Developing Arabic applications should be easy!

Digigirlz, 1st May 2012

Dina Lasheen - MSFT — Wed, 02 May 2012 13:59:09 GMT

Microsoft Kuwait conducted another successful DigiGirlz as part of the “Shape Your Future” Education Exhibition organized by the Ministry of Education on May 1st, 2012. The event was under the auspices of Sheikha Dr. Suad Al Sabah.
220 high school girls attended the event and it was very inspiring to meet such a young audience, with bright eyes.

Install Arabic VB6 applications

Dina Lasheen - MSFT — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 08:20:40 GMT

I still get questions about installing Arabic VB6 applications.

The problem occurs when you deploy your VB 6 application to other machines, which doesn’t have VB , VS or Office. Your application doesn’t
display RightToLeft correctly.

The cause: is that you need to have VBAME.DLL in your Windows System directory, for example, in c:\windows\system32. VBAME.DLL is the Middle East support file. So make sure that you package and deploy this file with you Arabic application.

For more info :

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vsarabic/archive/2007/08/13/vbame-dll-is-the-middle-east-support-file-for-vb-6-0.aspx

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/254935/en-us

DataGridView disable sorting

Dina Lasheen - MSFT — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:41:01 GMT

I needed to disable sorting in a DataGridView. I thought I would find something like DataGridView.AllowSort and simply set to AllowSort=false, but I couldn’t find it.

Finally, I figured it out. You need to access each column in the DataGridView and set it as NotSortable.

This is a small code snipet to disable the sorting of DataGridView.

for (int i = 0; i < dataGridView1.ColumnCount; i++)

{

dataGridView1.Columns[i].SortMode = DataGridViewColumnSortMode.NotSortable;

}

I hope that helps.

الإرشادات التفصيلية: إنشاء موقع ويب Ajax

Dina Lasheen - MSFT — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 07:33:54 GMT

الإرشادات التفصيلية: إنشاء موقع ويب Ajax

<هذه مقاطع من مواضيع أعجبتني من مكتبة تعليمات فيجوال ستوديو 2010, أرجو أن تنال إعجابكم. المقالة الأساسية موجودة هنا>

هذه الإرشادات التفصيلية بإنشاء موقع ويب ASP.NET أساسية مع صفحة ويب يوضح بعض ميزات مكتبة AJAX ASP.NET المضمنة في Visual Studio سيتم إنشاء تطبيق عرض صفحات ببيانات الموظفين من قاعدة بيانات نموذج AdventureWorks. يستخدم التطبيقUpdatePanel تحكم لتحديث جزء فقط من الصفحة التي تم تغييرها، بدون فلاش الصفحة التي تحدث مع إعادة النشر. ويشار إلى ذلك باسم تحديث الصفحة جزئياً. يستخدم التطبيق عينة أيضاً UpdateProgress عنصر تحكم لعرض رسالة حالة أثناء معالجة تحديث الصفحة جزئياً.

المتطلبات الأساسية

لتنفيذ الإجراءات في بيئة التطوير الخاصة بك التي تحتاجها:

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 أو Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express.
قاعدة بيانات نموذج AdventureWorks. يمكن تحميل قاعدة بيانات AdventureWorks وتثبيتها من مركز التنزيل لـ Microsoft.

إنشاء موقع ويب

إذا كنت قد قمت بالفعل بإنشاء موقع ويب في Visual Web Developer (على سبيل المثال، وذلك باتباع الخطوات المذكورة في الإرشادات التفصيلية: إنشاء صفحة ويب أساسية في ‏‫Visual Web Developer) ، يمكنك استخدام هذا الموقع ثم انتقل إلى الجزء التالي إنشاء صفحة رئيسية. وإلا، إنشاء موقع ويب جديد أو صفحة باتباع الخطوات التالية.

لإنشاء موقع ويب نظام الملفات

فتحVisual Web Developer
من قائمة File اختر New Web Site

يظهر مربع الحوار New Website

ضمنتثبيت Visual Studio القوالب, click موقع ويب ASP.NET.
في Location ، أدخل اسم المجلد حيث تريد الحفاظ على صفحات موقع ويب الخاص بك.

على سبيل المثال، اكتب اسم المجلد C:\WebSites.

في Language ، انقر فوق لغة البرمجة التي كنت تفضل العمل.
انقر فوق Ok

Visual Web Developer إنشاء صفحة جديدة باسم Default.aspx

إضافة عنصر تحكم UpdatePanel بصفحة ويب ASP.NET

بعد إنشاء موقع ويب إنشاء صفحة ويب ASP.NET اتصال يتضمن UpdatePanel عنصر التحكم. قبل إضافة UpdatePanel التحكم إلى الصفحة, يجب عليك إضافة ScriptManager عنصر التحكم. The UpdatePanel عنصر تحكم يستند ScriptManager تحكم لإدارة التحديثات الصفحة جزئياً.

