You could actually learn without installing a thing! Yes. Microsoft offers a great service called MSDN Virtual Labs. Using these Virtual Labs you can test and try almost every Microsoft technology and product. And of course SharePoint Virtual Labs is one of them. In the Lab courses you get to learn and have hands-on experience. They even include software which you would need like SharePoint Designer. Really helpful.

So go on and have fun

After sometime of trial and error I found out that Avast Antivirus(I have Avast Internet Security) was blocking some essential ports which Avast uses.

Basically what needs to be done are two things:

1. Enable the Internet Sharing mode in the Firewall settings

   

2. Enable some Firewall packet rules for the application ConnectifyNetServices.exe

   

That’s set, your ready go ahead and try it.

Hadoop open source project which is if I may say for cloud and distributed computing came to the picture as I  remember when Yahoo announced that they will be using it to store their data. That was long time ago. Later I also learned that other companies which need to manage their big volume of data like Google actually uses it too.

The good thing is that according to Microsoft’s statement is that existing Microsoft Business Intelligence tools will be compatible with Hadoop implementation.

Microsoft’s Hadoop’s efforts already showing results like a Hadoop to SQL Server connector for importing and exporting and an ODBC driver for Hive for real time querying from business intelligence tools into Hadoop.

Microsoft promised that they will contribute back whatever changes or additions they make and will commit to make it compatible with the open source project.

I love SQL Server and I’m glad to see this move from Microsoft. Hopefully this will help better manage big data requirements.

So far we got two Mobile providers in Syria which are almost identical. SyriaTel and MTN.

SMS

It is not just in Syria, but in a lot of countries Mobile companies still charges a lot for SMS despite how simple it is.

Lately I noticed that MTN and SyriaTel are offering good bundles to reduce the SMS cost.

So I advice all the people who uses SMS to pick one of the offers below. It will even reduce your mobile bill while using SMS instead of calling I think the 100 SMS is sweet.

SyriaTel

Send SMS with the code to number 1220:

MTN

To subscribe call *111# and choose package number:

GPRS

While I still think that the GPRS cost is very high, the bundles are still a way to save some money if you need to use GPRS.

SyriaTel

Send SMS with the code to number 1221:

MTN

To subscribe call *111# and choose package number:

Well that’s set for now, hope you like it

My favorite is Windows Live Photo Gallery. Nice way of organizing and sharing your photos. Most favorite feature is facial recognition, which let you find photos by faces.

After adding photos it starts recognizing faces and ask you to tag the persons in the photos. After tagging people the application starts guessing the persons in the photos and asks if the guess was correct or not. And it gets better at it very fast.

So in the future, whenever you add new photos it will automatically tag people. I started adding really old photos, and I was surprised by its ability to guess that it’s me in a very old photo when I was about 3 years old! So smart!

Other great feature is how easy it is to share photos and videos. Out of the box you can submit your files to SkyDrive (Awesome free 25GB space from Microsoft), Flickr, Youtube and others. But I couldn’t find an option for Twitter!

That’s why I started making a Twitter plugin for Windows Live Photo Gallery. And I made it open source since I couldn’t find any open source plugin for the Windows Live Photo Gallery.

I used CodePlex to host the project and TortoiseHg for distributed revision control system.

Please note that this project is not complete yet. What is left for now is the integration with Windows Live Gallery.

What I’ve finished and is working now is uploading a photo to TwitPic and then post it to Twitter along with a message. What’s left is only using the Windows Live Gallery SDK to communicate with this little application.

The project is hosted here: http://twitter4wlpg.codeplex.com/

You are welcome if you would like to give a hand

I opened the fridge and decided to use whatever I find.

Ingredients:

• 1/2 Kilo of skinless boneless Chicken breast
• 2 Lemons
• 3 spoons Olive oil
• Pepper and Salt
• 1 tea spoon of smashed garlic
• Fresh Thyme
• Flour (Decided not to use it)

Instructions:

I though it would taste good if I soak the Chicken with Lemon, so I squeezed a Lemon and a half into a plastic bag to soak the Chicken in it. Before that I splashed the Chicken breast with some salt and pepper. After that I placed the Chicken in the bag with some fresh Thyme leafs.

