Remon's Space

APPHOLES!

Remon Zakaria — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 06:02:52 GMT

I have just seen a tweet from Scott Hanselman about the amazing sarcastic Jon Stewart grilling Apple for their very aggressive move on Jason Chen.

I will not talk a lot about it, the fiasco has been already allover the internet. But I want to express about a thought:

I never liked Apple. Even before I had a computer, I always see them as arrogant & cocky. Google is being on that thin line between the spirit they’ve started with (Go No Evil) & fall into the arrogance hole, but apple did which is always the beginning of the end.

Apple reminds me somehow with the model of cheerleaders in US high schools. the type who is bitchy to everyone else (friends, geeks, & even teachers).

The question is: Is this really the beginning of the end of Apple’s image as the unique slick stuff who refuse to cooperate with anyone else in the world?

Apple has a very powerful brand, a very loyal & huge users. However, with this kind of exposure, arrogance mistakes like Jason Chen’s will amplify these mistakes & gradually people will let go of apple to a younger, more “good” product.

Apple won’t go down in the near future, but making enemies & negative public opinion was never good for any company/person in the history. Microsoft learned the lesson & they’re trying to do good. Apparently Apple still has a way to go in that!

I am an official Judge for Imagine Cup Finalists in Egypt!

Remon Zakaria — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 23:52:32 GMT

I have the honor to be an official judge for Microsoft Imagine Cup Final 4 projects in Egypt.

Imagine Cup is an annual competition sponsored and hosted by Microsoft Corp. which brings together young technologists worldwide to help resolve some of the world's toughest challenges. Primarily a software design competition, it enlists teams of four within the high school and collegiate levels to submit software solutions addressing a specifically provided theme. Started in 2002, it has steadily grown in size, where in 2008 210,000 competitors representing over 100 countries competed in the nine Imagine Cup invitationals.

Imagine Cup was in Egypt Last year & I attended the closing ceremony. It was awesome the number and quality of ideas that students all over the world spend time & efforts to solve real problems around the world, for that I am proud to be part of this event!

I will give you a feedback on the updates as we go, follow me on twitter @remon_z & I will give you as real time updates as i can about the contestants.

I will be Presenting at the Faculty of Engineer, Ain Shams University

Remon Zakaria — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 04:14:00 GMT

I will be presenting at Code Camp Reloaded event at Ain Shams university, organized by a group of enthusiastic student engineers at the university.

The session will start at 1:30 PM, Next Friday (23/April/2010). See you all there!

It’s dirty , It’s sad, It’s monopoly! Telecom Egypt kills Skype!

Remon Zakaria — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 06:31:54 GMT

It’s been couple of days & I have been hearing and experiencing the rumors of Skype is not allowed on Egyptians mobile phones anymore!

I have read this article on The Daily News Egypt today & it is confirming that National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority (AKA NTRA) will shutdown Skype on Mobile Phones & Portable mobile internet as well.

That sucks! Why would they do that ?

Simple! Telecom Egypt cannot handle the beating it’s taking from Skype. Skype is a young vibrant business that has people working very hard to invent a solution for expensive international phone calls & they succeeded! Now since old heaving slow Telecom Egypt cannot compete with Skype they are forcing the government to ban Skype for their sole benefit!

Is this Ethical ?

NO! It is not Ethical to call your big daddy & ask him to help you when you are in a fight. You go in & fight your fight, win or lose with honor.

Is this a conflict of interest ?

YES YES YES! NTRA is responsible for supervising, organizing & monitoring the telecommunication in general to ensure smooth operations. It’s not their job to step in, force a decision to save a particular company from being doomed due to its incompetency!

“This is not something new, but [mobile providers] weren’t required to enforce it until recently.”

Quoted Khaled Hegazy, external affairs director for Vodafone Egypt. That is correct it is not something new, however, that doesn’t mean it is correct back then! We are trying very hard to get foreign investments into Egypt, that requires very reliable infrastructure to protect your investments. And since Cairo is the most crowded cities in the world, foreigners afraid to drink our tap water and we have a very hot weather, telecommunication is currently the most reliable infrastructure aspect we depend on to bring investments into Egypt.

By banning Skype, NTRA cuts the small & individuals business relations to the outside world. They lose MILLIONS of investment opportunities by banning such technology.

Is this good for anyone?!

Besides Phone companies? NO! Most individuals who cannot get around that decision (using proxies & such) to bypass that restriction, will just give up. All young minds full of power will be pushed back with frustration to find something “else” to do.

Companies who won’t go around for that, they will use the Telecom Egypt phone lines & start charging that to their customers making them lose one of their most competitive edges, Price! leading them to an unfair comparison with India & China which is not going to end in their favor!

This is not the end of it!

They have also said that other voice over IP technology vendors such as Yahoo & MSN will be banned as well. I guarantee you, this is only a first step to ban Skype on all connections whether it’s a portable, mobile or fixed internet connection you have.

Conclusion

NTRA has misused their authorities taking such a “short-sighted” decision protecting an old company & telecommunication giants (who could’ve taken of themselves but they took the easy governmental path) from such a young competitor like Skype.

People will learn to go around that banning, no real value will come to anyone. Probably Telecom companies will fall again with battle with another technology instead of doing some heave R&D to save themselves for all the future promising open technologies.

Let’s hope such a decision does not stay for long to protect what we’ve been working hard for so long!

dotnetwork’s March 2010 Gathering

Remon Zakaria — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 03:53:32 GMT

After CairoCodeCamp’10, we’re back to our monthly gatherings.

This month we’ll have Mohammed Moussa & Mohammed Samy will talk about How would you apply Domain Driven Design with Entity Framework 4.0.

This session was planned for CairoCodeCamp’10, but for some GUC restrictions, we had to cancel it then, so here’s your chance to see it & learn some pretty cool stuff!

Want a cool .net Ninja by telerik or a free 1 month or 1 year voucher from tekpub? Pay attention & answer the speakers questions :)

RSVP on Facebook event in here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=357036403158

See you all there!

CairoCodeCamp’10, Are we there yet ?

Remon Zakaria — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 08:30:00 GMT

Back to blogging after organizing & participating in a very successful & exhausting CairoCodeCamp’10 conference. We had the perception that CairoCodeCamp is just a regular Code Camp. It’s a big community event organized by dotnetwork.org user group , the first & biggest offline user group in Egypt.

