leader INETA Pakistan, Code Run volunteers, organizing committee and all participating teams for making this event a huge success. See the event pictures on the contest blog here.