And I left it in the fridge for about an hour.

When it was cooking time I spilled the olive oil on the pan and was heating it up on low fire, because I know olive oil gets hot quickly. Now it is garlic time. I love garlic, actually I love eating it but not getting it ready to be eaten. Thankfully my dear wife has already smashed some garlic and was stored in the fridge. Phew!

I tossed the garlic in the pan and moved them around till they started getting brown. Then I took the Chicken out of the plastic bag and started cooking it. I also spilled the Lemon which was left in the bag into the pan. Kept on flipping the Chicken until the Lemon and olive oil almost completely dried and the Chicken was brown. Yum! The smell was awesome! Oh writing this now made drool

After the grilling was done I sprayed around some more fresh not cooked Thyme and squeezed the left half of Lemon over the Chicken. That’s set! It is now ready. To add more to the dish I just fried some french fries and I’m done.

I never did a big meal before, no bigger than a Burger with french fries, but I was happy about the results and my wife approve too

Above is what I’m drinking. Home grown Thyme! Yup. It’s awesome for when having a flu and to refresh the respiratory system.

So this new WordPress iPhone app might actually get me blogging more.

Google has a nice video here to give you an insight of how important the mobile devices are becoming.

Mobile devices comes in many different shapes and styles, but I think what is more important than the hardware is its operating system.

Symbian

Dead! I have used Symbian ever since I got my first mobile. They were the best back then and until just recently. But Nokia had to make a change and now they are tied with Windows Phone 7.

Android

Pretty much a copy cat! Maybe this is a bit harsh, but this what I really think. Of course I mean copying iOS. Same grid of icons style and many other things. The only cool thing I see about Android is how easy it is to customize everything. Heck, I can even replace the SMS app! Which personally never thought of it before. At the end I feel it is clunky and more geek oriented. Not very much for the normal user. Many analysis companies predicting its dominance in the future. In my opinion that is because it is free. Free for the hardware companies to install it on their devices. Which make them able of shipping many kinds of hardware with Android system. Still, I don’t like the user experience with it.

As for developing for Android you use sort of Java. Probably will use Eclipse or what ever IDE you like.

Coming from .NET development, I didn’t like it! The IDE compared to Visual Studio is just lame.

Windows Phone 7

I was so excited when I heard Microsoft are working on a new version of their mobile system which will be done from scratch. And I think they delivered. They came out with a unique design and user experience. They didn’t just imitate other operating systems! You really feel that they had researchers who worked to study each aspect of it. For example, you can see here how they had a team to research the best way to make a virtual on screen keyboard.

Windows Phone 7 now is still a version 1 which means it still lacks some stuff and behind more mature operating systems such as Android and iOS. Also seems to have restrictions on developers more than what iOS had when it was out.

As Microsoft promised in Mix 11 event, all of these issues will be address with Mango update which is probably coming out on September 2011.

As for developing for Windows Phone 7, Microsoft got the best tools for it, and they are free!

Microsoft is mainly a software company, so I think they got the best developing tools.

Windows Phone 7 has a bright future in my opinion.

iOS

Smooth, currently best user experience, mature. That’s it!

I think Apple are truly innovators. They ask for premium prices, but in exchange they give you delicious hardware and great user experience.

• Emirates Telecommunications Corporation (UAE)
• France Telecom (France)
• Qatar Telecom QSC (Qatar)
• Saudi Telecom company (KSA)
• Turkcell (Turkey)

After being qualified,  the companies will start submitting their proposals on the 12th of December.

Third mobile operator, we are waiting for you

UPDATE: UAE Etisalat quit the bidding, they’re uncool with the regulations. Source.

I didn’t want these services to hog the computer for normal usage, so I created a simple batch file to close these unnecessary service.

To create a batch file just create a new empty text file and rename it to have the extension .bat.

