Pooya's place (in the Gulf)

I’ve had several people ask me about the process for how to download software through DreamSpark.  It couldn’t be easier.

1. Go to http://www.dreamspark.com
2. Sign in with a LiveID (Remember this can be any email address including your .edu school address)
3. Select your Country, then University from the drop down lists
4. The system will verify that you are either on LiveatEDU or from a registered University that participates in Dreamspark
5. Download software :)

I’ve also created a short video that visually shows these steps:

I’m currently reading Presentation Zen which is very good and gives concrete examples of good and bad slides and presentations.  I’m hoping to incorporate some of the techniques into my own presentations this year, so hopefully you’ll see an improvement.  The next book will be Beyond Bullet Points, available on MS Press. 

One of the simplest ways to make presentations more engaging is to use great visuals and I wanted to share some of the sources mentioned in the book, I’m not listing them all, only the free and low cost image sources, there are lots more but this is a good start:

• iStockPhoto
• MorgueFile
• Flickr Creative Commons
• Stock.xchng
• everystockphoto

Megalopolis, one of the Game Dev finalists of Imagine Cup 2008 from Germany is now commercially available on the Xbox Live Marketplace.  Try out the demo if you have an Xbox, or check out the video.  Amazing what students can do these days, the team’s site has screenshots and a description of the environmental game.

Looking forward to seeing what the Gulf universities can come up with for this year’s imagine cup.  Game design returns as a category this year.

What an interesting day.  Spent the day at UAE University, one of the largest and most prestigious universities in the UAE meeting some of the professors and getting a tour of the labs there.  Dr. Nikolaos Mavridis  (who runs the lab) showed me around the Interactive Robots and Media Laboratory (IRML) where I saw some of their research projects including Ibn Sina (the world's first Arabic-speaking Humanoid Robot) and a Microsoft funded project called FaceBots (Facebook + Robots), which is just fun and could be expanded so much more (think twitter).  I also met Dr. Hesham El Sayed, who I need to thank for giving me an orientation on education in the UAE and also for introducing me to the Entrepreneurship center at the university.  Finally I met Dr. Leila Ismail who runs the High Performance Grid Computing Lab at the university and has been an Imagine Cup mentor for some successful teams from UAEU.

Some of the highlights were seeing Dr. Nikolaos’ monitor which is an idea I hope to copy soon,

seeing a camel in the back of a pick-up truck

and then getting to finally go to Jebel Hafeet.

I’ve been living in Dubai for 3 years and have visited Al Ain several times (the Zoo is a must), but had never gone up Jebel Hafeet.  Well, today was the day, what a great drive up,

seeing the sunset from the top and enjoying Iftar at the summit was fantastic.

My 1st blog post in a while and a good time to discuss some of the changes you’ll notice around here.  This year I’m going to be focusing a lot more on Academia and what we refer to as the Local Software Economy.  Basically this means I’ll spend a lot more time with students and professors and also on promoting entrepreneurship (I’m going to misspell this at least 100 times this year) in the Gulf.  So there’ll be a little less architecture and a little more research focused, student focused and a lot more on jobs and start-ups.  Working with universities this past month has made me realize how much I miss school and learning in general and working with start-ups is going to be great, takes me back to my roots, maybe I can live vicariously through them :)  If you’re a start-up in the Gulf, drop me a line and let’s talk, there’s a huge amount of help Microsoft can provide, I’ll be posting about some of these here on the blog in the near future.

I'm sure those on the Win7 Beta have seen the messages from your machines, but just in case you didn't, tomorrow is the expiration of the Win7 Beta, it's time to move to the RC.

“Starting July 1^st, the Beta will start to reboot every two hours and will expire on August 1^st.  Want to download the RC?  The RC download program closes on August 15^th.  After that, you won’t be able to get the download, but you can still install the RC and get a key if you need one.  Click here.  If you’re using the Windows 7 Release Candidate, we hope you like what you see.  Let us know – click here – and tell us what you think.”

I'll have to update my home machine tonight, but don't worry even if you don't do it before July 1st, you don't lose anything on the machine, but it will reboot every 2 hours.

I'm sure most of you have heard of the new Bing search from Microsoft.  I've been using it for a while (I've always been fond of the Image search capabilities, infinite scrolling, filtering, and the previews) and I'm pleasantly surprised to say it's been working very well for me.  It's called a decision engine and there's lots of examples of why, from travel, to shopping to health questions but here is a very simple example of why I like it.

 I was trying to plan for our next fiscal year and needed to know approximately when Ramadan would fall in 2009, so I did what most people would do, a quick search on the internet.  First place I tried was Bing (my default search provider) and the very 1st thing on the page is the answer I'm looking for, not just a link to where I can find the answer, but the actual answer (this one coming from timeanddate.com) .... looks like Ramadan will fall around August 22nd, 2009.  You can try it with other search providers and all of them will pretty much let you find the answer (in fact the search result links are ordered in pretty much the same way across most) but it's nice to just get an answer some times. 

 Try it out for yourself and decide, next time Bing it (all Chandler jokes aside). 

