Microsoft Unveils Windows Mobile 6

Microsoft has reportedly unveiled a new version of it’s Windows Mobile operating system (OS), Windows Mobile 6, which has the look of Windows Vista, plus features that were earlier available only on PCs.
Windows Mobile 6 promises to take advantage of features in Exchange Server 2007, as also provide a richer e-mail experience on devices.
Reportedly, the new version includes Windows Live, offering instant messaging with more than one person at a time, as well as sending files/images and record/send voice notes.

Another new feature that comes from Exchange Server 2007 is the ability to reply to meeting requests made in Microsoft Outlook in various ways such as email reply and forwarding the message to someone else from the mobile device. Presently, a user can either just accept or decline the invite. It now also supports direct e-mail push technology to receive and send e-mails faster.

Windows Mobile 6 also introduces the ability to view e-mails in their original HTML Internet format with live Web links from smart phones.

Moreover, it allows viewing, navigating, and editing documents in original Word, Outlook, Excel, and Powerpoint format, without affecting tables, images, or text. Other features include support for synchronisation with Vista via the new Windows Mobile Device Center, improved search, encryption of data stored on removable memory cards, .NET Compact Framework, SQL Server, and usability of the device as a modem for notebook PCs.

According to Microsoft, Windows Mobile 6 will be available in the second quarter of 2007. And, manufacturers that are expected to come out with new devices supporting Windows Mobile 6 include Toshiba, Lenovo, LG Electronics, and Samsung Electronics.

the source :
http://www.techtree.com/India/News/Microsoft_Unveils_Windows_Mobile_6/551-79016-580.html

Smart Client Application Part3

Office Smart Client Applications

Microsoft Office System 2003 provides you with a useful platform on which to build smart client applications, especially in an enterprise setting. With an Office smart client solution, you can integrate data sources, accessed through Web services, with the features of Word 2003, Excel 2003, InfoPath 2003, or other Office applications to develop smart client solutions.
Microsoft Office 2003 & 2oo7 has a number of key features and options for building smart client solutions. These include:

Smart tags: Smart tags give applications a way to provide users with context sensitive data pertaining to the contents of a document and allow them to easily see and use relevant information when working within a document.

Smart documents: Smart documents provide a more powerful way for the user to interact with documents and business Web services.

Microsoft Visual Studio® Tools for the Microsoft Office System: This suite of tools enables developers to create managed code Office smart client applications by using the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET development system.
Microsoft Office InfoPath™: InfoPath is an application that can gather structured data from the user by using a form-like interface. InfoPath provides support for XML Web services, a form-based user interface, and support for standard technologies such as WSDL and UDDI. InfoPath supports limited offline use by allowing the user to interact with the form when offline and then allowing the user to forward the form to a Web service when the user is online.

Mobile Smart Client Applications

Mobile smart clients are applications that run on smart devices — Pocket PCs, Smartphones, and other small form factor devices such as set-top boxes. These applications are developed using the .NET Compact Framework, which is a subset of the full .NET Framework.
The .NET Compact Framework has many of the features of the full .NET Framework, supports XML, and consumes Web services. It is optimized for use on small form factor devices, and it includes the Windows Forms designer for developing the user interface.
By using the Visual Studio .NET Smart Device Projects, you can develop smart clients that will run on the .NET Compact Framework. This approach allows you to develop, test and debug an application by using Visual Studio .NET on an emulator of the small form factor device. The use of an emulator significantly speeds up development and testing of these types of applications.
Mobile smart client applications are typically used to provide mobile access to essential data and services, or to collect and aggregate data when the user is mobile.
Examples of these types of applications are insurance and financial data-gathering applications, inventory management applications, and personal productivity management applications.
This guide does not specifically focus on mobile smart client applications, although many of the architectural issues and solutions that it discusses are relevant to smart devices.

The RSS in 5 minutes

The RSS in 5 minutes

The abbreviation :
RSS is a abbreviation to (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication ) .