In my batch file I’m shutting down MS SQL Server services and VMWare services:

net stop VMAuthdService
net stop VMnetDHCP
net stop “VMware NAT Service”
net stop “VMUSBArbService”
net stop SQLWriter
net stop SQLBrowser
net stop SQLAgent$MSSQLSERVER2008
net stop MSSQLFDLauncher$MSSQLSERVER2008
net stop MSSQL$SQLEXPRESS
net stop MSSQL$MSSQLSERVER2008
net stop MSOLAP$MSSQLSERVER2008
net stop MsDtsServer100
net stop ReportServer$MSSQLSERVER2008

Note that the SQL Services’ names are probably different on your machine. It depends on what did you call your Database’s instance name.

Here is a list of SQL Server services names.

To start the services again, just create another batch file and use “net start” instead of “net stop”.

It had an MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R motherboard, 512MB DDR RAM, GeForce Fx 5200 128MB and an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ processor.

I got it in the 2004 and it was top of the line. Now we are in the 2010 and it’s been almost 7 years.

My hope was to make it able to run Windows 7 and let me do my Development job smoothly and let my dear wife enjoy some games on it (The Sims 3 ).

Windows 7 min RAM requirements is around 1 GB. RAM Upgrade is a must. I wasn’t sure what type of RAM I should get, so I was glad to get help from Crucial System Scanner Tool to detect my motherboard model and suggest the correct memory upgrade. So I went ahead and got extra 2 GB RAM to have a total of 2.5 GB of RAM (Yummy!). Costed around $75.

I know my graphics card is probably old for Windows 7, but I wanted to try and see if it could work.

I inserted Windows 7 installation DVD and restarted the computer to boot from the DVD and do the installation. It gave me an error message saying “CDBOOT: Cannot boot from CD – Code: 5“. WHAT! WHY? I’ve just installed a fresh 2GB RAM for you man, don’t fail me! After researching online about this issue it was clear that Windows 7 installation DVD had an issue to boot with my old MSI motherboard. Lucky me I found a workaround this issue by patching the installation DVD using the instructions found here which worked like a charm

The installation was a breeze. The system rebooted and everything was working. Sound, Graphics..etc. Yuppie! Wait a minute, the graphics doesn’t look clear and my external Wifi USB is not working too. Ugh. Windows 7 Aero effect isn’t working. Went to nVidia web site and downloaded the driver, also visited Linksys site to download the driver for the external WiFi USB WUSBF54g. I found a good advice on the net that I could just use WiFi driver files instead of installing Linksys application which wasn’t compatible with Windows 7.

After installing the drivers my WLAN was working and also Windows 7 Aero effect worked! Everything is working.

I installed the new Visual Studio 2010 and then the Windows Phone 7 development tools to see how things are working. The application was launched quickly, actually any application launches quickly, but moving the windows around is so annoying, slow and jumpy. So my RAM wasn’t enough? I checked the RAM and %20 only was used. It is now obvious that this is because of my graphic card.

My graphic card should be put to rest. Its fan was noisy anyway.

The hunt for a new graphic card started, and with it I remembered the exciting feeling I used to have looking for a good kind of RAM, graphic cards and other computer components.

The max my motherboard can handle is AGP 8x, so after researching I chose my new graphic card MSI NX6200AX 256MB DDR2 which can also run The Sims 3 . Costed me around $37.

So now for around $100 I have revived my old machine and made it work pretty well

It was a campaign for having a cleaner street focusing on the habit of throwing trash out of the car’s window! Which is something I totally despise!

The campaign package consists of two things, the brochure which talks about how it is very hard to collect all the trash thrown out of the car’s window and how it needs an army of cleaners to collect that trash, because of course there are a lot of cars and a lot of people who are not aware of this issue. The second thing is a paper bag which you can stick on the car’s interior and put your trash in. Nice idea!

It is really nice to see people getting more aware and more civilized about this issue!

Thanks for the organizers and sponsors of this campaign:

Execution and planning:

- Scouts Syria
- UNHCR Damascus
- Twenty-fourth Division

Sponsors:

- DigitalNet
- Zad ISP
- Al Waten

The best way I came across to solve this issue is to use a software called ntlmaps.

This application is a proxy software that allows you to authenticate via an MS Proxy Server using the proprietary NTLM protocol. This is useful when you start getting error “Error 407 Proxy Authentication Required” which drove me crazy the whole day!

