Category: 3594

I was sitting with a dear friend, and we were talking about the new Windows Phone 7,  and the how it compares with the competition (iPhone, Android and Blackberry; notice no mention of Nokia here), and the Apple App Marketplace was mentioned, then my friend suddenly asks: why doesn’t Microsoft have a Windows Marketplace, that would be a great idea?

My immediate reaction was; what the … ?! Microsoft does have a Windows Marketplace and has had one for quite a while now. When I told my friend this he asked, well, why doesn’t Microsoft market this place? Why did I never hear of it before?

To tell you the truth, his was a good question, and it took me some time to realize this; Microsoft really doesn’t market a lot of its work well, doesn’t it? I mean, I grew up hearing the words “Microsoft is nothing but a great big marketing machine” and “the marketing people at Microsoft created this image” and stuff like that, to the point where I started to believe it was true.

But it really isn’t true, not to this point anyway. Microsoft does have a big advertising budget, but IMHO that is only targeted to products it can sell, products like Windows, Office, SharePoint and Windows Phone 7. A lot of other products go unnoticed, simply because nobody knew they even existed. I mean, up until I told everybody, nobody knew Microsoft had their own free antivirus product you can install i.e. Microsoft Security Essentials; operative word is free here.

Other things Microsoft does that go unnoticed are success stories, did you know that MySpace uses SQL Server? As a matter of fact, 440 SQL instances, yes, four-hundred-and-forty instances. Not only that, the total data managed by SQL Server is a whopping 1 petabyte (1 petabyte = 1024 Terrabytes = 1,048,576 Gigabytes), with 130 million users, 300,000 new users every day and 4.4 million concurrent users at peak time. Try that on for scalability and stability!!

Back to the Microsoft Marketplace, not only does Microsoft have a marketplace for Windows, it has one for Office, Mobile and Xbox. Yes, that is correct, four! And here they are:

• Windows Marketplace
• Windows Phone Marketplace
• Microsoft Office Marketplace
• Xbox Marketplace

So you see, Microsoft really is a changed company, and not all for the worse either. What do you think?

Links:

• http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/
• http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000004532
• http://www.windowsmarketplace.com/
• http://marketplace.windowsphone.com/Default.aspx
• http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/
• http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/

Bashar Lulu / MVP – Visual Basic / INETA Country Leader – Arabian Gulf / My website: www.basharlulu.net / Read my blog: http://basharlulu.blogspot.com / My development framework: http://www.jclframework.net/

Almost every Arabic speaking person I know does this; they write Arabic words using English letters. When chatting, SMSing or even blogging.

That’s somewhat normal, since they’ve memorized the English keyboard by heart. The problem is, some of the letters in the Arabic alphabet are missing in English, and therefore people have replaced these with numbers and combinations of numbers and letters.

For example, the Arabic letter ‘ع’ is replaced with the number ‘3’. And the letter ‘ء’ with ‘2’. Which makes the name ‘علاء’ in Arabic translate to ‘3ala2’ in English literals.

If anything, this makes reading very difficult.

Introducing Maren, Microsoft Egypt’s solution to the problem! Watch the video on the site and you’ll understand…

Download it here.

Links:
http://www.getmaren.com

Bashar Lulu / MVP – Visual Basic / INETA Country Leader – Arabian Gulf / My website: www.basharlulu.net / Read my blog: http://basharlulu.blogspot.com / My development framework: http://www.jclframework.net/

Neither could I. Xobni (pronounced zob-nee) is ‘Inbox’ spelt backwards, and has been hailed by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates as the ‘next generation of social networking’.

At first glance Xobni looks like yet-another-desktop-search-engine, much like Google Desktop and Windows Desktop Search. A second glance would prove all the difference.

Officially, Xobni is an Outlook plug-in ‘that helps you organize your flooded inbox’ (which doesn’t say much).

While indexing your email Xobni will group contacts you email together much like the way Facebook and LinkedIn do. It will provide you with information on who this contact ‘networks’ with (based on the people he Cc’s when emailing you), how many emails you have exchanged with each contact (in and out) and will even rank your contacts based on the number of emails you send.

Xobni will even let you know how many ‘conversations’ you have had with a particular contact and what files you exchanged with him/her.

Xobni will even attempt to associate telephone numbers with contacts based on ‘signatures’ and other algorithms and will allow you to call them using Skype. Whenever you click on an email (to read or preview it) Xobni will immediately provide you with the most relevant information for the person who has sent you the email.

