Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Microsoft Maren

We’re pleased to announce that today the Cairo Microsoft Innovation Center (CMIC) is releasing Microsoft Maren, a Windows extension that allows you to type Arabic in Roman characters and have it converted on the fly to Arabic script.  Maren integrates seamlessly with Windows and works in most Windows applications and websites.
We are inviting you to download and install Maren from: www.GetMaren.com

So please help us out and spread the word:
·         Tell people about GetMaren.com
·         Join the Facebook group

Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Debugging Tools for Windows

Visual studio debugger tools (including Spy++ & Remote Debugger) are great, but we always need to go beyond visual studio capabilities and that's when debugging tools are really useful.

I am writing this post for mainly two reasons, The first one is to share some of my favourite debugging tools that are powerful to use & know about; The second one is actually for documentation purposes to act as a guide/reference for me & others who search for a debugging tool that help in doing a specific task.

Below are some tools I used them myself & found them really useful and neat to use:

1- DebugView  for Windows, This tool tracks any OutputDebugString/ DbgPrint and displays it without the need for a debugger.
I see this tool is idle when quick debugging is needed on a clean machine (with no visual studio installed), no process attaching required .. etc


2- SysInternals Tools are indeed so powerful tools and I guess you will always find what you are looking for there (that's why microsoft acquired it ;) ). I tried WinDbg one -for commands lovers- , Process Explorer & Process monitor.
Process monitor is a very good choice for monitoring everything on your computer, starting from the registry, till process monitoring with filtering options.. it is indeed a very cool tool.


3- Auto Debug for Windows , a tool for APIs monitoring & tracing, maybe it has other features, but this was what I was interested in mainly.. the bad news is that it is not a free tool, however the good news is that it doesn't block you when you run the trial.

4- Dependency Walker , not a real debugging tool, but you will probably need it when things not work due to missing files/modules, it just does what it says & sometimes that's all what you want !

That's all for now, everybody is welcomed to share his favorite ones too.

Friday, February 13, 2009

The Undocumented Feature

Hello everybody,

Well, I just want to mention a small trick that many may already know, but many may not.. It's about copying & pasting the text that appears in a MessageBox, many times that is needed during development, but yet it is not documented in msdn or any other Microsoft resource..
 
The thing is that you can indeed copy text in a message box using simply (Ctr+C) and then pasting the copied text in any editor (Ctr+V), and it ends up having sth like that..


   ---------------------------
   Caption
   ---------------------------
   Text
   ---------------------------
   OK  
   ---------------------------

I can imagine that this feature was made out of a dev's passion :) ..  anyway, It is really a useful thing to know.. Happy development !!

Thursday, January 08, 2009

Gaza strip, the untold story

The least we can do is prayers & trying to spread what Israel is truly doing in Gaza..
Sameh, a Palestinian 23 years old blogging from inside Gaza.. 

Allah be with them..