Amir Shevat's Blog

Three more weeks to OpenUp + last month’s winners

ashevat — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 04:11:00 GMT

The OpenUp competition is ending in three weeks so time is running out on project submissions!

Up until now we received submissions for many cool and popular projects starting from games to frameworks and controls, all the way to environmental friendly projects.

The following projects have already won a Mobile Memory Mouse 8000:

The winner for July was:
Daniel Cohen – DNA Studio
Defrost Outlook
http://www.codeplex.com/defrostoutlook

The winners for June were:
Gil Shinnar and Simon Grinberg
WPF poker
http://www.codeplex.com/wpfPoker

The winner for May was:
Tamir Khason
Duplicate images finder
http://www.codeplex.com/DupliFinder

There is another mouse prize for this month, and the grand prize of a trip to PDC still waiting for you.

So post your project and you can also win a mouse and a trip to PDC!

OpenUp - Live Hits Finder

ashevat — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 08:11:44 GMT

Amit Talmor has release a cool new open source project to OpenUp called Live Hits Finder.

About Live Hits Finder- Many times when we are searching for some item in Google/Live/Yahoo/...
The top results do not satisfy us.
Sometimes the best results are hidden in the next search results pages.
By finding the BUZZ words related to the searched item we can:

Modify our search.
Get a better understanding on the searched item.

The project searches for BUZZ in Google's top 100 results and in Wikipedia relevant page (If any).
The results are ordered in a simple list.
After watching the results you can search again using the search item plus one of the found BUZZ words.

Thanks Amit!

OpenUp - Transfer gigantic DataTables over WCF / .Net Remoting

ashevat — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 07:03:09 GMT

Guy Eden has released a new project to OpenUp:

This solution deals with transferring huge DataTables over WCF and .NET Remoting.

When transporting large DataTables between a Server and a remote Client, there are several issues; that stem from .NET serialization. Serialization of a large DataTable is memory thirsty. A large enough DataTable will cause the client to get System.OutOfMemoryException, or System.InsufficientMemoryException. Those exceptions cannot be caught at the server side, as they occur in the innards of the framework code that deals with serialization and transport. If the DataTable is really large, the framework will throw the server process all together, with brute force. There is no way around that.

Another issue is throughput, which is not outstanding, and becomes noticeable when the table gets large. The solution at hand circumvents this problem by partitioning the DataTable to chunks and transferring the chunks in a multi-threaded fashion.

Thanks Guy!

OpenUp - Silverlight Tree View

ashevat — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 08:28:06 GMT

Silverlight 2 is great technology, but some of very handy User Controls are still missing from it.
Alex Golesh has released to openup a project called Silverlight Tree View that provides Tree View user control for Silverlight 2.

*NOTE: current code was ported from WPF source code and corresponds to Silverlight 2 Beta 2.

Thanks Alex !

OpenUp - QuickQuery

ashevat — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 05:03:54 GMT

Guy Rombaut has released a project called QuickQuery to OpenUp.

QuickQuery is a tool that allow the user to choose SQL type (microsoft sql, mysql, sqlite and more) and inject a query to his the database.
You can configure default details of your SQL (like server, username, password etc).
QuickQuery allows you to control your SQL database easily and fast without any installation required. Just put it in your server folder and it works!
QuickQuery is available for PHP and ASP servers.

Thanks Guy!

OpenUp - Framework Detector

ashevat — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 04:53:08 GMT

When you're testing a windows application, the Framework version is a very important thing to know!

If your application needs framework 2.0 and not framework 3.0 or framework 3.0 and not framework 3.5 - how can you know which version is installed?

Shai Raiten has released a tool to openup that enables you to know which framework version is installed on your computer.

Thanks Shai!

OpenUp - MOSS 2007 Open Calais Integration

ashevat — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 06:11:20 GMT

Eran Steinmetz has released a project called MOSS 2007 Open Calais Integration to OpenUp.

What is OpenCalais ?

The Calais Web Service automatically creates rich semantic metadata for the content you submit – in well under a second. Using natural language processing, machine learning and other methods, Calais analyzes your document and finds the entities within it. But, Calais goes well beyond classic entity identification and returns the facts and events hidden within your text as well.

