GuruStop.NET

SitePoint, a well-known publisher of nice easy-but-deep books in web design and web related stuff, has celebrated the end of the world cup (and the fact that Spain has won) by putting an ebook of one of their titles for FREE (“jQuery: Novice to Ninja”, 407 pages) – only for 24 hours (which I don’t know starting what hour, so, go quick!)

Get the book by putting your email here (you receive the PDF link by email):
http://sale.sitepoint.com/

Thanks Scott Hanselman (@SHanselman) for spreading on twitter, hence getting me to know about the book!

Have fun,

http://www.101ftb.com/T80G10C780

Five days ago I got a great email from 101 Free Tech Books. Seems the drawing I wrote about is real!!

Yes, I won a FREE print book. Filled in my shipping information yesterday and got the post that confirms my order was being processed. Feels so real! I’m even asked to give testimonials after receiving the book, which I will…

Which Book?

The book I have chosen is “Professional WCF 4: Windows Communication Foundation with .NET 4”. Sounded like a great title!

There is a trick in here. The option for books is only available from my wish list prior to the random drawing. I didn’t pay enough attention to this earlier, so, had a very small wish list of just “sample” books in it. Some of them I already had as ebooks. This was not very right.

I also tried to choose another book, add to my wish list, and go back to choosing again, but, as mentioned, only the books added prior to wining were there. Makes sense though!

You Can Win Too!

Now, I can recommend those people even more! They emphasize completely on showing how real this is, and I seem to believe them so far.

The SVN News

Today I was hanging around GitHub when realized a relatively old news, dated to April 1, 2010, saying they do support SVN.

Announcing SVN Support

Yes, it’s April Fools day. Very funny date to announce anything serious as they admit themselves in an update to the news post, but it DOES work.

Use the same Git clone HTTP URL, just add “svn.” between “http://” and “github.com”:

http://svn.github.com/[user]/[repository]

It even allows you to write changes back to the repository, as announced in the more recent news post, dated May 4, 2010, check it out for the “cavets” (known issues):

Subversion Write Support

That uses the same URL but with HTTPS:

https://svn.github.com/[user]/[repository]

This should work best when you want to get some project for read-only access or very few commits from your side, when this project has a very long history you are not really interested in. Of course you wouldn’t want to use that if you are leading (or a main committer to) a project hosted at GitHub.

Just noticed this great website for free printed technical books, with free shipping included.

Of course as you know, the sky doesn’t rain gold. Simply this is an advertisement based website (you may have expected it), and advertisement sponsor those books.

Every month they make a drawing for all registered users to choose which ones they’ll send free book. You go, register,, and choose your wish list, and hopefully be included in the drawing for a soon month!

Not bad given you don’t have to do much effort for getting in.

This is the registration link, through my reference:

http://www.101freetechbooks.com/T80G10C780 

This is how they express it:

101FreeTechBooks.com gives you 101 chances to win real tech books each month. Simply choose the books of your choice each month and automatically participate in monthly drawings. monthly winners will receive their books, shipped directly to them, for FREE. Even shipping is free. Want to increase your odds of winning? Simply refer your friends. Don’t miss your chance to win! Start browsing book catalog

Go try it out…

http://www.101freetechbooks.com/T80G10C780

Good Luck!

A great VIDEO series on all the nice effects (and functionality) you can achieve with jQuery JavaScript library for those who know NOTHING about it.

jQuery is a very powerful library. One of the first things I do when creating new project is to include the library in it. Microsoft is going to include it by default in ASP.NET web projects (All ASP.Net projects, not just MVC) starting Visual Studio 2010.

Here are some few examples of what you can do with it (VIDEO):

http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/web-roundups/jquery-for-absolute-beginners-video-series/?awesm=fbshare.me_EIez#

Have fun jQuerying…

If you heard about Microsoft Oxite CMS, this is the new one, created as a different project to avoid previous developer comments.:

From Press:

Microsoft’s open-source CMS platform is (re)born | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=4506

Project Homepage:

http://orchard.codeplex.com

Quote From Press:

The guesses (by me and others) look like they were on target. The “Orchard Project,” which is getting its debut on November 11 at Tech Ed Europe is, indeed, the successor to the Microsoft Oxite content-management system (CMS).

