Microsoft Kuwait celebrates the holy month of Ramadan and recently hosted an exclusive Ghabka for local media, VIP’s, government officials, educators and students at the Sheraton Hotel in Kuwait. At the event, Microsoft Kuwait took the opportunity to recognise key students and teachers from Kuwait University and American University of Kuwait (AUK). The Ghabka was attended by Wael Al Sagar, Chairman, A.H Al Sagar & Bros and Microsoft representative in Kuwait.

Ehab Mostafa, Country Manager, Microsoft Kuwait presented certificates to 23 computer science students and teachers of Kuwait University for their outstanding contribution towards the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Arabization content project organized by Microsoft in July 2010. Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, is a technology advanced programming language used by developers to develop console and graphical user interface applications.

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Tell us who you are?
My name is Cengiz Han; I am a software developer with 7 years experience as a professional. If we consider before the period that I started to get paid for developing software, I am developing software for 13 years. I am passionate about best practices of enterprise application architecture and software development life-cycle practices. Furthermore, I am following alt.net community and alt.net technologies and using some of them in real life projects. I am from Izmir, Turkey. I am currently located at Nicosia, North Cyprus and working as a software development consultant and trainer.

Tell us about your MVP history, when were you first awarded?
I am a Microsoft MVP since 2004, I am one of the MVP’s who are honored as first MVP’s of Turkey. My MVP competencies are ASP.NET and Microsoft Visual Studio ALM (current).

What do you do in order to keep up with latest tools and technologies?
First of all I try as much as possible to keep in touch with others from community. I participate at meetings as much as I can, both online and offline. I am reading books and blogs, my OPML list has a lot of RSS feeds. Furthermore, I am following some community luminaries on twitter to keep up to date.

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Tell us who you are?
Hi, my name is Gian Maria and I began coding when my parents gave me a Vic 20. From then on I moved on Turbo Pascal, Fortran, Prolog, C/C++, various assembly languages and finally started programming in .NET with the first public beta. I really loved to work with DirectX and computer graphics, and I was a fan of Low Level programming, in fact I really loved programming in assembly and working with Playstation2 assembly.

Then I moved to the opposite side, and I got interested in Application Lifecycle Management, agile processes and everything related to Software Engineering Management. Actually I’m working as independent consultant in Italy to help people developing software with the .NET platform.

Tell us about your MVP history, when were you first awarded?
This is my first year as MVP, I got my award 9 month ago, but I can assure you that these months were fantastic, especially for being able to have a direct communication with Visual Studio Team.

What do you do in order to keep up with latest tools and technologies?
First of all I try as much as possible to keep in touch with others through community meeting, and workshops, because I’m strongly convinced that exchanging ideas with others is the real key to stay updated with new technology. Then I use beta product to study them before they are released, so I’m ready to explain to people when they are public. I continuously buy and read books about technology and follow blogs. The key of everything is the passion we have in our work.

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With the Beta relased of Windows Phone Developer Tools, Microsoft also launched the updated version of Windows Phone 7 Training Kit for Developers. This Windows Phone 7 Training Kit will give you a jumpstart into the new Windows Phone world by providing you with a step-by-step explanation of the tools to use and some key concepts for programming Windows Phones.

Windows Phone 7 promises to be an amazing mobile phone operating system given its innovative user interface and functionality, as well as its great development platform upon which you can quickly and easily build games and applications.

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Today, Microsoft released the beta version of Windows Phone Developer Tools for developers. The same powerful and easy to use Visual Studio integrated developer environment (IDE) handles design and testing of Windows Phone 7 phone applications. This Beta of the Windows Phone Developer Tools is compatible with the final version of Visual Studio 2010.

The Windows Phone Developer Tools Beta includes the following

• Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone Beta
• Windows Phone Emulator Beta
• Silverlight for Windows Phone Beta
• Microsoft Expression Blend for Windows Phone Beta
• XNA Game Studio 4.0 Beta

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The Visual Studio 2010 Language Packs are free add-ons which enable the user to switch the English Visual Studio Professional User Interface into localized languages. As said by Somasegar few months back that code, the language of software, is universal, developers and end users speak in different tongues across the globe. For software to meet the needs of all customers, it must interact in their languages, currencies, times and dates, and accommodate layouts that feel natural to the user.

“With over a million words in the user interface and about 20 million words of documentation, producing localized versions of Visual Studio and the .Net Framework represents a massive engineering, testing, and translation effort,” said S. Somasegar, Senior Vice President of the Microsoft Developer Division

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Microsoft has released the June 2010 Release of the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit. The Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos. This content is designed to help you learn how to utilize the Visual Studio 2010 features and a variety of framework technologies including:

• C# 4
• Visual Basic 10
• F#
• Parallel Extensions
• Windows Communication Foundation
• Windows Workflow
• Windows Presentation Foundation
• ASP.NET 4
• Windows 7
• Entity Framework
• ADO.NET Data Services
• Managed Extensibility Framework
• Visual Studio Team System

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Microsoft has released the June update of Windows Azure Platform Training Kit. The Azure Services Training Kit includes a comprehensive set of technical content including hands-on labs, presentations, and demos that are designed to help you learn how to use the Windows Azure platform including: Windows Azure, SQL Azure and AppFabric. The June release includes new and updated labs for Visual Studio 2010.

