Friday, October 06, 2006
Good bye every Geeks with Blogs, I am moving to:
http://msmvps.com/blogs/omar
Good bye every Geeks with Blogs, I am moving to:
http://msmvps.com/blogs/omar
Thursday, May 04, 2006
Pageflakes won the Web 2.0 Award for #1 Start Page. See the "Start Page" category from:
http://web2.0awards.org
#2 is Google's IG and #3 is Microsoft's Windows Live.
Pageflakes is developed using ASP.NET 2.0 and Microsoft Atlas.
Here's what Pageflakes say:
Pageflakes is your personalized Internet. You can add what you like and remove what you don't like - and it's totally simple. What you see on the site right now is just a selection of a few standard modules ("flakes", as we call them) that allow you to read blogs, do web searches, create a to-do list, check your Gmail account and read the latest news. Normally you'd have to go to a different web page for each of those things. With Pageflakes, you have it all on one page! And it's all free.
Note: You can now create public sites and share your page with your friends! Setup a personal site very easily and collaboratively work together
Sunday, April 23, 2006
StickOut is a desktop sticky note application with multi-user support and Outlook integration. It is a .NET Framework 2.0 Windows Forms application that uses .NET Remoting to communicate with other StickOut users and exchange sticky notes with them. It uses the new .NET Framework 2.0 IPC Channel for communicating between Microsoft Outlook and the StickOut process. The Outlook Add-in allows you to stick anything out to the desktop from Outlook including e-mails, notes, tasks, appointments, etc., as sticky notes. Care has been taken to reduce the memory footprint of a .NET application significantly and to make a fast and smooth user experience. This article chronicles my first day of planning the application, through subsequent design, development, testing, and deployment days, revealing the evolution of the application, and the complications I dealt with at each step. You will read about lots of .NET tricks, deployment and versioning problems, Visual Studio tricks, and some other non-development–related tricks that might help you to boost your daily development work.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnwinforms/html/stickout.asp
Hope you enjoy it!
Sunday, November 13, 2005
Plugin 1: WYSI-Wordpress Plugin - Adds a WYSIWYG Editor
This plugin adds a WYSIWYG editor to the advanced editing screen of Wordpress, allowing you to edit posts as you would in any word processor application. It also includes an image uploader and manager. I personally find this plugin outstanding and it helps tremendously with your editing.
There are 4 others, check out from this page.
Introducing Google Analytics.
Sophisticated. Easy. Free.
Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site. You'll be able to focus your marketing resources on campaigns and initiatives that deliver ROI, and improve your site to convert more visitors.
http://www.google.com/analytics/images/intro_small.jpg
Saturday, November 12, 2005
This paper addresses some of the questions about customizing grid display that are commonly asked in newsgroups, on Web sites, and in other developer forums. The techniques described here are sometimes quite simple and at other times somewhat involved. In each case, however, they address a question of how to go beyond the basic functionality of the DataGrid control.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dv_vstechart/html/vbtchtopquestionsaboutaspnetdatagridservercontrol.asp
Topics:
Windows Forms versus Web Forms DataGrid Controls
Controlling Column Width, Height, and Alignment
Customizing Column Layout in Display and Edit Mode
Formatting Dates, Currency, and Other Data
Showing and Hiding Columns Dynamically
Adding Columns Dynamically
Adding New Records to a Data Source Using the DataGrid Control
Displaying a Drop-Down List in Edit Mode
Selecting Multiple Items Using a Check Box (Hotmail Model)
Editing Multiple Rows At Once
Selecting Rows by Clicking Anywhere
Monday, November 07, 2005
I recently attended the MVP Summit 2005 at Delhi, India. It’s a 3 days of rigorous training, seminar, team activities, grand lunch and dinner and also a lot of fun filled activities. Everyday we used to get to seminars at 9 AM, get nutrition to our brains till 7 PM and then go out for some heavy dinner, parties, fun filled activities.