لإنشاء صفحة ويب ASP.NET الجديدة

في "Solution explorer" انقر بزر الماوس الأيمن فوق اسم الموقع ومن ثم انقر فوق Add new item.

يتم عرض مربع الحوار Add New Item

ضمن Visual Studio installed templates, اختر WebForm
اسم صفحة جديدة Employees.aspx وامسح Place code in separate file خانة الاختيار.
حدد اللغة التي تريد استخدامها.
انقر فوق Add.
التبديل إلى طريقة العرض "تصميم".
في AJAX Extensions انقر نقراً مزدوجاً فوق علامة التبويب الأدوات، ScriptManager تحكم لإضافته إلى الصفحة.

اسحبUpdatePanel التحكم في مربع الأدوات وأسقطه أسفل ScriptManager عنصر التحكم.

إضافة محتوى إلى عنصر تحكم UpdatePanel

The UpdatePanel عنصر تحكم يقوم بإجراء تحديثات صفحات الجزئي ويعرّف المحتوى الذي يتم تحديثه بشكل مستقل عن باقي الصفحة. في هذا الجزء من الإرشادات التفصيلية تتم إضافة عنصر تحكم ربط البيانات التي تعرض البيانات من قاعدة بيانات AdventureWorks.

لإضافة محتوى إلى عنصر تحكم UpdatePanel

من Data اسحب علامة تبويب الأدوات، GridView التحكم في منطقة قابلة للتحرير UpdatePanel عنصر التحكم.
في GridView Tasks القائمة انقر فوق Auto Format
في Auto Format لوحة ضمن Select a scheme , Colorful ثم انقر فوق OK.
في GridView Tasks القائمة حدد <New data source> من قائمة Choose Data Source .

يتم عرض معالج Data Source Configuration

ضمن Where will the application get data from, اختر Database ثم انقر فوق OK
في Configure Data Source معالج Choose Your Data Connection الخطوة، بتكوين اتصال بقاعدة بيانات AdventureWorks ثم انقر فوق Next
للحصول على Configure the Select Statement الخطوة Specify a custom SQL statement or stored procedure ثم انقر فوق Next.
في SELECT التبويب Define Custom Statement or Stored Procedures الخطوة قم بإدخال عبارة SQL التالية:

SELECT FirstName, LastName FROM HumanResources.vEmployee ORDER BY LastName, FirstName

انقر فوق Next.
انقر فوق Finish.
في GridView Tasks لقائمة حدد خانة الاختيار Enable paging
حفظ التغييرات ومن ثم اضغط CTRL + F5 لعرض الصفحة في مستعرض.

لاحظ وجود لا وميض على الصفحة عند تحديد صفحات مختلفة من البيانات. وهذا لأن الصفحة لا تنفيذ إلى إعادة النشر ويتم تحديث الصفحة بالكامل في كل مرة.

إضافة عنصر تحكم UpdateProgress إلى صفحة

The UpdateProgress يعرض عنصر التحكم رسالة حالة أثناء محتوى جديد UpdatePanel يتم الآن طلب التحكم.

لإضافة عنصر تحكم UpdateProgress إلى الصفحة

من ملحقات AJAX اسحب علامة تبويب الأدوات، UpdateProgress التحكم إلى الصفحة وقم بإفلاته أسفل UpdatePanel عنصر التحكم.
حددUpdateProgress التحكم في ثم في الإطار "خصائص" بتعيين AssociatedUpdatePanelID خاصية UpdatePanel1.

وهذا يقوم بربط UpdateProgress التحكم مع UpdatePanel عنصر التحكم الذي قمت بإضافته سابقاً.

في المنطقة القابلة للتحرير UpdateProgress عنصر تحكم نوع الحصول على الموظفين... .
حفظ التغييرات ومن ثم اضغط CTRL + F5 لعرض الصفحة في مستعرض.

إذا كان هناك أي تأخير بينما يتم تشغيل استعلام SQL الصفحة كما تقوم بإرجاع البيانات UpdateProgress يعرض الرسالة التي قمت بإدخالها في عنصر التحكم UpdateProgress عنصر التحكم.

إضافة تأخير إلى تطبيق نموذج

إذا كان التطبيق الخاص بك يقوم بتحديث كل صفحة من البيانات بسرعة, قد لا تشاهد المحتوى UpdateProgress التحكم في الصفحة. The UpdateProgress يعتمد التحكم DisplayAfter يتم عرض الخصائص التي تتيح لك تعيين مهلة قبل عنصر التحكم. يؤدي ذلك إلى منع عنصر التحكم يومض في المستعرض في حالة حدوث التحديث لف سريع جداً. بشكل افتراضي، يتم تعيين التأخير إلى 500 ميلي ثانية (.5 ثانية) ، مما يعني التي UpdateProgress لن يتم عرض عنصر التحكم إذا كان التحديث وقتًا أقل من نصف ثانية.

