Ahmed Mahdy - Microsoft Student Partner

Since I’m a private beta tester for Microsoft Windows 7, I have the capability to contribute in private chats with Windows 7 product teams to discuss new features, provide feedback and suggestions to the new OS.

During these chats, a SWAG “Stuff We All Get” is offered for best questions (mostly best 3 questions in order of question and not by quality of question) during the chat session.

I won a SWAG before for some cool stuff with Windows 7 Logo on (see image below) with a signed letter from all product team who contributed in the chat session.

Before 2 weeks, I had some free time to login to another chat session about a certain technology in Windows 7 “I’m sorry, I can’t tell due to NDA of chat”, the surprise was that the coolest SWAG in beta chats for Windows 7 is in this chat session.

Here’s the page of the SWAG:

Hot off the presses and in limited supply!

Get yours by being selected as a Best Question Winner in Today's chat

Now available in a boxed set!  Both Beta and RC DVDs

I was very lucky to become a best question winner in this chat! Have a look :-)

I’m still waiting for the package to arrive to home to see the new box set!

That was after 1 week of obtaining non-boxed DVDs for Windows 7 Beta (x86 and x64)  during finalists of Imagine Cup 2009 Software Design local competition as being an official Microsoft Student Partner “MSP”!

Thank you Microsoft :-)

In a previous article, I’ve make a preview about the new Visual Studio 2010 features and drawbacks. One of the key drawbacks is that Smart Devices is no more supported in Visual Studio 2010.

Some people think that Microsoft is going to build a standalone IDE for Smart Devices including Windows CE and Windows Mobile applications like major competitors in this field “Apple and Google” who released free IDEs for development of both iPhone and Android applications respectively. Those thoughts were confirmed after the release of a public beta of Microsoft’s main development IDE, Visual Studio 2010 in the last week. Microsoft did not include Smart Devices programmability features in all supported languages in Visual Studio 2010, which was a bad news for smart devices developers when they found that out, especially for Windows Embedded developers which became very certain that Visual Studio will no more work with BSPs after much complaints of forcing most of Embedded developers who upgraded to Visual Studio 2008 to stick back to Visual Studio 2005 since VS 2008 and WinCE 6.0 were not compatible.

The good news that Microsoft Windows Embedded team is not intending to build its standalone IDE for Windows Embedded and Windows Mobile development. They’re working with Visual Studio team in order to find a solution for Smart Device programmability options in Visual Studio 2010.

Hoping to see Smart Devices back in next builds of Visual Studio 2010!

Microsoft announced Windows codename Chelan at TechEd North America 2009. Windows Chelan is the codename of the upcoming Windows Embedded Compact, the successor of Windows Embedded CE 6.0.

Window Embedded Compact is expected to include new key features including:

• Dual Core Support (SMP, ARMv6)
• WIFI Positioning System
• Bluetooth 2.1 stack
• Cellcore
• DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance)
• DRM
• Media Transfer Protocol
• IE7 Rendering Rich Media Plug-Ins
• NDIS 6.1 support
• Multi Touch Input
• Rich UX^* based on .NET 3.0/3.5

^(*)UX include C++ XAML API using technologies like WPF and Silverlight for attractive and functional user interfaces.

Windows Embedded Compact OS has the same architecture and core of Windows Embedded CE 6.0, so the porting of WinCE 6.0 based BSPs “Board Support Packages” should be straight forward for compatibility issues.

Windows Embedded Compact will finally become a plug-in for Visual Studio 2008, however there is no news whether it will become a plug-in for the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 or not since the last one removed Smart Device programmability features from it.

Microsoft didn’t want to declare more news about the new Windows codename Chelan. I think they’re true in this step especially in the mean time.

A public beta of Windows Embedded Compact will be available in the next months.

In a previous article, I displayed brand technologies in Visual Studio 2010. Since Visual Studio 2010 still in beta phase, some bugs and errors are found in this version of Visual Studio in just a glimpse about the product in less than 3 hours from first installation on a Windows 7 RC x64 machine.

Installation

Installation went smooth and fast without mentioned errors. I’ve tried several tests of installation on optical media "DVD”, local source and network source.

During network installation, I’ve powered off the network machine that include shared installation folder while installer was trying to extract a cabinet file. Installation considered file as corrupted and installation rolled back. During rollback, an error occurred stating that one of restoring computer to its previous state could not be found. Setup crashed because of absence of a Retry option during installation!

