Yousef’s blog

Imagine Cup

Ok, I’ll admit I promised I didn’t have any plans to participate in any more developing contests. However, how could I refuse joining a team from my university who became second at last years Dutch finals of the ‘world’s premier student technology competition’, the Imagine Cup. After a few weeks of hard work on our application and presentation, we were selected to present our solution named IConnect at the Dutch finals in Amsterdam. Incredibly, we have been chosen to represent The Netherlands at the worldwide finals in Seoul, South Korea in august! I guess I have to sneak out of Redmond for one week then!

From left to right: Edwin Jongsma from Avanade, my team (me, Jan, and Pieter) and the Acadamic Relationship manager from Microsoft Netherlands, Maarten-Jan Vermeulen. Note that one teammate (Gerardo) is missing on this picture because he was abroad for an internship.

Tags: competition, IConnect, Imagine Cup

Summer in Redmond

During MIX07, I was given the opportunity to interview for a postition as Software Design Engineer intern in the Windows Live New Product Incubation Team. I’m not sure whether that’s the official name, but it sounds pretty cool I think! I was pretty amazed by this opportunity, since I applied for an internship earlier this year but didn’t hear very much about that for a few weeks.

A few days after the conference I received an email ‘Summer in Redmond, USA’. Hurray! This means I’ll be spending july-september at the Microsoft Campus in Redmond. I’ll leave for the Seattle area next sunday around 1 pm from Amsterdam airport, and of course I am really looking forward to my first real working experience! I’ll try to keep you updated about my experiences as an intern.

Tags: None

What have I been up to?

Once again it’s time to post something to my blog! You might be wondering what kept me so busy since my trip to MIX07. Well, there are several bad reasons for my lack of blog posts, but today I’ll post some updates! Next to completing my first year at university, I’ve been busy with the Imagine Cup and several other projects. Check out the new posts to find out more!

Tags: None

WPF Earth: Virtual Earth 3D using the Presentation Foundation

About one and a half year ago, when I first heard of WPF (the Windows Presentation Foundation) I started some experiments with the technology. One aspect which particularly gained my interest was the ability to easily add 3-dimensional objects to a user interface. As a Windows Live-guy, I figured it might be interesting to map Virtual Earth onto a sphere using WPF (there didn’t exist an official 3D client for Virtual Earth back then).

Since I bumped into quite a few problems during development, it set the project aside a few times. Now I finally fixed all major problems and am ready to post some results. Read on to play with the application yourself, and read about the problems I encountered.

Continue reading WPF Earth: Virtual Earth 3D using the Presentation Foundation…

Tags: 3d, google maps, mapping, maps, virtual earth, virtual earth 3d, windows presentation foundation, wpf

MVP and MIX07

Today I officially received the Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award for my contributions to the Windows Live community. Even though I still need to fill in a biography, you’re welcome to check out my profile in the Windows Live Developer category.

Next to this I’ve got more good news. At the end of this month, I’ll be attending the MIX07 conference in Las Vegas! Since last year was an incredible experience for me, I am really looking forward to it. MIX07 will be covering all the latest developments around Web 2.0 and rich user experience. This includes (but is not limited to) ASP.net AJAX, Expression, WPF and of course Windows Live. I hope to meet a lot of interesting people at the conference again, so if you’re going as well, be sure to let me know!

Tags: award, conference, las vegas, live, microsoft, mix07, most valuable professional, mvp, windows live

IE7 Advanced toolbar buttons

Currently, there are several ways to create addons for Internet Explorer. The two I’ll be talking about in this post are BHOs (Browser Helper Objects) and Toolbar Buttons. To create a toolbar button, you simply add a value into the registry specifying whether you want to either launch a script, a function inside a COM library, executable or open an Explorer Toolband. When writing an advanced addon, most of the time you’d probably want to use a COM object.

As described in the Toolbar Button MSDN article, it’s fairly easy to get the COM object’s IOleCommandTarget::Exec function called when the user clicks the toolbar button. However, this method limits you to basic toolbar buttons. What if you’d like to create more advanced toolbar buttons, one with a dropdown menu for example?

This is a problem I ran into during the development of the first version of the Mapper IE7  addon. I’ve also seen this question being asked a few times at the IE Extension Development MSDN Forums. Several solutions to the problem are available on the internet (like this Codeproject article, or this newsgroup discussion). However, none of the solutions I found adds a real dropdown button into the toolbar, what I actually wanted to do. Continue reading IE7 Advanced toolbar buttons…

Tags: addons, BHO, COM, dropdown, IE7, internet explorer, mapper

Designertopia

On the first day of February I left at about 5 AM to Rotterdam Airport to catch my flight to London. I visited the Designertopia conference held February 1st/2nd this year. Even though the conference was mainly targeted at designers (and being mostly a developer myself) the sessions were pretty interesting. Continue reading Designertopia…

Tags: conference, designertopia, expresion, microsoft, vista, webdesign, webdevelopment