في بيئة تطوير إضافة تأخير زائفة إلى التطبيق الخاص بك للتأكد من UpdateProgress يعمل عنصر التحكم بالشكل المطلوب. هذا هو خطوة اختيارية وهو فقط من أجل اختبار التطبيق الخاص بك.

لإضافة تأخير التطبيق عينة

داخلUpdatePanel عنصر تحكم حدد GridView عنصر التحكم.
في الإطار "خصائص" ، انقر فوق الزر. Update
انقر نقراً مزدوجاً فوق PageIndexChanged حدث إنشاء معالج أحداث.
قم بإضافة التعليمة البرمجية التالية إلى PageIndexChanged لإنشاء تأخير الثانية ثلاثة artificially معالج الأحداث:

Visual Basic

//Include three second delay for example only.

System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(3000);

ملاحظة

معالج الخاص PageIndexChanged يقدم الحدث عن قصد تأخير هذه الإرشادات التفصيلية. في التدريب العملي عدم تقديم تأخير. بدلاً من ذلك، ستكون التأخير الناتج من حركة مرور الملقم أو رمز الخادم وقتاً طويلاً معالجة مثل استعلام قاعدة بيانات تشغيلها لفترة طويلة.

حفظ التغييرات ومن ثم اضغط CTRL + F5 لعرض الصفحة في مستعرض.

بسبب وجود الآن تأخير الثانية ثلاثة كل مرة يتم فيها الانتقال إلى صفحة جديدة من البيانات, ستكون قادراً على مشاهدة UpdateProgress عنصر التحكم.

SEO Arabic

Dina Lasheen - MSFT — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:24:08 GMT

Arabic is one of the highly ranked internet languages in the world… so the topic of Arabic SEO is very interesting, especially for this blog audience. How to improve the ranking of Arabic Web pages?

There are several factors that contribute to good SEO practices… but I’ll specifically focus on the issues particular for Arabic.

1) Your website hosting. You have to be sure that the Arabic hosting company is reliable. That insures that the speed from clicking on the search engine link to browsing the page is good. The search engine monitors how long it takes to navigate to the page… the faster the host the more the search engine like your site. Therefore it’s a good thing to invest in a good hosting company.

2) Arabic is a language spoken in more than 15 countries.. each country has their own culture but share this common language. To target a specific country you have to be able to address your target.

a. The Arabic formal language usage is also different from one country to the other . For example the word “boy” in a country is “ ولد”ina second is “صبي” , and in other regions “غلام”… All of them are correct and understandable by other Arabic speakers but the word’s relevance depends on the country\region.
b. Include colloquial word or phrase that is common in everyday, unconstrained conversation rather than in formal speech or formal writing. So this will create a stronger bonding with your target audience.
c. If your target audience are comfortable in writing Arabic in a Latin script (English or French) characters. For example, the word “3oud” for “عود”. It makes your site more friendly and attractive to the target audience.

3) Let people talk about your site!

If people from your region and community shares links, likes and positively talk about your site… search engine will pick up this info and start to notice your site.

Finally, SEO doesn’t happen overnight... it needs good SEO implementation and time... so be patient and consistent in the value you offer people and your site will be rewarded.

What a year 2011!

Dina Lasheen - MSFT — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 09:08:24 GMT

Wow, is it finally coming to an end! This was a remarkable year. It started with a big bang, Tunisia’s Bin Ali fled to Saudi and Egypt’s Mubarak stepped down, Libya’s Gadhafi dead, Yemen’s Saleh stepped down and Syria’s unrest... an Arab Spring … a bumpy ride but it’s not easy to change, we need to pay the price of change. Finally, I hope it all turns out to the best, no matter what.

At work, my ride wasn’t smooth either... There was a lot of change in 2011 too. My passion will always be in Arabic, bidi and RTL, after all I’ve been working in this field for so long... but I have other responsibilities, working on SEO (search engine optimization), BI Business Intelligence and more content related tasks, after all my team moved to the developer guidance team, overlooking the MSDN and TechNet.

This has kept me super busy and kept me away from my blog, but I need to set my priorities straight, I want to continue blogging and posting interesting blogs to Arabic developers and making sure that Developing Arabic Applications are easy.

Note: This is a personal reflection and doesn’t represent the opinion of my employer … just to make things clear.