Microsoft seems to have been interested in Xobni, but were turned down, price issues (rings-a-bell?). Xobni are planning versions for different email applications / services, but right now, its only for Outlook. Remember, its still in beta.

Enjoy!

Links:

• http://www.xobni.com/

Don’t know about you, but personally I love Office 2007. Despite what I hear and read about it, it is much easier than its predecessor (which ultimately means it is more efficient).

Having said that, the number one problem users new to Office 2007 face is the ‘ribbon’. To them, everything’s NOT where they used to have it and that actually reduces efficiency.

Therefore, the guys at OfficeLabs (online at http://www.officelabs.com, BTW powered by SharePoint) have come up with what they think would be the solution to some of their troubles; the search command ribbon.

What this does, is allow you to search for whatever command you’re looking for and the search result will actually be displayed in the ribbon itself.

A picture is worth a thousand words:

Remember, if you decide to download and install this, you should bear in mind that Microsoft will be gathering information with regards to your usage, and you can NOT disable this.

IMHO we ‘developers’ should be doing more with regards to integrating solutions into Office using the new ‘VSTO’ (Visual Studio Tools for Office). Right?

Ok. I just read about this on some blog. Microsoft’s “Live Mesh is an ambitious initiative — a combination of a platform and a service” or “a Software + Services platform for synchronization and collaboration” or simply “I think it’s being able to interact with your data anywhere you go across a number of devices”

‘Nuff said. Click on the links to find more!

Unfortunately, there’s a waiting list to try it out. I’ll try and see if I can pull some MVP muscle to get it.

Awesome!

Links:

• http://content.zdnet.com/2346-12558_22-198563-1.html
• http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1355&tag=nl.e539
• http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=821&tag=nl.e539
• https://www.mesh.com/

Ok for all of you out there who take their music seriously; Zune 2 is out. Yes, and it comes in new sizes, colors, capacities and of course, prices.

Here are a few of the update details for Zune 2 (source: ZuneScene):

1. Glass: The plastic screen has been replaced with actual glass. On a hardness scale of 1-10 where 10 is a diamond and 1 is an iPod, glass is 5.5. This is a major improvement over the Zune 30.
2. Video Out: The new Zune 80 will have a video out resolution of 720×576 maximum. This is for TV output and easily beats the original Zune’s 320×240 output. The LCD itself is the same 320×240 however. Warning to Zune 4/8 shoppers, there is not video output to TV on those flash memory units.
3. Smaller: Yes the Zune 2 is much smaller in size this generation. It actually weighs less than the latest 80gb iPod. This weight difference could be and advantage for Tour de France competitors and people who don’t like to weigh down the school backpack with hefty devices.
4. WiFi: Would you like to be the first on the block to sync your player from the car in the driveway? Very 007-ish, Q would be proud.
5. FM: Most players require an expensive ($49) add on accessory that sticks out the bottom of the player. Built in FM is just smart.
6. Squircle: The Zune Pad offers both tactile d-pad type control and also touch sensitivity. Have your cake and eat it too.

I’m actually considering one!

Links:
http://www.zune.net/en-US/meetzune/
http://www.zunescene.com/
http://www.news.com/2300-1041_3-6211316.html?tag=ne.gall.rbcs

Hey, all you Facebook fans out there, Microsoft and Facebook have launched a partnership and Microsoft has released a ‘Facebook Developer Toolkit’ which allows you to create applications for Facebook using Microsoft Popfly and Visual Studio Express.

You can even create a Windows Forms application that connects to Facebook using Facebook’s API!! Now that I like!

Enjoy!!

Links:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/express/bb510381.aspx

New releases from Microsoft for all you developers out there:

• Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2
• .Net Framework 3.5 Beta 2, and
• SilverLight 1.0 Release Candidate

Happy downloading!

Links:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/default.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/install.aspx

I know its been so long since I last blogged, but I’ve been extremely busy. I promise to come back, with a vengeance.

Meanwhile, enjoy this wonderful article Top 10 Hidden Gems in SQL Server 2005, courtesy of my MVP friends Moustafa Arafa and Alirez Aliabadi (who’s now in Canada).

Enjoy!!

Links:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/bestpractice/gems-top-10.mspx

‘Don’t have the time to read a 10-page how-to article or watch a full length webcast? Try an MSDN Nugget, a webcast that takes you step-by-step to discovering new functionality or exploring a hot developer topic, all in 10-15 minutes. View them online now or download for later reference.’

Links
http://www.microsoft.com/uk/msdn/nuggets/