What is RSS service ?

RSS is a way to delivering the changing of a web site content . Many news-related sites, weblogs and any publishers syndicate their content as a RSS Feed to whoever wants it.( it is a XML format designed for sharing headlines and other Web content as in the example below).

To whom the service mainly ?
To all internet users that are visiting a large number of sites daily like (news sites , blogs and so on) that may be consumed the user’s time ,although not all sites update daily .From the RSS goals a try to decrease the internet traffic .

Are all sites support this service ?
no, until now , but most of sites support that .The number of sites offering RSS feeds is growing rapidly and includes big names like Yahoo News and Amazon.com.

Are this service need a fees ?
No , it is free 100% .

How can I use this service ?
By using programs called as feed readers or aggregators can check a list of feeds on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that they find. It is common to find web feeds on major websites and many smaller ones. There are two type of Feed readers or Aggregators

• Standalone programs , programs embedd in web browsers .
• Web Based Newsreaders like google reader and NewsGator Online they require no software installation and make the user’s “feeds” available on any computer with Web access.

screen shot from google reader

Feed representation
On Web pages, web feeds (RSS) are typically linked with the word “Subscribe”, an orange square, or a rectangle with the letters or . Many news aggregators such as My Yahoo! publish subscription buttons for use on Web pages to simplify the process of adding news feeds.

Fast RSS 2.0 syntax via example :
RSS defines an XML grammar (a set of HTML-like tags) for sharing news. Each RSS text file contains both static information about your site, plus dynamic information about your new stories, all surrounded by matching start and end tags.Each story is defined by an tag, which contains a headline TITLE, URL, DESCRIPTION and pubDate. Here’s an example : <!–

xx xx xx xx xx xx

–>

The resources :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_%28file_format%29#Example_-_RSS_2.0

http://www.webreference.com/authoring/languages/xml/rss/intro/

http://www.whatisrss.com/

Source Control and Team Development Part 2

see part 1 here

Chapter 4

They start thinking and analyze whose part is this?? Finally after a lot of argument, they decide that Person X and Y are responsible for that feature. Those two takes a side and start a conversation about who will modify which part of his code. They agree on some changes.

Each one goes to his PC, make the changes, and gets his file back to the main PC. “Stop! don’t overwrite the old files!!” Someone shouts nervously “Backup the old folder first, as the new changes might break more than they fix so we can return to the old files”. They create a new folder and name it “after changes”. They put the whole project in it and then overwrite the old files in this with the new ones in this new directory. They try that feature and it works.

Chapter 5

While they are partying the success in having a running feature, by playing and resting. Someone was playing around with their application happy that they created something that works. Suddenly he gets another exception. “Oh damn it!” he says in dissatisfaction “can’t we have a single happy moment that it works fine?!!”.

He gathers the playing members and wakes the sleeping ones telling them the awful news. When he shows them the exception, silence goes around. Each one of themselves wishing that it is not his part so that he can get away with it and go continue resting.

Once again, after discussions, they made modifications, created a new folder, and fixed the problem.

Chapter 6

Six days, Eighteen folders later…

This day is the big day; the deadline. They should go and give a working copy of the project to the supervisor. After a long sleepless night, they’ve got so many folders with a lot of names like “after modification”, “this one will work isA”, “KEFAAYAAA”, “at night”, “3 am version”, “last 1″, last 2″, “final”, and “the final last one”.

“YOU ARE A BIG *** **** MY OLD CODE HAD NO PROBLEM, WHY YOU MADE ME CHANGE IT”, the other one replies “GO TO HELL, IF YOU WAS NOT THAT STUPID YOU WOULD HAVE KNOWN THAT EARLIER”…
[cut: after 15 minutes of yelling and thousands of dirty words]
“HEY PEOPLE, LISTEN TO ME!!! We’ve only 30 minutes to go and this must be fixed! Stop fighting like kids and do something!!” says someone impatiently.