Arabic Abjad Keyboard for Windows Phone 7.1

Dina Lasheen - MSFT — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 08:55:00 GMT

Ever wanted a keyboard that just works? Here you go, fully functional and compatible with WP7 7.1 (Mango)

Arabic Abjad Keyboard available now for Windows Phone 7.1, Abjad Keyboard

You can now correct misspelled words by tapping over them and then correcting or deleting them.

لوحة مفاتيح عربية سهلة الاستخدام ومرنة. تأتيك الآن بواجهة بسيطة وجميلة.

Versions Change Log

ver1.6

* Help instructions added (tap over the question mark)

* تم إضافة بعض التعليمات، إضغط على زر علامة الاستفهام بجانب اسم البرنامج.

ver1.5:

* Full support for portrait and landscape modes.

* Compatible with dark and light themes.

* Ability to correct words without the need to erase all text.

"Abjad Keyboard" is one of thousands of great apps for Windows Phone. See more at WindowsPhone.com

Create VS LightSwitch Arabic application

Dina Lasheen - MSFT — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 11:46:00 GMT

Some strong database professionals were dreaming of a power MS Access like, tool, that would take care of their UI, while they concentrate on their database. Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 enables you to develop line-of-business applications easily . LightSwitch is optimized to combine two things: data plus screens easily. Now you can an Arabic runtime application with a few settings. I discussed it in details in this LightSwitch HowTo blog.

You need to set you application culture to Arabic and the result is great. Your application is displayed Arabic and right-to-left orientation. You may fine tune it to have a more customized display.

I created a table with Arabic name and columns, check this screenshot:

I hope you enjoyed this short LightSwitch Intro.

RightToLeftAutoMirrorImage, what’s that?

Dina Lasheen - MSFT — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 15:09:27 GMT

It’s a mouthful, but we wanted to provide descriptive words for this property. This property is in the Strip controls, the MenuStrip , ToolStrip , StatusStrip , and ContextMenuStrip controls, in WinForms. When you set RightToLeft=Yes, your strip control items are automatically rearranged from right-to- left. Even more, there is an additional property for the rtl images.

By default, you should not mirror images, but in specific cases , you need the images to the rtl too.

RightToLeftAutoMirrorImage resolves common issues with rtl users, who use directional images, an example of directional images are the arrows with next \previous images.

In this specific case, you need your image to be mirrored too. This property mirrors automatically the ToolStripItem image when the RightToLeft property is set to Yes. Otherwise this property doesn't have an effect on your control.

This is the code snippet to mirror the Help image, in a toolstrip:

// helpToolStripButton
 //
 
 this .helpToolStripButton.DisplayStyle = System.Windows.Forms. ToolStripItemDisplayStyle .Image; 
 this .helpToolStripButton.Image = ((System.Drawing. Image )(resources.GetObject( "helpToolStripButton.Image" ))); 
 this .helpToolStripButton.RightToLeftAutoMirrorImage = true ; 
 this .helpToolStripButton.Text = "He&lp" ;

Get Traffic to your Website

Dina Lasheen - MSFT — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 09:42:39 GMT

Everyone wants to be the first page to be returned by a search engine, to get more traffic and do better business. When a search engine returns its results, how do you rank up, instead of down in the search results? How Google, Bing or Yahoo decide, who takes first place? This is really a specialized topic called SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Now, there is a job for people, whose task is to enhance the websites search results finding (SEO).

I’ll try to summarize the key concepts:

1) Your site must have a good structure, and have a short hierarchy (not too deep) and uses subfolders and all pages has links, so the search engine crawlers can reach them.

2) Targeted content. This starts from the correct Domain names, title pages.. and think about what your customer is looking for, and put these keywords in the pages.

This reminds me when I wanted to promote for the Arabic MSDN library, but the results didn’t show up when users entered “Arabic development “… of course there were no results these words were not in the site… so I’m too optimistic I should have recommend that we include such keywords, so that people can land on these pages… but this is a different story… back to SEO.

3) If your site has authority, it will rank higher. So the question is, is: “How do you gain your authority?” Some factors to enhance your authority are: when people visit your page more often + people link to your site + good hosting (that is not too slow or has spam). All these are factors that give your pages and your website authority.

The search engine don’t tell people, how they do there ranking but if everybody new, then it would ruin the result. So if you need to know more about the topic, I recommend you search for SEO topics :)

Sorry if I changed the topic in this blog from my usual Arabic development topics and discuss something different. But I hope you enjoy it.

Detecting RTL Cultures

Dina Lasheen - MSFT — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 09:29:29 GMT

When you develop Arabic\English applications you are bound to change you may change the Forms direction to rtl, programmatically at runtime or (1) according to user settings or (2) according to the detected OS culture. According to user settings is straightforward but what about change it according to the detected OS.