We held the first "TechTalk" today at Al Murooj Rotana for Partners who work with Microsoft with sessions on:

·         Introducing Windows Azure - Anton Delsink

·         Windows 7 -  Wilson Xavier

·         Web 2.0 - Pooya Darugar

·         Network Access Protection -   Zahid Tikrity

Unfortunately I had to do my session in 45 minutes as we were running late, but as promised the slides are here for your review.  I tried to look at Web 2.0 from a holisitc view, starting with Web 2.0 in the enterprise and then discussing the more well known web facing side for both user experience (AJAX, Silverlight) and the infrastructure (RSS, Live Services, ...)

This will be an ongoing series where you'll have a chance to connect with me and my colleagues from the Developer and Platform group as well as the Consultants who give their real life implementation experience.  If you'd like to attend, let me know as these are by invitation events.

I've been spending more time with the web design agencies in Dubai and it's a whole different world than the SOA work I do with the large enterprises, for one thing their offices tend to be much cooler.  We speak a lot about Sivlerlight and the power of .NET in the browser and one of the most frequent requests is how does a flash designer or developer get started with Sivlerlight.

Project Rosetta is a great way to get started.  There are 9 lessons there right now that walk you through the basics of Silverlight all from the point of view of someone with a flash background. 

A lot of people have been asking me what the best way is to recieve invitations to our Microsoft Gulf events for developers and to recieve news from us on new technology.  We have lots of sources for this, but the best way is to profile yourself and let us know what you're interested in. 

1. Go to the Microsoft Profile Center
2. Sign in with your LiveID
3. Update "My Personal Information" to make sure that your country is one of the Gulf countries: UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Yemen
4. Update "My Business Information" to make sure that the "primary role" is correct, select "Developer, Solutions Architect, ..." whatever matches

That's it.  You can also manage all of your subscriptions to the TechNet Flash and local Gulf DPE Newsletter from the Subscritption center as well.

 I've posted a quick video that walks you through this.  Sorry about the audio, I'll try to update it with better sound if I have a chance.

Live translator has been around for a while and its quite cool, being able to translate whole pages and see both the original and the translated version side by side.  Unfortunately it is blocked in the UAE by Etisalat (the major ISP) as all translation services can be used as sort of a proxy to access unauthorized web pages.  Leaving the decision to do this alone for now, it meant that a lot of users in the country could not use this great translation service.  Now we have a solution, introducing TBot.

 Simply add "mtbot@hotmail.com" (without the quotes) as a friend on Live / MSN messenger and start communicating with it.

Type "TBot?" and it will give you the menu choices to set your from and to languages.  All of the languages from the Live translator site are available, including Arabic.  You can change languages at any time by going to the "TBot?" menu and selecting the right option.

Try it out and see what you think, especially the arabic.

I've been asked a lot more recently about "Cloud Computing" and especially how Microsoft is playing in this area, I'll link to the articles when they come out.  In the meantime David Chappell has written a nice summary of the current state of cloud computing platforms and describes some of Microsoft's work in this area.  The paper is very focused on the enterprise aspects of cloud computing but remember that Microsoft has a huge array of assets in this area including ones that consumers can use today with the Live offerings and the Mesh platform. 

Biztalk Services is already available for use and does a great job of managaing identity in the cloud for developers. SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) gives developers on demand storage with the ability to query the stored data, available in beta. There's lots for developers to play with already but look for a lot more exciting developer oriented could computing announcements at PDC this year.

I hosted severl of our customers for an "SOA Day" at Microsoft Dubai today.  It was an interesting discussion focused around SOA that also touched on specific areas where Microsoft has great technology enablers of SOA, Biztalk, WCF, ... .  I'm posting the session slides here for the attendees and anyone who missed today's session.  I'll be doing more of these around the region, if you're interested in attending, drop a comment on the blog or send me an email and I will add you to the invite list.

I held 3 sessions:

1. What is SOA, Why SOA - What is it and why are people interested, what is the value

2. Real World SOA - Microsoft's approach to SOA, not top down and not bottom up, but a hybrid model

3. How do you get there - Methodologies and Tools that can help you start on the road to SOA

I just uploaded my 1st video on Community Clips :)  It came from a discussion we had this morning in a meeting as we were previewing some powerpoint slides.  The slide had gotten quite long with a lot of text and we wanted to split it into 2 slides.  One person suggested to simply copy the whole slide and delete the top section in the duplicate copy, making 2 slides.  The other person was certain that there was a command for it as he had done it in the past.  I used the Office Search Commands utility to search for the "split" command but didn't find what we were looking for.  A quick internet search showed the article that describes how to do the split, but since we were searching multiple pages and only scanned the results, it didn't seem like the right answer.  Either way, we used the old copy and delete method and got what we needed.

Once the meeting finished, I had a chance to re-read the instrcutions and actually try them and it works.  So I decided to create a quick Community Clips video to maket it visual and a little more interesting than the simple text description.  So here is my 1st Community Clips video, hope to see some of you creating some for your favorite Office task (or really any other video tips):