They stop fighting keeping in mind they will complete it later. “The correction of this was in one of the old versions, from two days ago, I know it” says A “let me try”. He takes over the keyboard again, keeps staring to the folder list trying to know which folder it was. He has 3 candidates, so he goes into each one of them opening the above-one-thousand-lines-of-code file and seeking for the correction desperately inside two or three functions in each file.

Finally after an hour and a half, and calls from friends at college saying that the professor is angry because there is no ready team and that he threatens to leave, and after a lot of “Com’on forget that stupid bugs, let’s just go we7na we 7azzena”, and after a lot of closed-eye concentration moments, he finds the correction and applies it to the final version of their application.

He runs the application to try it, and “DA-DOOOOM!!”, the application doesn’t work at all. You have seen so many different reactions in a single minute, someone sits on the floor crying, someone had his face blown in red out of anger, another one just hits his head against the wall.

To be continued…

Source Control and Team Development

I haven’t met a lot of teams who have actually used this feature. Since we are facing a new semester where we should start implementing our graduation project, I will introduce it.

You are in a team ? You divide the coding among you ? Then you definitely need Source Control.

Let me first tell you the scenario that you face each day of your team work:

Chapter One

Person A was assigned Class A, and Person B was assigned Class B. Till now everything is okay; each one works in him own home till he finishes, isn’t it ? Now they’ve finished. It is time to integrate work into a single project to start testing. They sit together in a single place, each one with his computer. They gather the source files and put them on someone machine. They create a project and add the source files. They hit “compile”. They get a huge list of errors.

Chapter Two

After the initial depression that their hopes and prayers that the project works from the first time painlessly have not been responded to, they start to fix the errors.

Each one boots his PC/laptop, gets the list of errors in his file, opens the IDE, and start fixing. After fixing all the errors he has, he gets his updated file to the main PC which they agreed to integrate their files using it. He does that by putting his file on a flash drive, or better, on the LAN.

Now the person on that PC, gets the new file and overwrites the old file. Then he tries to compile again, yet he still gets some errors from another one’s file. He waits till that person gets his files and compiles. And “Hooray!!” it has compiled “Thank GOD!” they say in relief.

Chapter 3

Now it is time to launch the project and see if it is working. They double-click the executable, and “BOOOOM!” they get an exception even before they see the application window.

The exception is in Class A, “Who’s class is this?!!” whispers someone in frustration. Person A replies “It’s mine”. He takes over the keyboard and traces till he find the error. Fixing it requires some modification in someone else’s work. He modifies his own file, while that someone goes to his PC and fixes his own. He gets the file back, he put it in the project folder, overwriting the old file while interrupting the one who is still fixing his file on that PC.

Now they compile again, “Thank GOD there is no compile-errors this time” someone says to himself proudly. They run the application. They see the application window this time. They tried to use it but it doesn’t make the expected behavior.

To be continued…

Dream.Build.Play – XNA Gaming Code Contest

This is your chance to make the dream come true! Create an original game for Windows or Xbox 360™* using XNA Game Studio Express, a new tool from Microsoft®. Then enter your game in the Dream-Build-Play Challenge. Besides worldwide fame and recognition, you could also win some fantastic prizes!
DreamBuildPlay

About XNA Game Studio Express

XNA Game Studio Express is a revolutionary new tool that makesit easy to develop video games for both Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360™. Whether you’re an experienced developer or a total newbie, this innovative software, along with the XNA Creators Club, helps you to build the games of your dreams more easily.

First released in beta in August 2006, the XNA Game Studio Express is now available in its complete, final form—absolutely free. Download it today and create games for Windows at no charge. You can also build games for Xbox 360 with an active subscription to the XNA Creators Club.

To learn more about XNA Game Studio Express, head over to theXNA Developer Center. And come back to this contest web site

Hint:- This article was copied from Microsoft Student Partners Articles