As the application loads the .NET framework inherits loads the system UI into the CurrentUICulture, you are then free to override the CurrentUICulture , if you need to display in another UI culture.

The TextInfo.IsRightToLeft property indicates the direction of each culture. This is a simple code snippet to detect the culture direction.

private static bool IsRightToLeftCulture()
{
return System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CurrentUICulture.TextInfo.IsRightToLeft;
}

Then you can use this function to know if the culture is right-to-left, and load the appropriate resources and set the appropriate RightToLeft styles.

I hope this helps.

Text Rendering

Dina Lasheen - MSFT — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 09:05:38 GMT

There are numerous classes presented by GDI+ and GDI for rendering text on Windows Forms. The GDI+ Graphics class has several DrawString methods that allow you to specify various features of text, such as location, bounding rectangle, font, and format. In addition, you can draw and measure text with GDI using the static DrawText and MeasureText methods offered by the TextRenderer class. The GDI methods also allow you to specify location, font, and format.

In the case of RightToLeftLayout is true you should use GDI instead of GDI+. This means, you need to use TextRenderer class to display text, while RightToLeftLayout is true. On the other hand, if you use DrawString the text would be mirrored and not readable. A better incentive to use GDI is that it offers better performance and more accurate text measuring than GDI+.

With the introduction of RightToLeftLayout we need to examine two cases for text display. The first is when RightToLeftLayout=true and the second is when RightToLeftLayout=false.

Let's examine the first case, when RightToLeftLayout is set to true:

• You don't need to change the coordinates because the origin starts from the rightmost edge instead of the left edge of the drawing area.

• You don't need to set the rtl TextFormatFlags because they are set by default.

The following code snippets show how to display text when RightToLeftLayout=true and RightToLeft=yes:

[VB]

TextRenderer.DrawText(e.Graphics, " العربية !", Me.Font, New Rectangle(5, 5, 50, 50), SystemColors.ControlText)

[C#]

TextRenderer.DrawText(e.Graphics, " العربية !", this.Font, new Rectangle(5, 5, 50, 50), SystemColors.ControlText);

Let's examine the second case, when RightToLeftLayout is set to false:

• You need to calculate the correct left edge of your controls. Since the origin is still on the left and not on the right.

• You need to set the rtl TextFormatFlags because it is not set by default. You need to specify TextFormatFlags.RightToLeft .

The following code snippets show how to display text when RightToLeftLayout=false and RightToLeft=yes:

[VB]

'We have to adjust the left of the drawing rectangle to draw the text in the correct location
'NewLeft = FormWidth - (Left + Width)
TextRenderer.DrawText(e.Graphics, " العربية !", Me.Font, New Rectangle(Me.Width - (5 + 50), 5, 50, 50),
SystemColors.ControlText, TextFormatFlags.RightToLeft)

[C#]

// We have to adjust the left of the drawing rectangle to draw the text in the correct location
//NewLeft = FormWidth - (Left + Width)
TextRenderer.DrawText(e.Graphics, " العربية !", this.Font, new Rectangle(this.Width - (5+50), 5, 50, 50),
SystemColors.ControlText, TextFormatFlags.RightToLeft);

Reading and Display Dates

Dina Lasheen - MSFT — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 09:48:22 GMT

One of the hottest topics in globalization is the topic of dates. Today we’ll see how we can use the DateTime class in the .NET framework to read and display different date values from different calendars.

The actual DateTime value is independent of the way it appears when you display it in your UI. Internally, all DateTime values are denoted as the total number of ticks that have elapsed since 12:00:00 midnight, January 1, 0001. The appearance of a DateTime value is the result of a formatting operation.

Reading Dates

First, you can initialize through the constructors, or by parsing the string representation of a date and time value. The Parse, ParseExact, TryParse, and TryParseExact methods all convert a string to its equivalent date and time value.

You can use the TryParse and TryParseExact methods to check if a particular string contains a valid representation of a DateTime value in addition to performing the conversion.

The following example uses the Parse method to parse a UmAlQura string and convert it to a DateTime value.

private static String ReadHijriDate(String InputStr)

{

String OutStr= "";

DateTime dt;

System.Globalization.DateTimeFormatInfo HijriDTFI;

try

{

HijriDTFI = new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("ar-SA", false).DateTimeFormat;

HijriDTFI.Calendar = new System.Globalization.UmAlQuraCalendar();

dt = DateTime.Parse(InputStr, HijriDTFI);

OutStr = dt.Date.ToString("dddd, dd MMMM, yyyy");

}

catch (Exception ex)

{

MessageBox.Show(ex.Message);

OutStr = "Error";

}

return OutStr;

}

Displaying Dates

The appearance of date values is dependent on the culture, international standards, application requirements. The DateTime offers a great deal of flexibility in formatting date and time values through the overloads of its ToString method.