Smart Devices Developers

If you’re a smart device developer, Microsoft is telling you if you still in need of programming Windows Mobile and Windows CE application, do not rely on Visual Studio 2010 since it’s no more supported in this release of Visual Studio. As most of Windows CE developers expected a solution for the Platform Builder on Windows CE 6.0 that was only was available for installation on Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft didn’t include the whole smart devices programmability set!

That maybe since Google and Apple released a free IDE for mobile developers to develop their own application, I guess Microsoft is going to release a special IDE for mobile developers free of charge unlike Visual Studio 2010. Hoping Microsoft would make a declaration about this criticism as soon as possible.

Cursor Blink

A very strange issue in the Visual Studio 2010 IDE is that the Cursor blinks in a strange technique causing a shadow after every blink which might cause some eye problems especially developers can’t work except by tracking the cursor (The shown image illustrates the cursor “3rd line” in a snapshot and it appears scattered").

Non Functional Buttons

Let’s start a project from an existing code for all C++, Visual Basic and C#.

For C++

I’ve tried to open an existing code folder written on C++ to complete it. I tried to click the Browse button, it’s not functional! I tried to do the same for Add button to check validity of it, the same! Not working!

For Visual Basic and C#

I’ve tried to validate all buttons and actions on this wizard for both VB and C#, I clicked the Browse button (represented as …) and then a window appeared to Select Folder then clicked Cancel without adding an option. The bug appeared, the drive letter (c:\) was called back again but in a non-unicode character (Asian character) that was translated into a strange box or undefined character set. Also the whole path was converted into lowercase ignoring true naming of path folders and drive letters as well.

Visio 2007 UML Reverse Engineering

Microsoft Visio 2007 Professional is installed on my machine, since it’s installed, a plug-in used to reverse Engineer code into UML diagrams, the tool was not found in this release of Visual Studio 2010.

That was after 2-3 hours of installation. I’m going to get in depth with Visual Studio 2010 Team System to find more bugs and I’m going list them in following articles beside another series of articles as tutorials of the new product.

Microsoft Corporation just released its most famous IDE tool for developers, Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 on May 20, 2009 for MSDN Subscribers and soon released another version to public. A CTP version of VS 2010 was released on 2008 in VHD format. Visual Studio 2010 was introduced by codename Hawaii.

Actually, I didn’t try to test VS 2010 on VHD since a runtime installation would work fine for me to debug errors during installation and working environments.

I’ve just installed Visual Studio 2010 (2 hours ago from posting this article) and here is the first impression.

First Look

As shown in figure, the Visual Studio 2010 IDE was redesigned for clear UI organization with support of multiple document windows and floating tools windows. The new that the IDE shell was rewritten on WPF “Windows Presentation Foundation”, Microsoft’s revolutions in graphics experiences was firstly introduced in .NET Framework 3.0, whereas the internals were redesigned using MEF “Managed Extensibility Framework” to allow rich add of add-ins.

New Technologies

.NET Framework 4.0

Microsoft announced the .NET Framework 4.0 on 29 September 2008. Public beta was released with Visual Studio 2010 on May 26. The new .NET Framework empowers the Azure cloud computing platform programmability by support of: Parallel Extensions, PLINQ, Task Parallel Library. It also provides full support for F#, IronRuby and IronPython languages. It also provides supporting the subset of .NET Framework and ASP.NET with Server Core as in Windows Server 2008 R2. Beside lots of enhancements on existing .NET technologies.

F#

Full support of the multi-paradigm programming language F# which was included into the new version of .NET Framework 4.0. F# would be a replacement of J# that was no more included since Visual Studio 2008 as a sign that Microsoft will no more provide support for JAVA programming language. F# was developed in Microsoft Research Labs and firstly appeared in 2002 and it’s a language that provide rich support for both functional, imperative and object oriented programming aspects.

Oracle Database Programmability Support

Since Visual Studio 2010 provides extensibility and providing rich support for adding add-ins for third parties, Quest announced that they will provide an add-in that provide Oracle Database programmability support within Visual Studio 2010.

The new tool enables Oracle developers to perform offline design, development and change management in VSTS, and integrate their changes into the application's automated build schedule. This capability ensures that all database changes are managed and tracked in the system, unifying Oracle professionals with the rest of their organization's VSTS team.