Microsoft made available the first the open-source Oxite CMS bits at the end of 2008. Like Oxite, Orchard will be a free, open-source CMS platform — plus a set of shared components for building ASP.Net applications and extensions. The Orchard code is licensed under an OSI-approved New BSD license.

From the Orchard page on the Microsoft CodePlex code-repository site:

“(T)his core (Orchard) team will use their experience working with ASP.NET and Oxite to deliver a fundamentally new architecture that is the Orchard CMS. We have deliberately chosen to start development, with the guidance and contribution from the community. Over time we expect this project to become a viable successor to Oxite v1 and we know that providing a migration path for users of that existing application will be a high priority.”

Microsoft has released a new Facebook SDK Version 3.0 (other than their old not-so-great one) and it looks to have not just updated APIs but also wide range of features supported in many application types.

Quoting a related blog post from c|net “The web services report” blog:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13515_3-10393823-26.html

Microsoft on Monday released a software development kit for Facebook that allows developers to create Facebook applications for Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation. This should expand the reach of Facebook in third-party applications as well as make Silverlight and WPF more viable platforms for developers looking to build social applications.

A screenshot showing off the NewsFeed control for WPF.

(Credit: The Silverlight Team Blog)

The SDK comes complete with samples and tools to develop Facebook applications in ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF, and WinForms. It also features the source code for the API, components, controls, and samples.

There are currently other libraries available that allow Facebook developers to develop with other technologies, such as JavaScript, PHP, ActionScript, and the iPhone. There are a variety of others as well, which can be seen here, but these are the ones that Facebook officially provides support for.

Some cool guys (all working in ITWorx I guess, one of the biggest Egyptian Software houses) have created a new website:

http://www.sharepoint4arabs.com

The website, as the name implies, is dedicated for ARABIC resources related to SharePoint.

It originally contained the technical blogs of the site founders (Founders’ Blogs) which are very useful for posts about SharePoint, then very recently they have also lunched Screencasts (Also in Arabic) that start from the very beginning until further advanced stuff.

I think you’ll enjoy them!

• SharePoint 4 Arab Homepage
• Founders’ Blogs
  • Ayman El-Hattab
  • Marwan Tarek
  • Mohamed Yehia
• Screencasts

I hope you like them,

.

Microsoft has released a final version of its book “Microsoft Application Architecture Guide, 2nd Edition”.
The book is described as:

This guide is available online here in the MSDN Library and will be available in the Fall of 2009 as a Microsoft Press book, ISBN# 9780735627109, that you can purchase through local and online booksellers.

The guide is intended to help developers and solution architects design and build effective, high quality applications using the Microsoft platform and the .NET Framework more quickly and with less risk; it provides guidance for using architecture principles, design principles, and patterns that are tried and trusted. The guidance is presented in sections that correspond to major architecture and design focus points. It is designed to be used as a reference resource or to be read from beginning to end.

The guide helps you to:

• Understand the underlying architecture and design principles and patterns for developing successful solutions on the Microsoft platform and the .NET Framework.
• Identify appropriate strategies and design patterns that will help you design your solution’s layers, components, and services.
• Identify and address the key engineering decision points for your solution.

Today (technically yesterday, since it’s 3:26 AM already while I’m starting this), Mr. Adam Mohamed Meligy finally arrived home, after staying 9.5 days in nursery. This –dear audience- given Mr. Adam arrived to our world only in October 5, 2009, a date that the entire world will (sooner or later) always remember!

Mr. Adam is now taking a personal cover, pretending to be a normal baby, while he is pretty professional, he cannot sometimes hide his special natures, being relatively quiet compared to normal babies, and highly responsive to touches and (believe it or not) spoken notes/requests.

These are things that the world will remember once Mr. Adam finishes his first big achievement in the field he will take up for living (God Willing). Some other small details matter more to the family, both his grandparents –for example- note him as their first grandchild. I –personally- recognize him as my extra chance in life! If I fail to manage to be another Anders Hejlsberg/Martin Fowler, Scott Guthrie/Brad Abrams, or Scott Hanselman/Rob Conery/Phil Haack (still trying), Mr. Adam has a bigger chance; else wise, he’ll be digging his road as a notable figure in some different field (God Willing).