The default DateTime.ToString() method returns the string representation of a date and time value using the current culture's short date and long time pattern. However, you can display the dates in the different calendars that you need. For example, the below code displays the dateTime in a UmAlQura date, notice here that the range for the UmAlQura calendar is much less than the Gregorian calendar, therefore you need to fallback to the HijriCalendar. Check out this code:

private static String DisplayHijriDate(DateTime dt)

         String OutStr = "";

         System.Globalization.DateTimeFormatInfo HijriDTFI;

try

         //dt = Convert.ToDateTime(InputStr);

         HijriDTFI = new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("ar-SA", false).DateTimeFormat;

         HijriDTFI.Calendar = new System.Globalization.UmAlQuraCalendar();

         if (dt > HijriDTFI.Calendar.MaxSupportedDateTime)

                 //We fell back to Hijri calendar, when we reached UmAlQura Max limit

                 HijriDTFI.Calendar = new System.Globalization.HijriCalendar();

         OutStr = dt.Date.ToString("dddd, dd MMMM, yyyy", HijriDTFI);

         catch (Exception ex)

                 MessageBox.Show(ex.Message);

                 OutStr = "Error";

         return OutStr;

I hope you found this blog useful and demonstrated how to read and display date through the DateTime class.

Arabic a Complex Script

Dina Lasheen - MSFT — Thu, 26 May 2011 08:58:00 GMT

In this video, you will explore the different features of the Arabic language. First, we will add an Arabic Keyboard and start typing Arabic. Switch to right-to-left display and examine some Arabic character shaping characteristics, in addition to ligatures, kashida, diacritics and Arabic numerals. Short video and filled with demos.

For your reference, this is a table of the characters used in my demo:

Arabic String	English Keyboard equivalent	Remarks
ا ااا	h hhh	The character “alef”, isolated, initial, middle and final forms
ث ثثث	e eee	The character “thaa”, isolated, initial, middle and final forms
ه ههه	i iii	The character “Haa”, isolated, initial, middle and final forms
لا	gh	Ligature character, “Lam” + “Alef”
ًُ	WE	Diacritics
ـــــــ	J	Kashida , or Tatweel character

Arabic MSDN library and the Arabic VS UI tooltip (CLIP) on Youtube

Dina Lasheen - MSFT — Mon, 16 May 2011 06:29:00 GMT

I created a YouTube channel and posted a couple of videos on the Arabic MSDN library and the Arabic VS UI tooltip (CLIP) project.
You can view them , and please share your feedback

Arabic MSDN Library
(Please visit the site to view this video)

Arabic VS UI tooltip (CLIP) project
(Please visit the site to view this video)

Arabic Microsoft Terminology

Dina Lasheen - MSFT — Wed, 11 May 2011 07:41:08 GMT

So, this is not a developer related post but I think this helpful to developers writing Arabic applications. Over the past 5 weeks I talked with several developers and MVPs in the community, in addition I reviewed some of the Arabic developer content. I noticed that there were no standard for Arabic terms in programs and technical writing, in general.

So if you want to have an Arabic application which uses the same terminology as Microsoft. We have a great resource: http://www.microsoft.com/language

You will find the Microsoft glossaries for all it products for the different languages .

So please visit the website, and enjoy!

Sketch Flow Video Tutorials

Dina Lasheen - MSFT — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 00:30:52 GMT

I’ll share with you today these very nice video tutorials about SketchFlow, here http://www.barm.ag/

The narration of the video is in Arabic and the key terms are in Arabic. It contains very useful information. Check it out and tell me what you think.

يعرض كيفية استخدام SketchFlow لبناء نماذج أولية تفاعلية للتطبيقات … http://www.barm.ag/

Reshape Arabic letters for Designers

Dina Lasheen - MSFT — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 08:19:00 GMT

Once again I got a request from a friend, actually I got the request from two friends but the first one was too sophisticated, they needed to shape Arabic characters to display on Windows Phone 7. However, the second request was to shape and re-order Arabic characters to use them in Expression Design. Microsoft Expression Design is graphic design tool for web images. It is part of the Microsoft Expression Studio suite and focuses on editing XAML and web graphics rather than print graphics (like Photoshop and Illustrator).

So my friend wanted to use Arabic words and use them in Expression Design. She had an easy way to simply use the Arabic words as images, .jpg or .png, then use them in her design. Of course this has many disadvantages, bad scaling & resizing, larger file size, not easy to change the colors or background , among a long list. I thought there must be a way to use Arabic fonts in these designers.

Windows in general perform the contextual shaping of Arabic characters as we type them, but some application, especially graphic designers apps, perform their own shaping and layout. On the other hand, I knew that the Unicode fonts that are shipped in Windows contain the shaped glyphs for Arabic character. So I wrote this simple conversion function to convert the Arabic characters from the Unicode 600 range to the shaped glyphs from the Unicode ranges. I thought it would be interesting tool to share with the rest of you Arabic developers\designers.

For simplicity, I assumed a couple of things:

1) Only Arabic letters

2) Only accepts one word, having separators

3) No numbers and No English accepted

I attached the application and you need to have the .NET Framework 2.0 to run it.

How to use it:

1) Type your Arabic word in the space provided.

2) Press “Shape”, if you don’t need to reverse the string, then uncheck the Reverse the string

3) The shaped string will appear in the result... press “Copy”.

4) Go to your designer, and paste the Text (make sure you select the Text input first).

Sounds easy, go ahead and try it.

I hope you find this useful J

Using Different Numerals in Silverlight

Dina Lasheen - MSFT — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 20:10:08 GMT

I just added a new blog post on my team blog about how to convert numbers from Arabic to Indic. The nice thing is this post works for any platform not only Silverlight. It also include the complete Silverlight code sample to demo this conversion. So read the full details at our team blog http://blogs.msdn.com/b/global_developer/archive/2011/02/24/display-arabic-digits-in-silverlight.aspx

إنشاء جزء ويب لـ SharePoint

Dina Lasheen - MSFT — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 07:27:43 GMT

لإنشاء "جزء ويب" إضافة جزء ويب العنصر إلى أي مشروع SharePoint. لإضافة عناصر تحكم إلى "جزء ويب" تحريره تعليمات برمجية الملف.

يمكنك أيضاً تصميم "أجزاء ويب" بشكل مرئي باستخدام مصمم. لمزيد من المعلومات، راجع كيفية القيام بما يلي: إنشاء جزء ويب لـ SharePoint باستخدام مصمم.

إنشاء جزء ويب لـ SharePoint

1. إنشاء مشروع SharePoint جديد أو فتح مشروع SharePoint موجود. للحصول على معلومات حول المشروعات المؤقتة ، راجع للمشروع SharePoint و العنصر خصائص المشروع.

2. في إضافة العنصر مربع حوار جديد، في الجزء القوالب المثبتة قم بتوسيع العقدة SharePoint له ثم انقر فوق 2010 .

3. في قائمة قوالب SharePoint تحديد جزء ويبثم انقر فوق إضافة.

4. في المربع الاسم ، اكتب اسماً لصفحة ويب، ثم انقر فوق إضافة.

يظهر العنصر جزء ويب في مستكشف الحلول. للحصول على أكثر المعلومات حول الملفات الموجودة في عنصر جزء ويب راجع إنشاء أجزاء ويب لـ SharePoint.

5. مستكشف الحلول, ينقر مزودجا "جزء ويب" تعليمات برمجية الملف. على سبيل المثال، إذا كان اسم "جزء ويب" WebPart1 ، ينقر مزودجا WebPart1.vb (في Visual Basic) أو WebPart1.cs (في C#).

ملف رمز الشريط يفتح في محرر التعليمة البرمجية.

6. إضافة عناصر تحكم إلى CreateChildControlsالأسلوب في ‏‏رمز الملف "جزء ويب". على سبيل المثال ، راجع الإرشادات التفصيلية: إنشاء جزء ويب لـ SharePoint.

Make yourself heard on Visual Studio 2010!

Dina Lasheen - MSFT — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 15:34:44 GMT

The Global Developer eXperience, team prepared a survey to collect your feedback on how you use Visual Studio 2010… If you used the Arabic CLIP, or the Arabic MSDN library, then please take this survey and give us your feedback and usage of Visual Studio 2010… it only takes 10 minutes to complete.

With this questionnaire, we also try to understand the preferred usage scenarios of the product, to better focus our future investments and improve the satisfaction of all users.

If you are using any version of Visual Studio 2010, let your comments be heard and fill the online survey.

We thank you in advance for your comments.

Come and Join us at Tech·Ed Middle East 2011

Dina Lasheen - MSFT — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 09:54:13 GMT

Tech·Ed Middle East returns to Dubai in 2011, March 8 - 10, for 3 full days of deep technical education, hands-on-learning and opportunities to connect with Microsoft and Community experts one-on-one.

Tech·Ed is Microsoft's premier technical education forum for providing the most comprehensive technical training on Microsoft's suite of products, technologies, solutions and services. Attendees get deep technical content, hands-on learning experiences, and opportunities to connect with industry and Microsoft experts one-on-one. If you are a technology professional involved in building, deploying or maintaining IT solutions using Microsoft technologies, Tech·Ed Middle East is the conference that will help you solve today's real-world challenges and prepare you for tomorrow's innovations.