"We are pleased to have Quest Software supporting Visual Studio Team System 2010," Jason Zander, general manager of Microsoft's Visual Studio Developer Division, said in the statement. "With this forthcoming solution, Oracle developers will be able to take full advantage of the benefits of Visual Studio Team System."

Code Editor

The Visual Studio 2010 code editor now highlights references; whenever a symbol is selected, all other usages of the symbol are highlighted. It also offers a Quick Search feature to incrementally search across all symbols in C++, C# and VB.NET projects. Quick Search supports substring matches and camelCase searches. The Call Hierarchy feature allows the developer to see all the methods that are called from a current method as well as the methods that call the current one.

IntelliSense in Visual Studio supports a consume-first mode, which can be opted-into by the developer. In this mode, IntelliSense will not auto-complete identifiers; this allows the developer to use undefined identifiers (like variable or method names) and define those later. Visual Studio 2010 can help in this also by automatically defining them, if it can infer their types from usage.

Visual Studio 2010 Team System

Visual Studio Team System 2010, codenamed Rosario is being positioned for application lifecycle management. It will include new modeling tools, including the Architecture Explorer that graphically displays the projects and classes and the relationships between them. It supports UML activity diagram, component diagram, (logical) class diagram, sequence diagram, and use case diagram. Visual Studio Team System 2010 also includes Test Impact Analysis which provides hints on which test cases are impacted by modifications to the source code, without actually running the test cases. This speeds up testing by avoiding running unneeded test cases.

Visual Studio Team System 2010 also includes a Historical Debugger. Unlike the current debugger, that records only the currently-active stack, the historical debugger records all events like prior function calls, method parameters, events, exceptions etc. This allows the code execution to be rewound in case a breakpoint wasn't set where the error occurred. The historical debugger will cause the application to run slower than the current debugger, and will use more memory as additional data needs to be recorded. Microsoft allows configuration of how much data should be recorded, in effect allowing developers to balance speed of execution and resource usage. The Lab Management component of Visual Studio Team System 2010 uses virtualization to create a similar execution environment for testers and developers. The virtual machines are tagged with checkpoints which can later be investigated for issues, as well as to reproduce the issue. Visual Studio Team System 2010 also includes the capability to record test runs, that capture the specific state of the operating environment as well as the precise steps used to run the test. These steps can then be played back to reproduce issues.

I’m going to display a list of backdraws and bugs found in this release of Visual Studio in a later article.

I've got many readings in Robotics from toys passing with mobile and industrial robots to space rovers. I really found it's so interesting that anyone can build their own robots so simply. I decided to build a Robot for my graduation project! Well, the idea is crazy -at least for my colleagues at faculty- due to lack of academic and financial materials.

Alright, I've searched tens of sponsors and could only gain a technical sponsor in specific parts of the robot, but no financial support.

I've did some Internet searching and could reduce costs up to 50%. That was really cool part to do to boost implementation process of the robot.

What's the problem then?

Actually, programming a robot is not that very simple. Okay, you may consider it: Plug, Program and Play (PPP). You can purchase all required hardware with tens of cautions of power failures and risks of incompatibility issues with hardware, then the most critical part is programming. You're not making simple software to control over a robot. It's all related to creating a special software for a customized platform with many considerations (power management is really tough!), networking and controls, even if you used the simplest programming languages like C#.

Roverbot

Roverbot is the codename of my graduation project. It would be the first of its type implemented ever in my university. It’s not simple at all to build a robot, but very fun to challenge!

Roverbot is expected to be released officially by June 2009. I’ll let you all meet Roverbot J.

Just wish me best of luck!

Laws of Robots

One: A robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allows a human being to come to harm. Two: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. Three: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.”

Windows 7 is…
the next release of the Windows client operating system, built on the secure foundation of Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. Performance, reliability, security, and compatibility are core tenets of this release as we collect your feedback to meet our engineering goals of making Windows 7 the best-performing and most stable Windows operating system to date. New innovations in the product are designed to augment your ability as an IT professional to better provision and manage increasingly mobile PCs, protect data, and improve both end-user and personal productivity. 

See Windows 7 for yourself

We are inviting IT professionals around the world to work with the Windows 7 Beta in their lab environments and secondary PCs to help ensure smooth adoption when the final product is available and to gather feedback from real-world settings.

How can you get involved?

1. Take a look at some of the new features and functionality in Windows 7 as part of our Springboard Series guidance on the Windows Client TechCenter on TechNet. As a partner you can also see additional resources on the Microsoft Partner Program portal.