I’m using Ubuntu as my Linux OS. If you were able to make Firefox work so you can go to http://packages.ubuntu.com/ , select your Ubuntu edition , browse all packages and look for ntlmaps, download it and install it.

After that open the file /etc/ntlmaps/server.cfg and make sure you fill the parameters correctly such as the Listening port (The port to use in the proxy) NT_HOSTNAME (Which is the Domain Controller’s computer name on the network) and NT_Domain.

After that configure the Network proxy to use your new proxy for example: 127.0.0.1:5865

Good luck

This is the biggest thing in my life and there is nothing like it…

I hope everyone would have the chance to have this too.

Locally my ASP.Net web application was working like breeze, but when I deployed it on a remote server the problem appeared. When the user try to generate a report selecting a date range and hit go, the user gets an error message “String was not recognized as a valid DateTime”.

The report is consisted of two Calendars with “dd/MM/yyyy” date format, a Grid View and a Text box to filter the grid. I used the Visual Studio to create the GridView which takes the Select parameters from both Calendars when binding. The date column in the MS SQL Server 2005 is of DateTime format and it shows like “31/05/ 2009 11:10:00 AM”.

So obviously there is a misunderstanding of the date entered, which means a difference in the Culture environment. I tried changing the regional settings of the server to match local machines settings, but that didn’t work; still the same error. I also tried to force the Culture info in the web.config, but that also didn’t work for me!

Then I was only left with formatting the date manually to the server’s taste

To do that, I used the Selecting event of the SQL Data Source to modify the parameter data before going to the Database. Note that if your case is with updating or deleting, .Net also has those events for you to use.

So I used the following function to convert the date format of my Calendar which is “dd/MM/yyyy” to whatever the machine likes (Is compatible with).

Public Shared Function ConvertToDate(ByVal dateString As String, ByRef result As DateTime) As Boolean
Try

‘Here is the date format you desire to use

Dim supportedFormats() As String = New String() {“dd/MM/yyyy”}

‘Now it will be converted to what the machine supports

result = DateTime.ParseExact(dateString, supportedFormats,System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CurrentCulture, System.Globalization.DateTimeStyles.None)

Return True
Catch ex As Exception
Return False
End Try
End Function

And from the Selecting event of the SQL Data Source:

Protected Sub SqlDataSource1_Selecting(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Web.UI.WebControls.SqlDataSourceSelectingEventArgs) Handles SqlDataSource1.Selecting

Dim d1, d2 As Date

If txtFrom.Text <> “” And txtTo.Text <> “” Then

ConvertToDate(txtFrom.Text, d1)
ConvertToDate(txtTo.Text, d2)

e.Command.Parameters.Item(0).Value = d1

e.Command.Parameters.Item(1).Value = d2
End If
End Sub

I just wanted to share this, I hope this would help

This time they introduced new type of subscription which depends on how much of Gigs you download.

Prices are as follow:

Limited by bandwidth

256 Kbps costs 900 SP a month (~ $19) – 2 GB bandwidth – each extra 1 GB costs 200 SP (~ $4)

512 Kbps costs 1200 SP a month (~ $25) – 4 GB bandwidth – each extra 1 GB costs 200 SP (~ $4)

Flat rate (Open bandwidth)

256 Kbps costs 1450 SP a month (~ $30)

512 Kbps costs 2300 SP a month (~ $48)

1 Mbps costs 3350 SP a month (~ $71)

2 Mbps costs 6100 SP a month (~ $130)

4 Mbps costs 11600 SP a month (~ $246)

8 Mbps costs 22600 SP a month (~ $480)

So these are the new prices, what do you think?

Well I don’t they are bad.

But the crappy thing is that they doesn’t have any subscriptions available!! It means that if you and want to subscribe, they got non! That’s what they say. Speed and stablility still sucks.

So what good are the new prices if there is no subscriptions!!?????

With C# you would be probably clearing the objects you no longer need from the memory using the Dispose method.

But if you dispose a Windows Form in C#, the whole application will quit! WHY?