CairoCodeCamp is the biggest conference dotnetwork is organizing throughout the whole year.

CairoCodeCamp hits multiple birds actually with one stones. It:

1. Provides a chance for a large amount of students, professional developers, business owners & software entrepreneurs to meet and socialize, facilitating TONS of opportunities for all participants to help them evolve even more.
2. Allows exponentially increasing number of speakers to be in the same place presenting very useful sessions on all of the software’s technical & business aspects, maximizing the learning value for all participants.
3. Invites high profile world-class grade speakers to speak at CairoCodeCamp. That gives Egypt a necessary exposure for the global software community and helping us marketing Egypt as a critical Landmark of technology in the Middle East.

CairoCodeCamp’09 was the first big conference we organize. It had 18 sessions presented by 5 domestic speakers & 4 international speakers.

CairoCodeCamp’10 was way bigger. We had more exposure. It had 40 sessions presented by 20 domestic speakers & 7 international speakers.

We have had the best sponsors ever! They have been very helpful in such bad global economy status. For them we are very thankful for helping making this dream come true!

So, we’re talking through the path , but are we there yet ? Not yet! We want more recognition & more people to learn & benefit their society and the world!

We have already started working on CairoCodeCamp’11. Please feel free to contact us through www.CairoCodeCamp.com , if you have any feedbacks, notes, ideas or want to help!

Thank you dotnetwork team, Speakers, all of our sponsors & Big Buddy Society for working as a team, making this event happen!

A Chinese Restaurant and a software house. What’s the difference ?

Remon Zakaria — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 08:46:00 GMT

I am going to tell you a short but real story, so please imagine that you’re us down there:

I went out for dinner with Yasser Makram, who joined recently DashSoft, last Friday. He recommended a Chinese restaurant that has great noodles. We went in hoping to get one awesome authentic Chinese meal.

An Egyptian waiter came along with the Chinese waitress, telling her to “be silent” so he can deal with us. We ordered 2 noodles soup and one beef stripes that looked very delicious “in the picture”. Service was fast, noodles came , then the beef. we actually couldn’t call it beef “stripes” we called it beef “threads” it was a very thin piece of meet with a crust over it inflated by a huge amount of air between them.

We were very annoyed, because the target was to “eat” a big portion of beef, not “see” a big portion of beef while it’s empty on the inside.

We asked the waiter to change it with chicken (hoping it would be good this time). He kept convincing us that “this is the Chinese way & there’s no mistake in the beef”.

After “4 minutes” of arguing. We asked him to get the restaurant manager. He went & them came back alone & said “The manager said that this order is already out & we can’t change it”.

That was pretty depressing for us, however, we insisted not to be treated like that. While thinking of that, a Chinese waitress came and asked us to meet the manager. The manager says with a big smile “I am Chinese, This is Chinese food and how we make it. In all cases, I am sorry and we want to see you here again. Thank you!”

Beside the type of business and the place we couldn’t find any differences between a Chinese restaurant and a software house. However, we found out many similarities between the waiter and the developer (I put all of them between “” in the story) :

1. “Be silent”. – Developers can communicate in front of customers in the exact same way they communicate between each others while working. That would give a HUGE bad image to the customer about the vendor.

2. Under-promise, over-deliver. – Developers could promise very good thing to be delivered as “in the picture”, however, instead of the specifications, you find something way different in the value “beef threads, not beef stripes” EVEN IF It’s done the RIGHT way.

3. Customers look always about the business value in the product, while developers look how the product is being done. The developers would keep defending their quality of work without having the customer perspective that (in our case) This perfectly-made-Chinese-way-beef doesn’t not provide the value for a hungry customer.

4. Resisting customer change requests would always lead to customers leaving. By resisting customers change requests, even if we deliver things 100% the-developers-right-way. This will lead to customers leave. That’s why good developers always try to apply concepts like YAGNI, DRY and Agile to be flexible enough to accept customers changes and implement them in a “feasible” timeframe.

5. It’s not about the situation, it’s about you handle it. I have just heard that sentence for a very experienced guy I care about his opinions, right before we go to the restaurant. The sentence kept popping up in my head when the waiter was talking to us and when the manager was talking to us. You don’t have to be the owner or the manager to have high ownership. Whatever you do if it aims to customer satisfaction is very appreciated by both customers and management. Always keep in mind that you have to talk to your team about your decisions, so that you don’t lead the whole team to a bigger mess.

One last thought, Some customers do usually abuse the vendors. These notes/guidelines above would really help them eat up the teams with no real appreciation from their side. The key is how to smartly incorporate those guidelines within your lifestyle, this comes with experience , so, if you don’t have enough experience, always try to ask more experienced people about what would they do in the situation.

Enjoy…

How to select a phone with a durable touch screen

Remon Zakaria — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:55:33 GMT

The problem

I have had the worst experience with HTC in general. I’ve got HTC Touch Dual since its release at a pretty expensive rate. a year later, the screen started to lose its sensitivity & it’s become very hard to close or view the running applications.

After paying more than $150 at the local HTC customer support & In less than a month it’s failed again.

The research

I started to research the screens & I found out the HTC Touch Dual has a “resistive” touch screen, the resistive screen are very vulnerable and weak. on the other hand, the “capacitive” touch screens are way more durable in general & with a good quality.

Here’s a comparison about the two screens types.

So? What to buy ?

If you are OK with paying a little extra money, and do have problems with resistive screens like I do (phone being pressured in your jeans pocket, etc…), then you have to buy a phone like Samsung Omnia or iPhone which utilize the capacitive touch screens.

I’ll be doing more intense research on what to get in general & keep you posted in another post.

Enjoy!

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 won’t open – Cannot Create The Window

Remon Zakaria — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:10:54 GMT

I am having Windows 7 64 bit RTM installed on it Office Mondo TP 32 bit (64 bit version doesn’t work correctly with the Windows Mobile Device Center) Along with VS2008 & VS 2010 Beta 1.

I have found a post by Gary Pretty (Thank you for that Garry!) that solves the problem by replacing the msvcm100.dll installed with Office Mondo with the one installed with VS2010 originally.

The problem is that if you’re having a 64 bit operation system, you don’t/shouldn’t replace the file in the system32 folder, instead you should replace the one on the “SysWOW64” folder.

Enjoy!

dotnetwork is to donate 50 brand new shirts to the “Resala” charity.

Remon Zakaria — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 22:23:16 GMT

On 14th of September 2009, it is announced on dotnetwork.org’s official site. dotnetwork.org, the first offline user group in Egypt is to donate 50 brand new shirts to Resala, one of the biggest community-driven charity movements in Egypt.

The donation was in contribution of the “1/2 million Eid cloths” campaign that Resala has initiated in the beginning of Ramadan.

Way to go Resala & dotnetwork!

Shrimps in microwave in less than 10 minutes!

Remon Zakaria — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 11:55:40 GMT

As promised, this is the first article in the microwave quick cooking recipes. Today will do a very nice shrimps on the microwave.

Ingredients:

2 tbsp butter (yes, don’t worry about the fats)
5 cloves garlic, minced (or 1 tbsp garlic powder)
2 Tbsp. lemon juice (or 2 lemons)
2 Tbsp. chopped fresh parsley (it’s ok if you don’t have that right away, but it would be better if you do)
1/2 tsp. salt (& you can add more after the last step if you feel you need to)
1/8 tsp. white pepper
1/2 kg medium shrimps, peeled & washed well.

Steps:

1. Cook all ingredients except the shrimp in an open over for 3-4 minutes (if the butter is solid) or for 1.5 minutes if the butter is liquid.

2. Add the shrimp to the mix, cover with plastic wrap or others & allow the steam to exit a bit. put in the oven on “high” for 3-5 minutes until the shrimps turn pink.

3. Get out of the bowl, leave on a solid surface for 3 minutes before serving.

Enjoy!

Can’t uninstall Office 2010! - This product installation has been corrupted.

Remon Zakaria — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 02:56:46 GMT

The version falsely leaked as Office 2010 Beta1 has a problem with the uninstaller. If you get the message “This product installation has been corrupted” then I found a good way for you (Thanks to Vikas Narula) to uninstall it manually.

Vikas:

“The Problem is a missing file in the installation folder of office 2010. Office 2010 has an Setup Controller directory and uses the directory to check the installed components. please check the directory "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\OFFICE14\Office Setup Controller\Groove.en-us\". if you have no "Setup.xml" file there please copy the file from the "Groove.en-us" directory of the source files to this directory and test the uninstallation again.”

Code Snippets – The developer’s neglected friend!

Remon Zakaria — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 03:09:10 GMT

Snippets are a very valuable tool that Visual Studio provides. Whether you are in a Startup or a Corporate.

Snippets would be an extremely useful tool to apply best practices patterns, coding standards, sharing knowledge & increasing productivity.

It’s very recommended to have all of your snippets in one place, motivate your team members & other teams to share the snippets , adding keywords & tag them. This would dramatically increases productivity, minimizes common mistakes & add up to the overall developer experience and awareness.

It would be great as well if it’s started with some motivation ideas like the best snippet of the month & reward the most active snippet author , etc…

I’ll start doing my share of contribution & add any snippet I add tagged by Snippets.

The human side of a geek!

Remon Zakaria — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 23:23:11 GMT

It’s always known that the “computer” guys are “geeks”. They don’t talk, walk, or live without computers.

Long story short, I found out that cooking is a very relaxing practice to relief the pressure I have at work. And the best thing is: Cooking has totally no high tech in it!

I’ve always liked the microwave, it’s pretty fast & make great food, only if you used it right, and the best part is you don’t have to wait for long hours to enjoy a nice fresh meals.

So, from now on. I will start posting the successful recopies out of the failed trials I do. You can find all of them tagged as Food and/or Microwave.

If any of my favorite geeks network want to share or add posts, let me know & I will create an author account for you.

Get ready. Make sure you have Ambulance on speed dial!

Can I install Windows 7 64 bit on my machine?

Remon Zakaria — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 08:14:57 GMT

A question I had in my mind for a while. I never really thought it is possible until I checked Intel’s site.

In order to install 64 bit systems, you need to check if your processor’s architecture does support it. Otherwise you can’t be able to use a 64 bit edition of any software.

Why should I switch to 64 bit systems?

For many reasons:

1. You system would be able to read larger memory storage (bigger than 4 GB).

2. If you are using x64 copy of your programs, your system would be faster.

3. You will notice the power of 64 bit if you are used to run multiple applications at the same time.

GREAT! Does my processor supports x64 architecture?

If your machine has AMD processors, AMD always says it explicitly so you won’t have a problem knowing that.

If your machine has an Intel processor though. You need to look over the site (products section) or you can just install the Intel processor Identification Utility. The utility will show all your processor technical information (including the 64 bit Architecture) as the picture below:

Anything to take care of before the installation?

Couple of things:

1. You’ll be needing to make a new clean install. You cannot upgrade a x86 (32 bit) OS to x64 one.

2. Don’t bother Backing up your files. The new Windows 7 Installer copies all the (Users, Program files & Windows) folders to a new folder (Windows.Old) when you do a clean install.

3. Try to check if your current programs have a 64 bit edition. Otherwise, if you’re not upgrading for larger memory, the upgrade won’t be pretty worth it.

Windows 7 cannot see the wireless hotspot suddenly

Remon Zakaria — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 00:12:01 GMT

I have been facing this problem for quite sometime now. to be honest, it’s pretty annoying. I work on my Dell Latitude D820 laptop & after a while the internet goes down & Windows cannot find the hotspot at all.

What happens is Windows shuts down the hardware device in order to save power. So what you need to do is simply prevent the windows from doing so as below:

1. Go to Device Manager

2. Locate your wireless adapter –> Right click –> Properties.

3. Go to Power Management tab & uncheck the option “Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power.”

If this solution doesn’t work. Try "manually” disabling and enabling the wireless adapter.

Also, the steps above did work for my Bluetooth adapter as it wasn’t able to find my Bluetooth headphones.

dotnetwork’s July'09 Gathering – The Entity Framework Day

Remon Zakaria — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 07:52:51 GMT

Another day is up. Entity framework geeks is showing us lots & lots of demos about Microsoft’s Entity Framework. It’s going to be awesome!

Next Saturday (July 18th 2009), at Del Vento Cafe. Attendance is free, you are not obliged to order a drink or anything. Just do it if you want to enjoy good taste with good technologies!

You need only to subscribe to the facebook event here. No eventbrite event this time.

See you there!

Microsoft Releases SilverLight 3

Remon Zakaria — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 01:36:35 GMT

By TechTree.com:

Microsoft has rolled out Silverlight 3 with a lot of new stuff including the Smooth screening feature. Silverlight is a browser plugin that enables rich media experience, audio playback, vector graphics and animation. Silverlight 3 was released a day early, as it was supposed to be out officially on July 10. Currently, Silverlight 3 supports Internet Explorer 6/7/8, Firefox 2/3 and Safari 3/4 browsers - no support for Opera and Chrome browsers.

Microsoft's Silverlight is a direct rival of Adobe Flash and is available for download from Microsoft's Silverlight site.
This new Silverlight 3 RTW (3.0.40264.0) version brings along a number of features, including Smooth Screening, GPU hardware acceleration, H.264/AAC/MPEG-4 Video support, and out-of-the-browser experience without any additional plugin downloads. Thousands of other API features are enumerated by Tim Heuer, program manager for Microsoft Silverlight.

Microsoft touts that Silverlight 3 brings streaming of high-definition video in full screen with stutter-free live and on-demand video. For a demo of Smooth Screening, head to this special link for checking out the Smooth Screening experience of playing HD video at any point of time, instantly. The third version will allow streaming of 720p HD content over the web with an ability to Pause and Rewind the video.
The GPU hardware acceleration support will allow this framework to make the best of the available graphics in the user's system. Apart from that, version 3 is a mash up of streaming video and offering Rich Internet Applications experiences. Developers would be able to create Silverlight based apps so that videos can be seen even if the browser is shut off.

Learn to type faster!

Remon Zakaria — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 07:24:38 GMT

A very important factor of your productivity depends on how fast do you type & how many times your eyes go off the code to the keyboard , then come back again to the screen searching for the line you were working on.

Let me tell you, if you worked hard on your keyboard typing speed & minimized your eye movements , you will be able to maximize significantly. This means more productivity & less time staying at the boring office ;)

Initially you can start testing your typing speed & work more on it, then you can Google videos & tools to train yourself how to speed up your typing.

Start here http://keybr.com/ to test your speed & use http://www.powertyping.com/ to practice more on how to start typing faster.

Type fast!!!

Oslo May 2009 CTP Released!

Remon Zakaria — Tue, 26 May 2009 13:10:15 GMT

Oslo May 2009 CTP is available to download from:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=827122a5-3ca0-4389-a79e-87af37cbf60d

You will find lots of classes that has been renamed & changed.

They have also added Quadrant, a Visual modeling tool that has been exclusive only to the PDC’08 attendees.

New in this CTP:

The "Quadrant" modeling tool. Use Quadrant to browse and edit models in a repository database.
Domain models for the UML 2.1 specification encompassing Use Case, Activity, Class, Sequence, Component diagrams, profiles and templates.
An XMI importer supporting the 2.1 specifications, and covering the diagrams identified above.
A domain model and loader for System.Runtime.

Happy Coding!

Getting Started with Visual Studio & TFS 2010

Remon Zakaria — Thu, 21 May 2009 10:27:48 GMT

You can find here detailed instructions on how to install Team foundation server 2010.

Also download the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Training Kit, it contains many samples & workshops to get you up to speed with almost everything in the new release.

Happy Coding!

Visual Studio 2010 Beta is our for Public!

Remon Zakaria — Wed, 20 May 2009 10:27:35 GMT

For non-MSDN subscribers, download Visual Studio 2010 Beta & TFS 2010 Beta it now from :

http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010/default.mspx

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Beta is available to MSDN subscribers

Remon Zakaria — Tue, 19 May 2009 01:36:33 GMT

Microsoft Announces the release of Visual Studio 2010 Beta, Visual Studio 2010 Professional Beta & Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta to MSDN subscribers. It will be available to public probably by the end of the month.

You can download it from here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/downloads/default.aspx

If you don’t have a MSDN subscription , you can check the documentation: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd831853(VS.100).aspx

Have a look at the features at the product page: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010/default.mspx

Stand by for more posts about the super cool features of Team System 2010!

Fix Etisalat Modem Connection

Remon Zakaria — Sun, 17 May 2009 00:34:48 GMT

I have had a problem with the Etisalat modem that it can’t authenticate at all with the ISP.

I get this error:

“Error 619: A connection to the remote computer could not be established, so the port used for this connection was closed.”

I called the Customer Support & It worked. Here’s how:

1. Open Etisalat 3.5G USB Modem Window

2. Go to Tools –> Options –> Profile Management

3. Create New Profile , Add a new profile name.

4. Change the APN to Static & use internet.etisalat (All small) in the APN Textbox

5. Save the Profile, Set it as default, restart the application & connect using the new profile.

The profile window should look like this:

dotnetwork’s May 2009 Gathering…

Remon Zakaria — Sun, 17 May 2009 00:26:49 GMT

For dotnetwork fans! Next gathering is up. Please make sure you get & print your ticket with you.

Get the tickets from here

Released: Windows Live Spaces Photos API (Alpha)

Remon Zakaria — Sun, 10 May 2009 20:59:12 GMT

Microsoft announces the release of the Windows Live Spaces Photo API (Alpha) and the Spaces Photo API Interactive SDK. The Photos API allows Web sites to view and update Windows Live Spaces photo albums using the WebDAV protocol. Sites can:

Upload or download photos.
Create, edit, or delete photo albums.
Request a list of a user's albums, photos, or comments.
Edit or delete content for an existing entry.
Query the content in an existing entry.

Try the Photos API Interactive SDK: Execute requests against your Spaces photos and get the sample code behind that request.

Read the Photos API docs.

Getting Started with Windows 7 RC

Remon Zakaria — Sun, 10 May 2009 07:20:13 GMT

I have just installed Windows 7 RC1 on my machine. I thought I should give some heads-up for small issues I have faced.

First Run Upgrade Advisor

Run Upgrade advisor first (you can find it here)

Second Backup your data

I didn’t have any installation problems (except for a Bluetooth driver problem that I am still working on), however, I strongly recommend that you backup your important files before starting the installation of Windows 7. After all, who knows what could happen.

Third Installation and Activation:

Register to download first, after registration you will be provided with an evaluation product key to use within the installation.

You will notice that you still have the “Windows 7 , Evaluation Copy” text at the bottom for your screen even after the activation, that is OK because after all this is an evaluation copy.

Read full installation instructions here.

Tips

Daemon tools is incompatible with windows 7. Daemon tools has just released an update for Windows 7. you can get it from here. (Thanks Hosam Kamel for the tip)

Enjoy the ride!

Top 10 Ninja Tricks for Microsoft Office

Remon Zakaria — Sun, 10 May 2009 05:09:37 GMT

Thanks Mohammed Samy for the tip!

To enhance your productivity you should always learn any program’s keyboard’s shortcuts. Here’s some shortcuts & tips for various Microsoft Office programs.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA102750211033.aspx

Enjoy!

This is why life at DashSoft is so cool!

Remon Zakaria — Sat, 02 May 2009 01:08:33 GMT

Last Thursday we had another working outdoor day. it's an idea to work outdoors, in a cafe or somewhere like that. We did our first day at city stars too (check it here). This time it was a bit different, a new UK fashion store had their official opening by running a fashion show. that featured super cool dresses on super hot models!

At the lunch break we went to the food court , had some nice Burger king & KFC & on our way back we had some photos with the Fanta dude:

Shehab El Hadidy went right over there & ask them to have a photo with us. We met Deepak Kumar (AKA D). the Fashion Show Stylist, a very nice Biritsh dude although he & the models were a bit disappointed that we didn't know him (They understood later that we're computer geeks!).

Unfortunately most of the DS guys have left already not knowing what they're missing ;)

Here's what they're missing: (excuse my bad HTC camera):

After the photo shoot we went to Golden Stars Cinema and enjoyed X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and we got out just in time to watch the start of the fashion show. We enjoyed the show, they really had great dresses coming up, watched the whole show and went back home insisting on having another day like that soon!

How to connect to a SQL named instance listening on a non standard port (1433) ?

Remon Zakaria — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 04:14:47 GMT

It's a bit tricky as most of the naming standards to login to a non-standard port is to add a colon ":" between the Host/IP & port. in SQL you actually use ",".

So to connect to SQL Server "XYZ" on port 1234 and connect to the named instance "ABC" you should type this in the SQL Management Studio:

XYZ,1234\ABC

If you're having a named instance , you'd probably need to figure out the SQL Dynamic Port that is being used to listen. You can find help here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/265808

and

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms177440.aspx

Logging your expenses using Oslo SDK!

Remon Zakaria — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 06:51:30 GMT

I had the privilege of speaking at the Microsoft Innovation Day. Unfortunately it was a small session that cannot fit to even go very quickly on everything on Oslo.

We're going to get started with a small real life scenario as an example: I really want log my daily expenses as I go. I don't want to wait till I go home to start adding those expenses & trying to remember them.

So What we'll do is pretty simple, we're going to record some data like "I spent $10 on food" at my mobile, send it through SMS , email it then i have the same processor on the other end to "understand" and save it to a database.

What's DSL ?

DSL or Domain Specific Language means as you read it. It is some sort of language for a specific domain , could be music, medicine, economy or even a system analysis language.

Just before we get started, this is a pretty simple demo that was made specifically for short presentations, it would give you a sneak peak about what Oslo is, but this is like 10% of what Oslo does, so have a look at the resources paragraph at the end.

1. Download Oslo SDK

You can download January 09 CTP from here.

2. Add your Domain Specific Language Text

3. Open a template.

a. Create a new file and name it Expenses.mg.

b. Press CTRL+ALT+T to open the template pick window & open the Expenses.mg file.

c. The Window turns to a 3 panes mode.

4. Start Building MGrammar

a. Everything should start with a module

b. Inside the module we can define a new language, import other languages, create queries & relations & lots of stuff I'll talk about on other posts.

c. We'll start by defining the module & naming the Language. Languages always start with syntax Main syntax

d. Now I am telling the computer that my "Expenses Language" consists entirely of only one sentence "I spent 400 LE on Taxi". The computer understands it & displays on the preview pane what it understood.

5. "Tokenize" the syntax

a. We'll start tokenizing the syntax, so we can extract the useful information from the raw data.

b. We'll ignore the whitespaces for now , interleave keyword instructing the parser to ignore those characters/syntax. We'll ignore spaces, dots , Carriage & Line Feeds.

6. Generalizing the tokenized text

a. If i tried to replace "400" with "300" it won't work. So we need to generalize the variable data. We'll create "tokens" that represent the data we want so we can accept variables.

7. Project extracted information to "data stores"

a. After Extracting the data , we'll project these data to data stores. Data stores is just a name came by my mind to simplify the concept of Projection is "redirecting" or "reformatting" these data to a whole new schema that would be used to generate the M file.

b. I meant to change the names of the projected value to show you the difference (i.e. Person -> Name, Amount -> Money, etc...)

8. Accept multiple entries

a. Now, It's not practical to insert only one item each time , I want to say I spent X on this & Y on that at the same time. Here's how can we can we accept multiple entries and how to project them.

9. Running M commands

Save the files, I save the DSL pane contents as "expenses.dsl".

The commands you can find at "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Oslo SDK 1.0\Bin" I always add that path to the Environment Variable %PATH%. We'll use four commands that takes the dsl input file and saves it to a SQL database as the following:

Compile the Model using MG Tool. It generates a expenses.mgx file at the same directory
mg expenses.mg

Use the Language Utility to Generate M File by referencing the generated mgx file from the previous step. This step generates a expenses.m file.
mgx expenses.dsl /r:expenses.mgx

Compile the M generated file to an Image using M utility.
m expenses.m /p:image

Load the Compile File to the database... (Use /c to create a new DB & /s if you are not using the default SQL instance)
mx /i:expenses.mx /d:NEW_DB /s:(local)\MY_SQL_INSTANCE /c

10. Check the extracted information in the database

Open your SQL Server, you'll find the database crated (I used demo db instead of NEW_DB db)

So you can now run reporting, use excel data feature, do whatever you want on expenses we just wrote on a regular file.

Here's the final grammar file:

module Finance
{
    language Expenses
    {
        syntax Main = s:Spending* //* means a collection of Spendings
            //valuesof keyword projects multiple values from a collection
            => Spendings {valuesof(s)};
        syntax Spending = p:Person "spent" a:Amount c:Currency "on" i:Item
            => {Name = p, Money = a, Currency = c , Description = i};

        //Read Characters from A to Z Case Insensitive
        token Person = ('a'..'z' | 'A'..'Z')+;
        //Accept only numbers from 0 to 9
        token Amount = ('0'..'9')+;
        token Currency = ('a'..'z' | 'A'..'Z')+;
        token Item = ('a'..'z' | 'A'..'Z')+;
        //Eliminate the white spaces & trivial characters
        interleave Whitespaces = ' ' | '\r' | '\n' | '.';
    }
}

Please contact me at remon.zakaria { a t } dashsoft.com if you need more information.

First Friday's Event Successfully Done!

Remon Zakaria — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 08:39:25 GMT

We had a nice & delicious event yesterday. Thanks for everyone who came, & Thanks for Friday's team for hosting us!

Let's hope to see even more next time!

Another Exclusive Event! Microsoft Innovation Day!

Remon Zakaria — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 09:06:38 GMT

For everyone who won't be able to attend dotnetwork's April'09 Gathering, do not worry, Microsoft has a new surprise for you. An Invitations-only event that will have wonderful technical materials, fun & the best of all, the announcement of winners of the local Imagine Cup contest that would represent Egypt in the global contest that would be held here also in Egypt soon.

The event is going to be at Intercontinental City Stars next Wednesday (April, 22nd 2009), it's mainly done to encourage the development community work , not only in .net but also interoperability between Microsoft and other platforms like Java (through Egyptian Java User Group (EGJUG)). Besides their interest in interoperability, Microsoft also invited dotnetwork.org, Barmagy, Innovation Hut, ITWorx's Cutting Edge Club, and Egypt SharePoint User Group to be the main participant of this unique event.

The community will participate with speakers as well. Every community would have a short session (How Do I session) that talks about a very focused topic with no presentations or anything, only geek tools. I will be doing dotnetwork.org's session about How To Get Started With Oslo. I will blog it after the event.

Last but not least, Steve Ballmer is the event's mystery guest of honor is going answer the community's most urging questions about Microsoft.

Agenda

Here's the agenda of the event:

Start	End	Session	Speaker	Community
9:00	10:00	Registration & Coffee Break - Recruitment Booths - Surprise Fun Activity
10:00	10:30	Opening Speech	Ahmed Adel
10:30	10:45	How Do I: Work with Fantastic 40 MOSS templates	Shady Khorshed	Barmagy
10:50	11:05	N/A	N/A	EGJUG
11:10	11:25	How Do I: Protect from Cross Site Request Forgery Attack in ASP.NET	Mostafa Siraj	Cutting Edge
11:30	11:45	How Do I: Use JQuery in SharePoint	Marwan Tarek	EGYSU
11:50	12:05	How Do I: Code Fun, Hello Facebook	N/A	Innovation-Hut
12:10	12:25	How Do I: Get Started with Oslo.	Remon Zakaria	dotNetwork
12:30	1:00	Executive Speech	Steve Ballmer
1:00	1:30	Communities Q&A	Steve Ballmer / Community
1:30	2:30	Lunch Break
2:30	3:15	A lap around Azure and Cloud computing concepts	Mohamed Sami
3:15	4:00	Developing in a Hybrid Environment	Mohamed Nar & Nohal Rady
4:00	4:30	Coffee Break
4:30	5:15	The Future: Software + Services	Mohamed Fayez

How to Register?

First you need to make sure that you will come. It's a great event and it would be great if you left the chance to someone he would come for sure.

The rest is easy. Send an email to info@dotnetwork.org with IDINV in the subject, add the following details:

Name
Email
T-Shirt Size (only M,L,XL,XXL sizes are available now)
Company
Referrer (me in this case)

It's very recommended that you wear the T Shirt on the Innovation Day so people would know that you got there through dotnetwork (There's different color for each community). and also you must bring your invitation with you.

How to get the invitation & the T-Shirt?

Mohamed Gamal El-Din
Friday (April 17th, 2009) , City Stars, from 8 PM to 9PM
Mob: 012-290-3599

Shehab El Hadidy
Saturday (April 18th, 2009), City Stars, during & after dotNetWork April's gathering , 10 am to 1 PM
Mob: 011-122-1849

Shehab El Hadidy
Sunday, (April 19th, 2009), City Stars,from 11 AM to 3.30 PM
Mob: 011-122-1849

Remon Zakaria

Tuesday, (April 21st, 2009), Downtown, from 7 PM to 8:30 PM

Mob: 012-2579717

April'09 Gathering - A dotNetwork's Exclusive Event!

Remon Zakaria — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 01:31:00 GMT

Throughout the past year, we have had great solid support from the Canadian International College (CIC). Unfortunately, due to the global economic crisis and the aggressive expenses cutback strategies for organizations allover the world, the CIC has decided not to open its campus at the weekends for any activities (and that includes us of course).

So, Next Saturday morning, for the first time in .network's history. We are going to make an exclusive event at Friday's City Stars!

We chose Friday's for their known flexibility & their open mind to ideas, and we were right, only in one meeting they were very excited, they have even created a custom menus for non-profit communities that has a very approachable price range, so they can even host more communities like us.

So here's the deal, we'll have our event starting from 10:00 AM till 1:00 PM. we are going to have 2 perfect sessions (See Agenda below). But it's time for the community to star supporting themselves now. You can easily support .network by ordering only one item from Friday's menu, you don't need to order from the original menu, I personally recommend to order from the communities menu they did!

Gathering Agenda

From	To
10:00 AM	10:15 AM	Attendees Check-in
10:15 AM	11:15 AM	Testing automation using VSTS 2008 (for Dev & QC) "Lots of demos for both developers & testers..So Testing Engineers, please join us!!" Hosam Kamel Senior Software Engineer ESRI Northeast Africa
11:15 AM	11:45 AM	Break
11:45 AM	12:45 PM	CellFactor Psychokinetic Wars, challenges and achievements "CellFactor is first-person multiplayer shooter game, developed for PS3 and XBOX 360 by a mostly-Egyptian team." Mohamed Samir Technical Lead Timeline Interactive Inc.

How to reserve ?

Reserve your ticket from here .

Just a note, this event is an exclusive one with limited number of attendees, only 60 attendees, so please do not reserve a ticket if you are not sure you are coming.

See you there!

OsloTool, a GUI on top of m.exe, mx.exe, mg.exe and mgx.exe

Remon Zakaria — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 20:11:49 GMT

Bryan Sumter wrote a cool GUI to compile our grammars and models:

Dear readers,

I’ve been working on a small project called “OsloTool” and I thought it would be best to share this with the rest of the Oslo developers. It saved me a lot of time developing Oslo applications.

Basically it’s a Graphical User Interface on top of the commandline tools: mg.exe, mgx.exe, m.exe and mx.exe. Untill Microsoft Implements build-options into IntelliPad u can use this (if you hate commandline as much as I do).

I’ll post the source as well, so you can modify and maybe even expand it.

Screenshot:
http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/1353/oslotool.jpg

Download:
http://michaelwolbert.nl/projects/Oslo/OsloTool.zip (thanks to my dear colleague and friend, Michael Wolbert)

Mirror:
http://www.zshare.net/download/56614958a3fce0d5/

Note:
In “Commands.cs” there is this line of code which specifies Oslo Directory:
static string OsloDirectory = “C:/program files/microsoft oslo sdk 1.0″;

If you got any questions concerning OsloTool feel free to leave a message!

Greeting,
Bryan Sumter

Oslo MSDN Community post

Grab the executable and source here!

Original Post here.

DreamSpark; It's not just Business!

Remon Zakaria — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 02:12:19 GMT

In my previous post, I talked about BizSpark and the great surprising help coming out from Microsoft to Startups.

Now for Students, you also can start working with authentic Microsoft Products for FREE.

What is Microsoft DreamSpark?

Here’s how it works: if you’re a current university or high school student, you can download professional Microsoft developer, designer, and gaming software through DreamSpark at no charge. Yes, students get to download software at no charge. DreamSpark enables students, like you, to download and use Microsoft tools to unlock your creative potential and set you on the path to academic and career success by advancing your learning in the areas of technical design, technology, math, science, and engineering! It doesn’t matter what classes you’re taking right now, just as long as you’re a current student in a verified, accredited School and use the tools in pursuit of advancing your education in one of these areas.

Joining is also very easy!

Just visit DreamSpark and follow the 3 steps.

Microsoft to release VB6 as Open Source

Remon Zakaria — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 07:33:13 GMT

After many years of complaints from the VB6 developers around the world, Microsoft has finally agreed to re release VB6, not as a full product, but as a full featured, not crippled free Open Source product with source code on CodePlex.

Developers around the world should rejoice at the prospect of writing again good old VB6 apps that use ADO to connect to Access databases.

Feeling the possible wrath of the C# community that will feel abandoned by this bold move, Microsoft will also create a VB6 like C language called C♭(pronounced C Flat). Using C♭, C# developers will be able to use VB6 like features like Variants, ActiveX controls, arrays that start with 1 or 0 (finally some choice!).

Asked to comment, Scott Gu said: “April’s Fools.”

Original Link: http://guy.dotnet-expertise.com/PermaLink,guid,2fe1c488-86fa-4568-8615-542711020381.aspx

ON FIRE!!

Remon Zakaria — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 11:48:58 GMT

I am burning on Feedburner. Subscribe to my feed here: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/Remon

.network's Code Camp'09 Videos

Remon Zakaria — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 08:15:16 GMT

A good friend, Said Fawzy has sent me links for some videos he got in the event:

1-Opening Session
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACmwynV1CWI

2-Some shoots from sessions
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAw7WX49lhA

3-Steven Birthday without Forks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l87ih0Gt6Ls

4-Some shouts from closing session
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyFDYFMl_Vw

Check dotnetwork.org group on facebook for more information about the group & the events.

Fun day at City Stars!

Remon Zakaria — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 05:09:43 GMT

We went to the company today & started to work & out of no where a big electricity problem happened in the whole area of Ramses. Electricity won't go back before 5 hours from then.

So we did the craziest thing ever, we went to City Stars , staying at Cafe Supreme at Pahse II (actually writing this post from there!)

We went to the food court to try this new and awesome London (Fish & Potato) restaurant, Shehab met a beautiful cute girl over there (he didn't ask for the phone number though) and tried the Oxford meal (great british fish) & she created for me & Nasr a big plate of potato with tons of butter & cheese, we almost added everything over there. It's so great , you should try it one day!

After the super nice food we came came to the cafe again, then we went (me, Rizk & Islam) to Slim-Sure to find if there's any massage option (they were jealous of the massage i have had with Stephen Forte & Remi Caron in Luxor). We went in & we met this beautiful Moroccan Berber girl that would give us a discount from $150 / session to $100/session for 2+ people (CHEAP!), We liked her so much that we asked her to leave them & come be our health specialists @ DS! (find the good in the bad, it was worth it to meet her, even after we knew the numbers!)

I see it as a great experience that shows our flexibility (about 90% of the company came here to work & have fun at the same time).

Developers with no crazy managers , convince your manager & spend a day like that with fun & work!

Building a company culture...

Remon Zakaria — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 02:05:51 GMT

So, I was sitting yesterday with DashSoft's General Scrum Master, Ahmed Nasr (AKA Nasr) talking about how can we improve DashSoft even more.

We've had our growth pain. We've grown up 300% the past year and we're still growing. We've learned in the hard way that controlling or should i say "regulating" that growth and preventing it from changing the company culture is even more important.

Actually I learned about the company culture a while ago. I've been talked and learned about by Stephen Forte, Remi Caron and Joel Semeniuk. however, I've never really understood the importance of it until we faced a massive growth in a relatively short period.

Generally, the company culture is a set of values that produce a specific mind set. You can know that you built a good culture in your company when you ask various individuals at your company the same question "What would you do if ...." and you get mostly the same answer. So the answers you get are mostly flowing around a central core. This core is the value that you have built in your company.

So the values could be technical, ethics, or commitment values. They can be a way of treating customers, a way of treating fellow employee, or even a way of treating yourself when you face a challenge and so on.

In order to track your progress of building a culture, you need two things: a set of tools to measure the culture aspects and a set of standards to compare your measurements to.

I am going to demonstrate an example we are doing currently in DashSoft now.

Interviews

So the first step we did is that we raised our interview levels standard. we become more picky on the ethics aspect more than the technical one. DashSoft is well known with its high technical level, and smart developers would be up to speed in no time.

Defining Culture

You need to define "very" clearly what is your target, you need to show the teams first, the benefits they're going to have when they try to have these values within them, teams believe more in things if they know the reason why.

Start planning a road map

Now everyone is agreed on the What and the Why, we need to agree on the how. Consult your upper management, share your vision and process their feedbacks. Come out from those meetings with a roadmap on how should the company, the management and the teams do in order to have a healthy culture and work environment.

Release a guide on how to improve yourself and doing periodical evaluation meetings with the teams is always a good thing to put them on the right track and everyone makes sure that they're on that track.

Evaluation

Most important part is find a way to "measure" those improvements. So you and your teams can understand if they're working right or not, if not, you'd be able to figure out what's wrong and save yourself lots of time trying to implement a wrong part that potentially would affect the company in a bad way.

Incentives to keep growing

So, yes, you have the teams that willing to do a change, they're smart have high endurance threshold and you can really depend on them to create a solid company. What happens if some bad apples slipped inside ? or people getting lazy ? What's the incentive they would have to start getting up again ? A word I have learned from a dear friend Vassil Terziev a year ago & it's still ringing in my head, "Peer Pressure". Teams should be self sustainable, people are up should help the ones are down. It's not your job to get people up on their feet. It's your job to create the culture that will make everyone feels that its his/her duty to help others.

So beside the guidance and supporting people , everyone will see the "Improvement Progress Chart"

Aspects

Commitment

Ethics

Technical

Team

Name 1

√

Name 2

√

Name 3

√

Simply it has all the names and all the values we agreed on. each value (V1,V2,...) has a link on how to improve yourself on this specific value along with examples and cases we faced or we would have.

Each team member (Name 1, Name 2, ....) has a √ at the values he gets and nothing (-) at the values he does not have it fully yet. The trick is what is the standard you are going to go by that would say from 1-3 is nothing & from 4-5 is something ? It's tricky because you need to realize your team capabilities and you need to understand how far can they endure to be better person. Think of it like a gym. If you are going to train someone, he'd be in pain (good pain) but can he run for 1 hour from the first the first month or day or from the first year.

The last part is: if the team member's leader see he should learn something. He would find a message at this specific value he doesn't have yet that is visible only to him telling him how to be better as a tip, that's beside the guide on how to be better on the value that is visible to everyone.

One last thing. If you are going through that, you need to have a great faith in your team. I do. I have the reputation of being a tuff person in technical projects management. So whoever can survive me for that long surely he/she is a pretty great person. I have a team of people who can survive me, and I do have the faith in them that they won't let the me down. You need to make sure of that first before going forward with building a culture.

I will keep you posted on how this goes.

Sitefinity as a platform

Remon Zakaria — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 11:20:00 GMT

So, I decided to use Sitefinity as my blog engine as a thank you for Telerik for supporting our user group .network.org by giving us a free license for Sitefinity.

Sitefinity is providing, if we can say, good starter kits for different kinds of usage (that i need all of them actually!). They provide Personal (Blogs,etc…), Company (DashSoft needs a new site) and the one I love the most, the Community Template. I really loved all the modules and the UI all put down & blended together to produce a wonderful site that i needed only to change the default group name and logo to ours.

As the two words Sitefinity and Community started to come together, I really though “hmmm.. Why don’t we see if the community and Telerik can collaborate together?

I have been always a fan of the win-win situations. The idea started to cook and i found that Telerik can help in the establishing important, market-needed values in the fresh students like commitment, researching the market for new ideas. In return the community would support Sitefinity by practicing those values on creating modules and controls for the Sitefinity platform.

So, Telerik in conjunction with Microsoft and .network would start a contest for the best Plug-in idea(s) and page control(s) that can be used on Sitefinity.

Beside the XBOXs, Free licenses, Internships at Telerik’s local offices, and all the cool stuff from Microsoft & Telerik, Winners would start their own projects on CodePlex, having exclusive internal support from very Telerik team that made Sitefinity. Also Students would be on Microsoft BizSpark’s radar, so these students would earn their opportunity to start new businesses on their own and really make a difference within the world.

I will post more updates soon after everything is finalized between Microsoft , Telerik & .network.

My First Post!

Remon Zakaria — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 14:35:00 GMT

So, First things first, I am Remon Zakaria. I am the CEO of DashSoft, a software house located in Egypt that is specializes in providing software consultancy service only to offshore companies all over the world.

I am also the founder of .network.org user group. I am working with this awesome team from different software houses here in Egypt to help making a difference in our community.

I am also, and proud to be, a graduate of Computer Sciences School, Helwan University. One of the best computer sciences schools in Egypt. Because I know people would ask about it.

The top banner of my blog is the Bibliotheca Alexandrina’s Small Theater. I adore and respect the initiative done by the whole world to return the original library books back to homeland. This was a good sign of world peace, done silently & decently without all the propaganda.

So, enough of me & let’s get started. Stand by for my next post on Telerik’s Sitefinity.

Now! Startups get the help they need!

Remon Zakaria — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 12:18:00 GMT

I just learnt yesterday, Microsoft has soft-launched this awesome initiative BizSpark. It’s an initiative that would allow the startups anywhere to have tons of Microsoft support like Software licenses, MSDN, Support Incidents and Visibility to potential customers and investors. check the full list benefits here.

How to join? Easy!

I - Check to see if you qualify – most privately held software development startups in business for less than 3 years that are generating annual revenue under USD $1 million can join. (Some countries has different limits due to their economy)

II- Connect with a BizSpark Network Partner or a Microsoft BizSpark Champ to get your BizSpark enrollment code.

Enrollment is free, just pay a USD $100 program offering fee at program exit.

For more details about BizSpark, see: The Startup Program Guide, which describes the program benefits and more.