MVPs are inspired personalities. All of them share the same passion for technologies and a great desire to share it with others without expecting any return. MVPs are selfless contributors to technical forums, blogs, User groups all over the world. They have only one thought in mind all the time, how to make Microsoft products better, easier and more accessible to everyone and help everyone get more results from those products. Such dedication and mentality surely make them superior technical personalities than the rest of us in many ways. Microsoft proudly awards “Most Valuable Professional” (MVP), the topmost technical award in their domain to recognise those selfless individuals who spent their valuable time making the world better for developers and IT Professionals all over the world.
Friday, November 04, 2005
Model-Driven Development is a hot topic in the developer community, but many still don't know how to make it work in real-life projects. By offering developers built-in guidance, tangible architect makes Model-Driven Development finally accessible to everyone. I have been working on a new custom UML designer for making the design process a lot easier than using generic UML designer. It will be released soon. Check out the cool app:
www.tangible.de
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
How to run scheduled jobs from ASP.NET without requiring a Windows Service to be installed on the server? Very often we need to run some maintenance tasks or scheduled tasks like sending reminder emails to users from our websites. This can only be achieved using a windows service. ASP.NET being stateless provides no support to run some code continuously or to run code at scheduled time. As a result, we have to make our own Windows Services in order to run scheduled jobs or cron jobs. But in a shared hosted environment, we do not always have the luxury to deploy our own windows service to our hosting provider’s web server. We either have to buy a dedicated server which is very costly, or sacrifice such features in our web solution. However, running scheduled task is a very handy feature especially for sending reminder emails to users, maintenance reports to administrator, run cleanup operations etc. So, I will show you a tricky way to run scheduled jobs using pure ASP.NET without requiring any windows service. This solution runs on any hosting service providing just ASP.NET hosting:
http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/ASPNETService.asp
If you find this article useful, please vote for me.
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Everything you can imagine about CSS, Javascript, Blogging, and other web related technologies, you will find it here:
http://www.bobbyvandersluis.com/main/linkLibrary.php
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
.NET 2.0 introduced an interesting feature in the "Process" class where you can specify UserName, Password and it runs the process as the specified user. However, it only works inside Console Application. It does not run if the application is a Windows Application. It throws "Win32Exception Access Denied" when the Start() is called. Is it as designed? I really need this feature in a windows service.
Try the following code in a console app, it will run perfectly. But change the application type to "Windows Application" and run, it will throw exception. IF you do not set the UserName, Password, it will run then. I am using VS 2005 Release Candidate.
Here's the code:
ProcessStartInfo startInfo = new
ProcessStartInfo(@"SampleEXE.exe");
startInfo.Domain = ".";
startInfo.UserName = "test";
// create a secure string from the password we have
SecureString securePassword = new SecureString();
foreach (char c in "test")
securePassword.AppendChar(c);
securePassword.MakeReadOnly();
startInfo.Password = securePassword;
startInfo.UseShellExecute = false;
startInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = true;
startInfo.RedirectStandardError = true;
startInfo.RedirectStandardInput = false;
startInfo.CreateNoWindow = true;
startInfo.WindowStyle = ProcessWindowStyle.Hidden;
startInfo.WorkingDirectory =
Path.GetDirectoryName(startInfo.FileName);
//if( info.Properties.ContainsKey(ARGUMENTS_ATTRIBUTE) )
// startInfo.Arguments =
info.Properties[ARGUMENTS_ATTRIBUTE];
startInfo.Arguments = "Hi Hello How are you?";
using (Process p = new Process())
{
p.StartInfo = startInfo;
p.Start();
string fileName = @"output.txt";
using (StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(fileName))
{
writer.Write(p.StandardOutput.ReadToEnd());
writer.Close();
}
p.WaitForExit();
p.Close();
}
Thursday, October 13, 2005
A homepage that earns million dollar. You can book one pixel on this page with $1.
http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/
You can also book space on this Zero Dollar Homepage free of cost:
http://www.zerodollarhomepage.com/
Monday, October 10, 2005
Here's an easy way to know the folder where all the .NET framework files are installed:
Debug.WriteLine( Path.GetDirectoryName( typeof(object).Assembly.Location ) );