If you aren’t aware of the unique qualities of Falafel Software, here’s one for the archives. Falafelites are located across 4 time zones in California, Colorado, Texas, and Michigan, and through each other we get to experience lives beyond our own. And they aren't always what you might expect (includes cute baby animal pictures!)

Based on popular demand, we decided to make the Falafel University shirts available online in the Falafel store

So go ahead! Show them how you really feel :)

Ever find yourself getting emailed tasks and then noticing they get lost too easily in the daily pile of emails? Generally it doesn’t happen to the really important ones, or those that are tracked by some other task/project tracking mechanism. To avoid permanently feeling scatterbrained, I started trying to use the Tasks section of Outlook 2007 to track such otherwise un-tracked items on my To-Do list. I liked the categorization, and also the summary list that showed up next to my email reading pane. But recently I found a feature that makes it invaluable – Drag and Drop tasks!

Two hours ago, Microsoft released Windows 7 to Manufacturing.  Congratulations Microsoft!.

How is Windows 7 going to do in the marketplace is something a lot of people are wondering. Is it a good OS? YES indeed! I have been using it for a while and it is definitely a pleasure to work with.  I still can’t believe they were able to lower the barrier so much for “Aero” that it can work on more modest machines with no problems whatsoever.  The OS is fast and several issues that drove people crazy in Vista have been eliminated or fixed in W7.  For a development platform, it is rock solid and I have VS 2008 and VS 2010 running with heavy use of WCF, Silverlight 3, LINQ, MS SQL 2008, etc.. all day long with great performance.  What’s your thought on W7?

When:  Wednesday, 7/15/2009 at 6:30 PM
Where: Microsoft San Francisco Office, 835 Market Street, Suite 700, San Francisco

Lino Tadros, Chairman & CEO of Falafel Software is presenting this session at the Bay.NET User Group at the Microsoft offices in San Francisco on July 15th 2009 starting 6:30 PM.  Feel free to register for the Event here and look forward to seeing you there.  It should be a very exciting and fun session.

Capitola, CA - July 1st 2009, Microsoft awarded Lino Tadros, Falafel Software’s Chairman & CEO, the prestigious MVP award in the C# language category for the 6th year in a row.  This award is mainly awarded to few individuals worldwide for their contributions in the C# community and helping Microsoft with the short term and long term strategies of the language.

Lino Tadros has been presenting numerous sessions on the language in the USA, Europe and Australia since the year 2000 in many of the industries’ top conferences.

My dear friend Steve Teixeira, Product Group Manager of Parallel Computing at Microsoft, has been telling us at Falafel to keep an eye on PCP for a while now and we are definitely listening.  Some of us are taking PCP to a completely new level, especially when they can apply their techniques in real life scenarios.

Our President and CTO, John Waters in the picture below took a night in the town away from work and the kids and implemented his version of PCP on alcoholic drinks, Swedish way!

Hi Fellow .NET geeks worldwide! Are you going to be at PDC 2008 in Los Angeles ?  If Yes, then look for our CTO, John Waters in this flashy shirt seen below around the Telerik booth # 401

We are looking for a few GOOD .NET developers and trainers, John will be conducting interviews right at the PDC, who knows you might go home with an offer letter in hand to start working for a fun and successful company.

Best of luck to all and have a great conference!

The Falafel team from California, Colorado and Texas assembled once again for the 5th annual Maui retreat from Oct 4th to Oct 11th.  We all had a wonderful time and got a chance to celebrate a very successful year at Falafel and enjoy each other's company and our families.  Cheers to all the Falafelites for a great year and a great vacation!

Last week I went to PAX for the second time and here is what I have to say about it.

Steve was in Cambridge 2 weeks ago teaching a TestComplete class and while he was sightseeing with the rest of the class attendees, they insisted to take his picture with this sign :)

 

Good job Steve!

Need to capture popups or tooltips in your screen shots? It's easy with the Windows Vista Snipping Tool.

When your WPF project gets large with a well structured class diagram, you may run into a case where you need to add a dependency property to a class that it is not convenient to inherit from a dependency object. In that case you need a little help from a helper class. I recently ran into this little problem and came up with this class.

Is your desktop full of Icons and Shortcuts? Then read on for some neat little apps to help get your ducks in a row.

The company has been doing some Webinars, with materials distributed in a PDF format. I got tasked the other day with developing the materials for an upcoming session - but I didn't really have a way to create PDF output, just Microsoft Word. "Just", I say, until I googled some phrase like "Microsoft Word PDF".

We enjoyed meeting the TechSmith team at TechED this year. We are big fans of Snagit and Camtesia Studio and all of us here at Falafel use their products for several years now.  SnagIt 9 was released this week at TechED with awesome new features.

Picture below is for Betsy Weber, Chief Evangelist of TechSmith, and Lino Tadros from Falafel Software at the show.  Stay tuned for great new announcements coming up from both companies partnering to bring the latest and greatest in technology to customers worldwide :)

The Falafellites are having fun at TechED 2008 at our Bronze Sponsor booth.  Rocking on RockBand for XBOX 360 till late last night with attendees for several hours.  Too much booooooze! We don't remember anything!

It has been wonderful to spend some time with the AutomatedQA team here in Orlando this week, during the TechED 2008 Developers Conference. Falafel and AQA have build a solid and successful partnership, offering high quality consulting and training worldwide on TestComplete, AQTime and Automated Build studio.

I got up at 5 in the morning and jumped on a plane to meet the rest of the Falafels at headquarters. It was a long day. The airline had lost my luggage and I had been up for 8 hours before even getting to the office. We worked all day and headed out for dinner after that. I was exhausted. That all changed when I realized how I was going to get back to my hotel. I was going to take the company car: