Omar AL Zabir[MVP]

Moving my blog

Omar AL Zabir [MVP] — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 00:48:00 GMT

Good bye every Geeks with Blogs, I am moving to: http://msmvps.com/blogs/omar

Moving my blog

Omar AL Zabir [MVP] — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 00:47:00 GMT

Good bye every Geeks with Blogs, I am moving to: http://msmvps.com/blogs/omar

Pageflakes - #1 Start Page in this years Web 2.0 Awards

Omar AL Zabir [MVP] — Thu, 04 May 2006 18:01:00 GMT

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

Stickout - .NET 2.0, Outlook, Word, Excel, Remoting everything in one article

Omar AL Zabir [MVP] — Sun, 23 Apr 2006 23:50:00 GMT

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!

5 wordpress plugins

Omar AL Zabir [MVP] — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 03:16:00 GMT

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.

Google Analytics

Omar AL Zabir [MVP] — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 02:43:00 GMT

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

Just back from India - MVP Summit 2005

Omar AL Zabir — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 13:24:00 GMT

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.

New Model-Driven RAD Tool Generates up to 95% of a Custom Application

Omar AL Zabir — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 16:44:00 GMT

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

Simulate Windows Service using ASP.NET

Omar AL Zabir — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 14:11:00 GMT

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.

Atlas resources on web

Omar AL Zabir — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 15:55:00 GMT

Atlas is the solution from Microsoft which is integrated in Visual Studio 2005.

Please read the following articles to get familiar with Atlas:

http://weblogs.asp.net/eporter/archive/2005/10/04/426630.aspx

http://weblogs.asp.net/pglavich/archive/2005/10/07/426868.aspx

http://weblogs.asp.net/mschwarz/archive/2005/09/14/425185.aspx

http://atlas.asp.net/docs/default.aspx

http://atlas.asp.net/quickstart/default.aspx

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/09/14/425131.aspx

http://weblogs.asp.net/pglavich/archive/2005/10/14/427453.aspx

http://weblogs.asp.net/mschwarz/archive/2005/10/06/426816.aspx

http://weblogs.asp.net/mschwarz/archive/2005/09/15/425220.aspx

http://weblogs.asp.net/eporter/archive/2005/10/05/426701.aspx

http://weblogs.asp.net/rchartier/archive/2005/09/13/425039.aspx

http://www.wilcob.com/wilco/Default/158/showpost.aspx

Largest collection of web related resources

Omar AL Zabir — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 05:10:00 GMT

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

.NET 2.0 Process Impersonation feature not working in Windows App

Omar AL Zabir — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 20:18:00 GMT

.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();

}

Million and Zero dollar homepage

Omar AL Zabir — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 05:15:00 GMT

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/

Get the location of .NET Framework

Omar AL Zabir — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 17:24:00 GMT

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 ) );

Omar AL Zabir[MVP]

Moving my blog

Moving my blog

Pageflakes - #1 Start Page in this years Web 2.0 Awards

Stickout - .NET 2.0, Outlook, Word, Excel, Remoting everything in one article

5 wordpress plugins

Google Analytics

Top questions about data grid

Just back from India - MVP Summit 2005

New Model-Driven RAD Tool Generates up to 95% of a Custom Application

Simulate Windows Service using ASP.NET

Atlas resources on web

Largest collection of web related resources

.NET 2.0 Process Impersonation feature not working in Windows App

Million and Zero dollar homepage

Get the location of .NET Framework