On the heels of a successful Karachi event, we are pleased to announce two more WebCamps in Pakistan. November 24th in Lahore. And November 30 in Islamabad. Please register at http://www.webcamps.ms.

The momentum continues across the region. Over the next few weeks Microsoft is sponsoring over 20 free Web Camp Training Events, Content and a Channel 9 TV Show around the Middle East and Africa.   Each WebCamp is a 1 day session with 30-50 attendees, we recommend participants bring their own laptop. These provide a great way to learn about SP.NET MVC, WebMatrix, Visual Studio 2010, Web Apps, IE9/HTML5, jQuery and more.

The camps are designed to be interactive with focus on learning through presentations that are heavy on coding demos. The objective is to help you build real applications using what you’ve learned, including hands-on labs, where you join small development teams with other attendees and work on a project together.

In Karachi, we partnered with IEEE Pakistan to organize the first Pakistani Microsoft Webcamp on latest web technologies including ASP.NET, WPF, Silverlight, LINQ and ADO.NET. The camp was held at October 30, 2010 at Usman Institute of Technology. This training was held exclusively for the participants of Pakistan Student Congress, a yearly gathering of leading students under the umbrella of IEEE.

The training was focused on modern web development by using Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Blend 4.0 tools. More than 25 participants attended this hands on workshop and implemented the real world scenarios.

It is truly an exciting time with our next generation web stack and tools. Look to this blog for more announcements in the next 48 hours.

Are you a web designer or developer? If so, join  the WebsiteSpark program.  To get updates on offers and events, join the Facebook group.

Are you sharing the innovation in Pakistan? If you are already in the WebsiteSpark program, share your successes with us and win free music by reporting your Windows Server 2008 deployments.

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Are you having a hard time buying licensed software at reasonable prices? The Microsoft :: LicenseWise provides you with reliable quotes on software that you can share with any retailer.

Invite hosters to be part of the WebsiteSpark program! We have thousands of developers looking for hosters. Help us identify ambitious web hosting companies who are ready to take the next step. Any hoster who has signed up with a SPLA Essentialsagreement, is eligible to be one of the elite WebsiteSpark Hosting Partners in Pakistan. All you have to do is sign up!

Are you looking to build a site for yourself or your company? Don’t create your application from scratch. We have free applications for blogging, Wikis, Online Commerce, and Content Management systems. Just download from the Web Application Gallery onto your Windows hosting platform of choice.

Got an idea for a module to one of these apps? In only a few days, developers in the UK created a DeepZoom add-In called ZoomIt to the Drupal application.  You can be a star too  - share your ideas with us and we can help you get noticed through microsoft.com.

Looking for a hosting offer in Pakistan?  Our hosting offers are listed in the Hosting Gallery.

If your favorite web hoster isn’t listed in the Gallery, please let them know. They can readily submit an application assuming that they fulfill these requirements. Specifically, the technology requirements needed to obtain the “Spotlight” badge are: SQL Server 2008, ASP.NET 4.0, MVC 2.0, URL Rewrite, IIS Remote Management, Web Deploy, WebPI pre-installed (valid only for Virtual or Dedicated hosting offers). In the future, Web Matrix publishing test will also be required. In addition to the technology requirements, an offer also needs to provide 99.9% uptime and 24/7 support guarantee in order to be eligible for the “Spotlight” badge.  There is a dedicated FAQ page for the Hosting Gallery visitors available at http://www.microsoft.com/web/hosting/faq.

November 3, 2010.  Karachi, Pakistan. Over 1500 members of the software community, flooded the Sheraton Karachi for a 2 day jam-packed OpenDoor event, where Microsoft and the technology industry literally opened not only the doors, but the floodgates.

The mood was energetic, with waves of conversations, energy and potential pouring into increased innovation in Pakistan.  Unlike more mature markets,  Pakistan’s IT community bounces with agility from one opportunity to the next unhindered with relics of archaic technology. The first interaction a Pakistani has with technology is generally through the cell phone, with teledensity at nearly 64% of the population, hardly surprising with 111 million people under the age of 25, who represent a number roughly equal to  the entire population of Britain and France, combined.

The OpenDoor event in Karachi this week is hailed as the biggest IT event of the year.  In between customer and partner events, meetings and roundtables, I had the opportunity to present on two topics – The Microsoft Web Story, which is really a fascinating look at the surge of the web development community in Pakistan, and how the next generation of Microsoft’s web stack will take this surge global. The second topic is about Internet Explorer 9, and is chock full of amazing demos that showcase how IE9 delivers on the Need for Speed.

You can download my sessions or subscribe to the feed. Please comment and share your stories of OpenDoor Pakistan. Hear more coverage  about OpenDoor on CIO magazine