That’s because by default C# select a start up form defined in the Program.cs file like this:

Application.Run(new Form1());

So to fix this just delete the “new Form1()” , and load up an instance of the form you want from Main() in the Program.cs so the whole thing will look like:

Form1 frm1 = new Form1();
frm1.Show();
Application.Run();

Now you can load and dispose forms all you want without the application quiting on you:)

The service let you backup your mobile by first installing a software from the company (a .sis file some program) and then it uploads all kinds of data from the mobile like the SMS, MMS, Contacts, Calendar, and folders to be stored online, where you can manage them.

I heard the service will be like a subscription, there is a 3 months plan, 6 months, and a year subscription. The one year subscription costs 350 S.P (~$8). Without GPRS costs probably.

This service is especially useful when you lose your mobile or when it gets stolen, so then you can restore your mobile data.

I see this as a really cool feature and great advance in services provided by the SyriaTel.

There is a service which I’ve been using for a while to back up my mobile and it is Mobile Network independent, which is ZYB. The only thing I miss with ZYB is that it doesn’t backup MMS, SMS, nor special folders.

Sharepoint does have a Scale Survey, but if you glimps at it you can’t tell who got the best score, which is something they wanted for the “Employee of the month”.

So in the same way I did to read the items of the Choice Survey, I did it again with some modifications. So instead of looking for the “Choice” type, I used “GridChoice”. Also, the value of the response is different. In a GridChoice value you woud see something like:

Co-operation#4#Skills#3#Outgoing#4#Ideas#3#Attendance#2#


This means the employee got a vote of 4 out of 5 for Co-operation,3 for Skills,4 for Outgoing,3 for Ideas and 2 for Attendance.

So now all I had to do is find a way to extract the numbers out of the string and sum up the numbers for each employe. To do that I did the following C# function:


  private int ResponceScore(string expr)
  {
  String[] numbers = System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Split(expr, @"[^\d+]");
  int total = 0;
  foreach (String number in numbers)
  {
  if (number != "")
  {
  int num = int.Parse(number);
  total += num;
  }
  }
  return total;
  }


What the funtion does is it recieves the response’s text, use a regular expression to select or extract the numbers in the string, sum up the numbers of the response and send it back to be saved in an array or in a variable (Like adding to a variable for each employee).

So the final code is something like:

foreach (SPListItem item in SurveyList.Items)
  {
  foreach (SPField field in item.Fields)
  {
  if (field.TypeAsString == “GridChoice”)
  {
  if (field.Title.ToString() == “Employee Name”)
  {
  empScore+= ResponceScore(item[field.Title].ToString());
  }
}
}

So that is how I managed to do a web part to show the top scores in a Scale Survey in Sharepoint.

Have fun

I got this request where they wanted a Survey. Sharepoint does have survey, but it lacks statistics on the survey. In their Survey, the Choices for all the questions are identical. For example voting on “Employee of the Month”. After responding to this survey, they wanted to show the top employee in each Choice. The style of the answers are Choice type, where the user choose one of the option under the name of the employee. For example:
- Emplyee name 1
Choice 1: Co-Operation
Choice 2: Great Example

- Emplyee name 2
Choice 1: Co-Operation
Choice 2: Great Example
.
.
.

So the best solution is to make your Web Part read from that Survey’s items.

And to do that, we just need to loop through the Items of the Survey List, look for the “Choice” type of field in it and read its content (The choosen Choice. Choice 1 or Choice 2 … etc). The title of the field is the question text(Employee name).

So we need two loops one to look for the items, and one to look for items’ fields with the type “Choice” – then its title and content.

This is the code to do the loops and readings:

using (SPSite mySite = SPContext.Current.Web.Site)
{
using (SPWeb myWeb = mySite.OpenWeb())
{
SPList SurveyList = myWeb.Lists["Employee of the month"];
foreach (SPListItem item in SurveyList.Items)
{
foreach (SPField field in item.Fields)
{
if (field.TypeAsString == "Choice")
{
if (item[field.Title].ToString() == "Co-operation")
{
coop += field.Title.ToString() + ",";
}
else if (item[field.Title].ToString() == "Great Example")
{
example += field.Title.ToString() + ",";
}
}
}
}
}
}


Here I used normal string variables to store the names of the employees for each Choice, maybe you would like to use some sort of array instead, but I didn’t since I dont have many questions.