This metadata gives you the ability to build maps (or graphs or networks) linking documents to people to companies to places to products to events to geographies to… whatever. You can use those maps to improve site navigation, provide contextual syndication, tag and organize your content, create structured folksonomies, filter and de-duplicate news feeds, or analyze content to see if it contains what you care about.

About MOSS 2007 Open Calais Integration:

The MOSS 2007 Open Calais Integration automatically adds semantic metadata and intelligent search capabilities to content pages on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) content management web sites. Basic knowledge about the MOSS 2007 infrastructure is required.

Thanks Eran !

OpenUp - Instant Messaging application

ashevat — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:08:37 GMT

Tom Hanetz has released a project called T messenger to openup

T Messenger is an Instant Messaging application, which uses .NET Framework 3.5 networking (by sockets). It uses both TCP and UDP protocols in order to communicate over the network. T Messenger can transfer text messages, as well as emoticons, images and files. Transferred text and images are displayed in the T-Messenger GUI.

Thanks Tom!

OpenUp - Text2Speech

ashevat — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 11:30:32 GMT

Shai Raiten has released to OpenUp a text to speech application (with a MS Word application plug-in) that reads out text.

You can download the source code and the application itself here.

Thanks Shai!

OpenUp - Defrost Outlook

ashevat — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 10:24:07 GMT

Daniel Cohen has released a popular project (that got into lifehacker) called Defrost Outlook to OpenUp:

Daniel - "Outlook 2007 sp1 freezes or hangs in some occasions. Until a formal fix release from Microsoft , we want to help in the meanwhile."

Thanks Daniel!

OpenUp - Wireless Migrator

ashevat — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:12:46 GMT

Tamir Khason has create a handy free program, that knows to backup and restore all wireless networks setting from your computer. Tamir has released this program to OpenUp.

Why is this tool useful? - "For some reason, there is no way to do it by using regular Windows Vista tools. This feature is extremely useful, when you have to reinstall your computer or use the same settings of wireless networks for different machines"

Thanks Tamir!

OpenUp - Non-Paged CLR Host

ashevat — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:07:54 GMT

Sasha Goldshtein and Alon Fliess have released a very interesting project called Non-Paged CLR Host to OpenUp, Microsoft open source competition.

This project is a custom CLR host that can provide significant performance improvements for applications that consume large amounts of memory. This is accomplished by locking all CLR-allocated pages into physical memory. Running an application under this host can guarantee that paging will not occur even if other applications on the system are allocating and deallocating memory continuously, or if the application becomes idle for a long period of time.

Thanks Sasha and Alon!

Silverlight 2.0 training with Tamir Khason

ashevat — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 06:41:14 GMT

We are holding a local Silverlight 2.0 training event at Microsoft Israel Development Center and the room is super full (round 140+ people). Tamir Khason's knowledge of Silverlight is phenomenal.

Here is a first shot of the event:

Up until now it looks very interesting :)

If you've missed it, there is a second event.

Silverlight String-To-PathGeometry Converter

ashevat — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 09:47:11 GMT

Alex Golesh has release String-To-PathGeometry Converter to OpenUp.

About the project: "Silverlight 2 is great technology. But for some developers who used to work with WPF there are some missed helper classes, which are very handy.
One of them is “PathFigureCollectionConverter” object, which accepts string with figure path definition and convert it to Geometry object. This project provides similar functionality for Silverlight 2: it accepts string with path definition, and return PathGeometry object which could be used in Silverlight 2 applications to set “Data” property for Path object. Also, it can convert PathGeometry object back to string with path definition."

Thanks Alex!

OpenUp - Gmail desktop application.

ashevat — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 09:35:40 GMT

Shai Raiten has released a really cool, and free, gmail desktop application to OpenUp called GSender.

Gsender is a simple Gmail desktop application that you can now use to send emails with your Gmail account, moreover no configuration is needed to run the application.
Gsender features include - Drag and Drop attachment, Schedule email, add and remove contacts and more…

Thanks Shai!