Category: 3601

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/

Line and Shape controls, PrintForm component, and Printer Compatibility LibraryMicrosoft Visual Basic 2005 Power Packs 2.0 includes a new set of Line and Shape controls and updated versions of the two previously released Visual Basic 2005 Power Packs, the PrintForm Component and the Printer Compatibility Library. All three are now included in a single assembly making them even easier to use and redistribute with your application.

Links:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vbasic/bb735936.aspx

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

‘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/

Free!

Step-by-step training and downloadable samples illustrating Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 features.

Enjoy!

Links
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb251751.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=26E4FF75-E68D-4B34-9C60-94BA1937B467&displaylang=en

From an online download website: ‘Microsoft XML NotePad 2007 assists developers in creating XML applications. It allows authors to rapidly build and edit small sets of XML data as a test bed during the development of XML-based applications.

With XML Notepad, you can create XML document prototypes quickly, easily, and in an iterative fashion, using familiar metaphors. XML Notepad offers an intuitive and simple user interface that graphically represents the tree structure of XML data.

Working with the standard building blocks of XML (Elements, Attributes and Text), authors are able to create reproducible data structures that can be easily filled. It also includes XMLDiff to visually compare the differences between 2 two XML files.’

Download here!
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=72d6aa49-787d-4118-ba5f-4f30fe913628&displaylang=en
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/xmlnotepad.html

Read more here:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa905339.aspx