So when the code run, I will have something like the following in my variables:
Co-Operation variable: “Hasan B, Ahmad D, Farah H, Aya K, Hasan B, Amal K, Ahmad D”
Great Example variable: “Tahseen K, Sebhi J, Jafar A, Tahseen K”

Now by counting how many times each name is repeated for each choice, I can get an idea of who got the most votes for each choice.

I used the following C# function to count how many times each phrase or word accured in a string variable:

private string CountWords(string input)
{
char[] delims = new char[] { '.', ',', ';' };
string[] wordlist = input.Split(delims, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);
SortedList words = new SortedList();
foreach (string item in wordlist)
{
if (!words.ContainsKey(item))
words.Add(item, 1);
else
words[item]++;
}
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
foreach (KeyValuePair kvp in words)
sb.Append(kvp.Key + ": " + kvp.Value + "
");
return sb.ToString();
}


So now from my Web Part I can write:

writer.Write("Co-Operation" + "
" + CountWords(coop) + "
" +
"Great Example" + "
" + CountWords(example))


And the function CountWords will return me the number of times a name accured in that passed string variable which represents the Choice.

For my example the output would look like:

Co-Operation
Hasan B: 2
Ahmad D: 2
Aya K: 1
Amal K: 1
Farah H:1
Great Example
Tahseen K: 2
Jafar A: 1
Sebhi J: 1


This code needs some additions to make it more useful, but I searched on the net, and I didn’t find answer for this, so I thought I would share with you what I got so far. I’m probably going to work more on this.

Hope it helped.

I did a lot of research about this, and it seems to be the problem is in Vista drivers and how it handles DVI. If the LCD have VGA it would be much easier since the VGA is Plug and Play.

Microsoft promised to fix this bug with SP1. Now SP1 is out and seems it didn’t really fix the problem! At least it didn’t for me when I was trying to connect the computer with a 52″ Sharp LCD through DVI.

I tried updating the Graphics’s card driver, didn’t help. Tried to use a program called PowerStrip to define custom resolutions to be compatible with the LCD, also didn’t help.

At the end, I replaced the DVI cable with “DVI -> HDMI” cable, and finally it did work!

I didn’t remove the PowerStrip software, because I think I need to use it to define a custom resolution for the big LCD.

Look at this flayer for more info:

The event was organized by Basma organization and the marketing campaign by U.G.

This walking was arranged to raise the attention and understanding about Kids Cancer, and at the same time try to entertain the Kids.

There were some activities for the Kids like Painting, Painting on the faces, Clowns, lunching balloons, gifts, and some other stuff like small dances

A few facts I learned about Kids Cancer and some people should know about:

• Kids Cancer can effect kids from the ages 1 month to 18 years old.

• It is curable, but costs so much and needs specialized doctors. Unfortunately in Syria there isn’t enough support. There is one Center in Damascus which is lacking financial support and expertise. The available doctors aren’t much specialized in this.

• Cancer is NOT contagious! I heard stories saying that some parents lock their infected kids from the world!

Basma is an organization which try to help in this. Visit their site to get to know more about this and learn how you can help.

UPDATE: Here is a small Video capture I took from the event when the kids released the Balloons.

Kids Cancer Support Walking – The best video clips are right here

It looks like the company is becoming a major telecommunication player in the area serving customers in 22 country in the Middle East and Africa with a net income around $820 million dollars a year!

The rumors can be true since we saw that the company did recently buy a mobile network company called Fastlink in Jordan, and the MTC company which is originally in Kuwait but also has branches in Iraq, Yaman, Sudan, Bahrain, Lebanon, and other branches in ~14 country. So it seems to be a natural move if they did really buy the SyriaTel network.

From what I heard they offer great modern services. There is this cool feature which let you make International call with the fees of a local call! Of course only if both parties have a Zain phone number.

Personally I hope this rumor is true.

Yes I’ve been away for some time, and now I’m back with my new Virtual Home so make your self at home and take a look around. You’re welcome.

See you