Here is what is new in the kit:

• Introduction to Windows Azure – VS2010 version
• Introduction To SQL Azure – VS2010 version
• Introduction to the Windows Azure Platform AppFabric Service Bus – VS2010 version
• Introduction to Dallas – VS2010 version
• Introduction to the Windows Azure Platform AppFabric Access Control Service – VS2010 version
• Web Services and Identity in the Cloud
• Exploring Windows Azure Storage VS2010 version + new Exercise: “Working with Drives”
• Windows Azure Deployment VS2010 version + new Exercise: “Securing Windows Azure with SSL”
• Minor fixes to presentations – mainly timelines, pricing, new features etc.

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Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R3 is now a freely available .NET-based programming environment for building robotics applications. It can be used by both professional and non-professional developers as well as hobbyists. The R3 release is a minor update that has the functionality of the previous Standard Edition, but is available at no cost to all users. As of the R3 release there are no separate Editions and only a single download.

Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio can support a broad set of robotics platforms by either running directly on the platform (if it has an embedded PC running Windows) or controlling it from a Windows PC through a communication channel such as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.

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Microsoft has released the updated version of Windows Phone Developer Tools, which means you can now build Windows Phone 7 apps on the final release of Visual Studio 2010. The same powerful and easy to use Visual Studio integrated developer environment (IDE) handles from design to testing of Windows Phone 7 Series phone applications.

Here are more updates from the Windows Phone Team. Examples of what’s new & changed include:

• This release has been tested to work with the final release of Visual Studio 2010.
• An updated Windows Phone 7 OS image for the Windows Phone Emulator.
• A few APIs in the frameworks have been added and or changed. See this MSDN page for more details.
• The documentation has been updated with new and expanded topics. See this MSDN page for more details.
• We’ve provided limited support for launchers and choosers. In cases where the underlying built-in experience is not present launchers and choosers are still not available (i.e. the email chooser asks you to select a contact, but there are no contacts in the emulator and no way to add one).
• Pause/Resume events are now supported.
• If the tools are installed as the admin user, non-admin users are now able to deploy to the emulator.
• A problem with incremental deployment of projects has been fixed.
• A problem resulting in the error “Connection failed because of invalid command-line arguments” being displayed during project creation has been fixed.
• A problem where the Windows Phone node was not appearing in VS 2010 on non-system drives has been fixed.
• Design time skin refresh issues have been addressed.

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Visual Studio 2010 premiering at a theatre near you! Join Microsoft Gulf and the local developer community at the Cinestar Cinemas at the Mall of the Emirates for exclusive presentations on Visual Studio 2010, fun giveaways, and a viewing of Iron Man 2! It’s completely free but you do need to Register.

Schedule:

• When – May 2nd, 2010, 02:00 PM – 08:00 PM
• Where – Cinema # 3, CineStar Cinema, Mall of the Emirates, Dubai (Map)

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Microsoft today released an add-on for Visual Studio 2010 to provide tooling for Microsoft Silverlight 4 and RIA Services. It can be installed on top of either Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Web Developer 2010 Express. It extends existing Silverlight 3 features and multitargeting capabilities in Visual Studio 2010 to also create applications for Silverlight 4 using C# or Visual Basic.

Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 includes several features:

• Support for targeting Silverlight 4 in the Silverlight designer and project system
• RIA Services application templates and libraries
• Support for Silverlight 4 elevated trust and out-of-browser applications and other new Silverlight 4 features

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Expression Blend 4 enables you to create websites and applications based on Silverlight 3 and Silverlight 4, and desktop applications based on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) 3.5 with Service Pack 1 (SP1) and WPF 4. Expression Blend provides support for prototyping, interactivity through behaviors, special Silverlight functionality, and on-the-fly sample data generation.

Expression Blend includes new behaviors that are quickly and easily configured. To support the development of line-of-business (LOB) applications, Expression Blend introduces support for Views and ViewModels.

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Yesterday, Microsoft released the Microsoft Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch Beta which will allow developers to use some of the same controls that are used by developers on Microsoft Surface. You must have Microsoft Windows 7 Operating System and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 or Microsoft Visual C# 2010 Express Edition, as well as Microsoft .NET 4.0 installed on your computer. Do watch the Introduction to the toolkit video on Channel 9

As mentioned by Microsoft, the Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch Beta is a set of controls, APIs, templates, sample applications and documentation currently available for Surface developers. With the .NET Framework 4.0, Windows Presentation Framework 4.0 (WPF), and this toolkit, Windows Touch developers can quickly and consistently create advanced multitouch applications for Windows Touch PCs. This toolkit also provides a jump-start for Surface application developers to prepare for the next version of Microsoft Surface. Use it to take advantage of the innovative Surface technology and user interface to develop your own rich and intuitive multitouch experiences for a variety of Windows Touch devices.

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Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 provides an integrated environment of tools and server infrastructure that simplifies the entire application development process. Deliver business results using productive, predictable, customizable processes and increase transparency and traceability throughout the lifecycle with detailed analytics. Whether creating new solutions or enhancing existing applications unleash your creativity with powerful prototyping, architecture and development tools that let you bring your vision to life targeting an increasing number of platforms and technologies including cloud and parallel computing.

Realize increased team productivity by utilizing advanced collaboration features and use integrated testing and debugging tools to find and fix bugs quickly and easily creating high quality solutions while driving down the cost of solution development. Here are the download links:

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