Live webinar: Accelerate the deployment and provisioning of your SharePoint e-learning platform

Challenges faced by today’s educational institutions typically lie in three main areas: efficiency, security, and accuracy.

When it comes to building a Microsoft based e-learning platform, thousands of students, teachers, and parents’ accounts should be provisioned for tens or hundreds of your schools on an interrelated set of Microsoft application servers such as Active directory, SharePoint, Exchange, and Office Communication Server (OCS). In reality, these activities are painful. In such large-scale deployments of Microsoft Learning Gateway (MLG) or other connected e-learning solutions, manual provisioning becomes practically impossible. Consider data incompleteness and inconsistency. And add the fact that mass provisioning is needed every new academic year and ongoing re-provisioning is needed through the year.

Build your Microsoft e-learning platform. Automate your most mission-critical provisioning and ongoing management activities. Rely on a secure, reliable, and scalable provisioning solution; ITWorx Education Catalyst Provisioning Suite.

ITWorx introduces Catalyst 2.0, the second release of its market- sweeping provisioning product, with a richer set of functions and capabilities to further expedite and facilitate your provisioning processes.

In this webinar you will learn how Catalyst can:

• Decrease the provisioning time from weeks to hours.
• Meet the real education business challenges.
• Automate the synchronization with Schools’ Management Information Systems.
• Guarantee data consistency and accuracy across the board.
• Tailor to administrator needs for reduced complexity.
  

Writing a data-driven unit test

This was a really cool investigation…

It's all about one having a unit test case and it is required to run it using some number of data… An "easy" way out of this could be creating the same unit test case with different parameters every time. However, if one has enormous amount of data that should be tested on a specific method, he can create a unit test case and bind to it a datasource that is used by this test case.

Please follow the steps below:

1. Create a new test Project (File  New  Test Project)
   
2. Create a new method into the default class being created (Let us name it: TestTrimTexts())
   
3. Above this method, you should write the code [TestMethod]
   
4. To identify the datasource that would be used by this test method, you should write this line of code: [DataSource("System.Data.SqlClient", "Data Source=.\\OfficeServers;Initial Catalog=master;Integrated Security=SSPI;", "spt_values", DataAccessMethod.Sequential)]
   

   This instructs the CLR to use the table "spt_values" using the connection string "Data Source=.\\OfficeServers;Initial Catalog=master;Integrated Security=SSPI;" and the provider "System.Data.SqlClient". It also mentions that the data should be used sequentially.
   

   The most important part comes last, reading the data from the datasource just defined in the previous steps. You should add this pieace of code:
   

   
   

   Afterwards, inside the test method, TestTrimTexts(), you should use the TestContext.DataRow["name"] where it will contain data fetched from the datasource specified, the column named "name", in this case.
   

   Enjoy it then :)
   

   Notes: There is an overload for step number 4. Check the screen shot below:
   

   
   

   This overload had a small problem with me since it used data from the datasource randomly and this caused me to get frightened while debugging… I wasn't able to trace it with ease :)
   

References:

1. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182528(VS.80).aspx
   
2. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182527(VS.80).aspx
   
3. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.visualstudio.testtools.unittesting.testcontext.datarow(VS.80).aspx

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Installing Visio for Enterprise Architects without installing the prerequisite Visual Studio

Today I faced a problem while installing Visio (Enterprise Architects version) on my work machine... Tried searching the net for solutions, but didn't find much. However, I still believed there was a way... After more searching, I found this amazing wicked method... Follow me :)

Open the registry at the following key:
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Setup\VS\VSTD\

Of course, if you didn't find any part of this path, create it till the end...

Afterwards, inside VSTD, create a String key with name "ProductDir" and put any text inside it.

Voilaaa, VSTA installation will start like a sparky :)

Enjoy it till it lasts...

Brain Computer Interface (BCI)

I've had some friends at university (The American University in Cairo - AUC) who actually implemented their thesis project to work out a BCI system and it did work in the demo...
Now, we even read more about it online !!!
Check this video below :)

Gmail accessing methods

Ever thought of accessing your gmail using other ways than the ones you are used to...
I've listed them here for you
Enjoy

Safe mode

http://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0.

It disables the experimental features from Gmail Labs, just in case some of them are buggy.

Secure mode

https://mail.google.com/.

It encrypts the traffic between your computer and Gmail’s servers.

Older version

http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=1.

This version has been replaced in October 2007 by a rearchitectured Gmail, but the old version is a little bit faster.

Basic mode

http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html.

It’s the version that doesn’t use JavaScript, so it loads faster and it works well with older browsers.

Mobile mode

http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=mobile or http://m.gmail.com.

This is a simplified Gmail interface for mobile phones that has even less feature than the basic mode. Use it if no other Gmail mode works for you.

iPhone mode

http://mail.google.com/mail/x/gdlakb-/gp/.

A more user-friendly mobile version for iPhone and other mobile phones that use WebKit-based browsers.

iGoogle gadget

http://www.google.com/ig/gmailmax.

This is the canvas view for the updated Gmail gadget which can be found in the new iGoogle.

“No browser checking” mode

http://mail.google.com/mail?nocheckbrowser.

If you use a cutting-edge new browser and Gmail serves you the basic HTML mode, try this URL to bypass browser detection.

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