2. Download the Beta for a hands-on trial.  For a limited time, Microsoft is making this pre-release version of Windows 7 available to the first 2.5 million people who download. Ready to take a test drive? You can get one by trying the Windows 7 Beta. We think you’ll have the best experience if: 

• You are willing to participate as an active beta tester and provide feedback to help us complete Windows 7. 
• You have an extra computer available to dedicate to testing beta software.
• You can back up your PC, install and reinstall Windows, and reconfigure your home network connection.
• You’re comfortable troubleshooting your own PC problems. There’s no technical support available for the Beta.
• You understand how to burn an ISO file to a DVD using your computer’s DVD burner.
• You have a system recovery disc and know how to use it.
• You enjoy participating in an interactive community of beta testers, sharing experiences and feedback in real-time.

Microsoft isn’t providing technical support for the Beta and isn’t responsible for business-related downtime. Don’t install the Beta on your primary home or work computer. When the Beta expires on August 1, 2009, you’ll need to reinstall a released version of Windows to keep using your computer. (See Installation Instructions.)

These are the Microsoft minimum hardware recommendations for systems that will be running the Windows 7 Beta. These recommendations are specific to the beta release and are subject to change:

• Processor: 1 GHz 32-bit or 64-bit processor
• Memory:  1 GB of system memory
• Hard drive: 16 GB of available disk space
• Video card:  Support for DirectX 9 graphics with 128MB memory (in order to enable Aero theme)
• Drive: DVD-R/W drive
• Internet connection (to download the Beta and get updates)

Note: Some product features of Windows 7, such as the ability to watch and record live TV or navigation through the use of “touch”, may require advanced or additional hardware. 

To learn more, see Windows 7 Beta: Frequently Asked Questions.

Source: Microsoft TechNet

In an earlier report “Windows 7 Beta is Now Public!” , I’ve declared that Microsoft has removed the Windows 7 Public Beta links and soon Microsoft Windows Team Blogs posted this item:

“Due to very heavy traffic we’re seeing as a result of interest in the Windows 7 Beta, we are adding some additional infrastructure support to the Microsoft.com properties before we post the public beta. We want to ensure customers have the best possible experience when downloading the beta, and I’ll be posting here again soon once the beta goes live. Stay tuned! We are excited that you are excited!”.

Microsoft reposted this message at 4 PM Pacific Time:

“Thanks for your interest in the Windows 7 Beta. The volume has been phenomenal -- we’re in the process of adding more servers to handle the demand. We’re sorry for the delay and we’ll re-post the Beta as soon as we can ensure a quality download experience.”

So, we’re still awaiting!

Microsoft Corporation declared the release of the new operating system Microsoft Windows 7 Beta to public testers today.

Brandon LeBlanc, one of The Windows Team Blogs team stated that:

“On January 9th, the Windows 7 Beta will be available for Windows enthusiasts to download via the Windows 7 page on Windows.com. The Windows 7 Beta is going to be available download-only (we’re not sending out physical media) and available for a limited time to the first 2.5 million people who download the beta.

The Windows 7 Beta will be available in English, German, Japanese, Arabic, and Hindi, and each language will be available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions (except Hindi which will only be available in 32-bit). “

Other sources from Microsoft Partners website declared the exact time when the link will get published to public as:

“Partners with a MSDN or TechNet subscription can download Windows 7 Beta now. All other partners can download Windows 7 Beta starting January 9, 2009 at 12:00 P.M. Pacific Time. “

Once it became 12 PM, people could be able to access the following link to sign up for the product and receive product keys, when you choose your preferred version (86 or 64) and language and hit the continue (>) button, you will get “Server is too busy” page and won’t be able to proceed with sign-up process.

Few minutes later (12:40), links were soon removed and visitors only get: Windows® 7 Beta coming soon!

If you’re interested in downloading Windows 7 and were lucky to get in, here’s the link: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dd353205.aspx

I hope that Microsoft would get links up again to let users enjoy the “Vista that users were looking forward to”.

Bye bye 2008! On the technological field, I’m going list the top 10 strategic technologies for 2008 as per Gartner Inc. analysis.