The session catalogue is published and you can start to review the list of training that will be available, at http://www.teched.ae/session-catalog.aspx.
You can also tell us what you think of the catalogue by completing the session preference survey here: http://www.teched.ae/session-preference.aspx

Enabling ASP.NET site for RTL

Dina Lasheen - MSFT — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 09:40:00 GMT

I had a question from a friend about how to enable an ASP.NET site for right-to-left languages. I know what needs to be done and I published, over the years, some useful resources and small bit and pieces but I started of with Bing. What did I find? I found many questions from people who would like to enable their ASP .NET site for RTL, but the responses were not very clear. So I thought, this definitely deserves a blog, to clarify what you need to consider to enable your ASP .NET site. So this your brief guide on how to enable your website for RTL (Arabic)

First, make sure your site is Unicode aware and you are using good fonts that would display properly on any browser. Nice article here The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

Second, you need to decide on the resource model that you need to select, either local or global resources. Would you prefer to declare resources implicitly or explicitly.

A good resource for internationalizing your application is available at http://quickstarts.asp.net/QuickStartv20/aspnet/doc/localization/default.aspx

The first two steps are general to any language you need to localize your website into. The next steps are specific to RTL website.

Third, specify when to use the “dir” attribute. The dir attribute handles the RTL direction of text or UI elements. When direction is specified as RTL (right-to-left) in the <Page> tag, the page will be set as RTL and all the UI elements will be displayed from right to left and the vertical scrollbar appears on the left side, instead on the right. The rest of the controls in the page will implicitly inherit RTL style of the page.

If you don’t want to flip the layout of your page then specify the direction attribute on control s under the page level.

So answer the followings questions:

Where do I need to place the “dir” attribute ?

· If you want to flip the layout of the page then set “dir=rtl” on the page level

· If you want to keep your page without the flipping the contents then use the “dir” on the contents and content elements

Some more information at Bidirectional Support for ASP.NET Web Applications

How to load the “dir” on the fly?

Simply save the direction value of your ASP .NET pages in the Arabic Resources and load the resource value on the fly. I have a post to show how to load “dir” on the fly. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vsarabic/archive/2007/08/27/changing-the-web-page-direction-on-the-fly.aspx

Useful tips and tricks?

Special considerations for the web page alignment and other useful tips and tricks are available in this blog post http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vsarabic/archive/2007/07/31/quick-tips-on-having-arabic-web-pages.aspx

I hope this short guide is useful !

البيئة الخاصة بالـ SmallBasic

Dina Lasheen - MSFT — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 08:37:00 GMT

<هذه مقاطع من مواضيع أعجبتني من مستند بدء تشغيل SmallBasic, أرجو أن تنال إعجابكم. المقالة الأساسية موجودة هنا>

لنبدأ بمقدمة سريعة فى البيئة الخاصة بـ Small Basic. عندما تبدأ تشغيل Small Basic سوف ترى اطار مماثل للرسم التوضيحى التالى.

هذه هى البيئة الخاصة بالــ Small Basic التى سوف تقوم فيها بكتابة وتشغيل برامج الــ Small Basic. هذه الييئة تشمل العديد من العناصر التى تم تعريفها بالارقام.

المحرر، معرف بــ (1) هو المكان الذى سنقوم فيه بكتابة برامج الــ Small Basic. عندما تقوم بفتح نموذج لبرنامج (Template) او برنامج تم حفظه مسبقا، سوف يظهر على هذا المحرر. يمكنك بعد ذلك تعديله وحفظه للاستخدام فيما بعد.

يمكنك ايضا ان تقوم بفتح وتشغيل اكثر من برنامج فى وقت واحد. كل برنامج تقوم بتشغيله سيتم عرضه فى محرر منفصل. المحرر الذى يحتوى على البرنامج الذى تقوم بتشغيله حاليا يسمى بــ المحرر النشط.

شريط الادوات، المعرف ب (2) يستخدم فى اصدار اوامر اما الى المحرر النشط او الى البيئة. سوف نتعلم الاوامر المختلفة فى شريط الادوات لاحقا.

السطح، المعرف بـ (3) هو المكان الذى تظهر فيه اطارات المحرر.

Diacritics, Accents, Tashkeel

Dina Lasheen - MSFT — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 08:21:47 GMT

It’s Déjà vu… So I’m blogging in two places! My team created a new blog for international applications and I’m blogging their too.

If you are interested in the topic of Diacritics, tashkeel and you would like to learn more, read the full article on our team site http://blogs.msdn.com/b/global_developer/archive/2010/12/20/diacritics-accents-tashkeel.aspx

Thanks!