Green IT. The focus of Green IT that came to the forefront in 2007 will accelerate and expand in 2008. Consider potential regulations and have alternative plans for data center and capacity growth. Regulations are multiplying and have the potential to seriously constrain companies in building data centers, as the impact on power grids, carbon emissions from increased use and other environmental impacts are under scrutiny. Some companies are emphasizing their social responsibility behavior, which might result in vendor preferences and policies that affect IT decisions. Scheduling decisions for workloads on servers will begin to consider power efficiency as a key placement attribute.

Unified Communications. Today, 20 percent of the installed base with PBX has migrated to IP telephony, but more than 80 percent are already doing trials of some form. Gartner analysts expect the next three years to be the point at which the majority of companies implement this, the first major change in voice communications since the digital PBX and cellular phone changes in the 1970s and 1980s.

Business Process Modeling. Top-level process services must be defined jointly by a set of roles (which include enterprise architects, senior developers, process architects and/or process analysts). Some of those roles sit in a service oriented architecture center of excellence, some in a process center of excellence and some in both. The strategic imperative for 2008 is to bring these groups together. Gartner expects BPM suites to fill a critical role as a compliment to SOA development.

Metadata Management. Through 2010, organizations implementing both customer data integration and product integration and product information management will link these master data management initiatives as part of an overall enterprise information management (EIM) strategy. Metadata management is a critical part of a company’s information infrastructure. It enables optimization, abstraction and semantic reconciliation of metadata to support reuse, consistency, integrity and shareability. Metadata management also extends into SOA projects with service registries and application development repositories. Metadata also plays a role in operations management with CMDB initiatives.

Virtualization 2.0. Virtualization technologies can improve IT resource utilization and increase the flexibility needed to adapt to changing requirements and workloads. However, by themselves, virtualization technologies are simply enablers that help broader improvements in infrastructure cost reduction, flexibility and resiliency. With the addition of automation technologies – with service-level, policy-based active management – resource efficiency can improve dramatically, flexibility can become automatic based on requirements, and services can be managed holistically, ensuring high levels of resiliency. Virtualization plus service-level, policy-based automation constitutes an RTI.

Mashup & Composite Apps. By 2010, Web mashups will be the dominant model (80 percent) for the creation of composite enterprise applications. Mashup technologies will evolve significantly over the next five years, and application leaders must take this evolution into account when evaluating the impact of mashups and in formulating an enterprise mashup strategy.

Web Platform & WOA. Software as a service (SaaS) is becoming a viable option in more markets and companies must evaluate where service based delivery may provide value in 2008-2010. Meanwhile Web platforms are emerging which provide service-based access to infrastructure services, information, applications, and business processes through Web based “cloud computing” environments. Companies must also look beyond SaaS to examine how Web platforms will impact their business in 3-5 years.

Computing Fabric. A computing fabric is the evolution of server design beyond the interim stage, blade servers, that exists today. The next step in this progression is the introduction of technology to allow several blades to be merged operationally over the fabric, operating as a larger single system image that is the sum of the components from those blades. The fabric-based server of the future will treat memory, processors, and I/O cards as components in a pool, combining and recombining them into particular arrangements to suits the owner’s needs. For example a large server can be created by combining 32 processors and a number of memory modules from the pool, operating together over the fabric to appear to an operating system as a single fixed server.

Real World Web. The term “real world Web” is informal, referring to places where information from the Web is applied to the particular location, activity or context in the real world. It is intended to augment the reality that a user faces, not to replace it as in virtual worlds. It is used in real-time based on the real world situation, not prepared in advance for consumption at specific times or researched after the events have occurred. For example in navigation, a printed list of directions from the Web do not react to changes, but a GPS navigation unit provides real-time directions that react to events and movements; the latter case is akin to the real-world Web of augmented reality. Now is the time to seek out new applications, new revenue streams and improvements to business process that can come from augmenting the world at the right time, place or situation.

Social Software. Through 2010, the enterprise Web 2.0 product environment will experience considerable flux with continued product innovation and new entrants, including start-ups, large vendors and traditional collaboration vendors. Expect significant consolidation as competitors strive to deliver robust Web 2.0 offerings to the enterprise. Nevertheless social software technologies will increasingly be brought into the enterprise to augment traditional collaboration.

“These 10 opportunities should be considered in conjunction with many proven, fully-matured technologies, as we as others that did not make this list, but can provide value for many companies,” said Carl Claunch, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “For example, real-time enterprises providing advanced devices for a mobile workforce will consider next-generation smartphones to be a key technology, in addition to the value that this list might offer.”