.NET From India

Ad Funded MS Works

There has been some info on the web on a new version of Ad-funded MS Works that would basicall be free to the end user. Works has a stuff like a low end version of Word, address book etc. I have never used it as I have always had access to Office Professional.

Though most people in the US do not seem to like the idea, I think this is something that would be of great value in a country like India. I think something like Office Home funded by ads would be a great sucess in India or other countries where buying a license of Office is very expensive and there is a growing number of home users. For such non-technical users, like my parents, this would make a perfect way to use Office software legally. Most of these set of users currently use illegal copies of Office (most probably provided by their vendor or friends). I have rarely come across this user set using OpenOffice (I mostly find OpenOffice being used by techies rather than end customers) or other free tools. So it would make perfect sense for MS to have a Ad-funded version of home office for these customers. Though MS Works is not Office Home, I think this is a good first step and maybe it would lead to a ad-funded Office suite at sometime in the future.

Learning SQL 2008

If you want to learn what is new in SQL 2008, MS learning has a couple of free trainings that could help you.

What's New in Microsoft SQL Server 2008

Note: You need an understanding of either SQL 2000/2005 for this to be useful

What should you be learning this year?

I do get asked a lot of questions on what is the best technology to learn. Obviously, depending on what a person currently knows, this question also has options added. So it is usually, .NET or Java, VB or C#, SQL Server or Oracle etc..

And in most cases my answer depends on what I know of the person asking the question. Obviously, a generic answer is mostly useless. But then I do have some advice for you this year if you are a web application developer working on ASP.NET or related technologies.

Learn MOSS 2007.

Continue reading "What should you be learning this year?"

Windows 7 - Is Vista's end near?

With all the latest excitement on whether we would get a new version of Windows in a year or so, Supersite for Windows, has a few screenshots of what may end up as Windows 7.

Currently as mentioned in the page, it seems to be Vista with a few things added. It is still in design stage and it will take quite a while before they clear up on what new features will go in and what will go out.

But the problem with a new version coming out in a years time, is more to do with applications. For example, Lotus Notes just added support for Vista and they still do not support 64-bit (Personal Experience :( ). There are quite a lot of applications that need to start supporting stuff like 64-bit and UAC. With a possible new OS in a year or so, how many of these applications would be able to keep up??

DSG!!

Came across a interesting article titled Do You Have a DSG (Dumb SOA Guy) Issue? in the SOA World Magazine. This is something that I come up against regularly, in multiple places.

This is always a problem when there is what I call the in-thing technology. SOA is currently one of them and is reaping the hype created mis-information...:(

An Eclipse Runtime?

Looks like Eclipse wants to take the jump from being a IDE to being a full runtime platform.

At EclipseCon 2008 in Santa Clara, Calif on Monday, the project leaders announced the Eclipse Runtime project (Eclipse RT) an initiative to build an open source run-time technology based on its own Equinox, a lightweight OSGi compliant run-time. Equinox, the core run-time platform for Eclipse, is not new. The run-time is used by Actuate, BEA, Code 9, Iona, IBM and Oracle and is reportedly deployed on millions of developers’ desktops

Will this be a competitor for Java or .NET. I am sure a lot of people hope so. My take, it is going to be very difficult due to the large following these runtimes currently have and the amount of corporate muscle (MS or Sun is not going to let someone else take over that easily) that are behind these platforms. It is going to be a long shot, but sometime long shots do turn out sucessful..

Eclipse launches super run-time project as alternative to Java and .NET

Vista SP1 - Experience

I have SP1 RTM running at my home machine for around 2 weeks now. There are any number of articles on the web on the changes, both on how many things are faster and some on app incompatibilities etc.

Looking at it purely from a end user perspective, SP1 is quite transperant from an experience perspective. Maybe things are a little faster, but not enough to actually be felt. I know a lot of file operations have become faster, but I don't copy/move files that often that I have actually noticed anything.

It does look to improve reliability, apart from nVidia driver crashes (which were present even before SP1), but then this maybe because of other factors too.

Is this good or bad?? Good in that it does not break any of my work and all those bug fixes are not affecting what I want to get done. I know it has not drastically changed stuff to make them better, but I prefer a SP that does not break and has minor improvements, to one that has major changes that may break stuff.

Vista SP1 Application Issues

If you are installing Vista SP1, then you maybe intersted in this KB Article that talks about some programs that do not work on SP1 and which may need a update.

Most of these are Firewall and AV software, so it is important that you take a look before you install SP1. Obviously, SP1 is not yet available to the end consumer and so this maynot be a major problem. But if you plan to play around with it and have access to it, then this is something you need to take care of.

Free MS Software For Students

Students had multiple ways to get free Microsoft software. MS has a decent academic program, which allowed students of enrolled colleges to get access to MSDN for free. There are also a number of free to download software like the Express suite of products.

Now MS has a new offer called Microsoft DreamSpark. This allows students who are studying in registered universities/colleges to have access to Professional versions of MS software for free. The main thing here is that they get the real professional versions of software like VS 2008 and Windows 2003. The site does say it is Global, but I don’t know if there are country wise restrictions. Maybe someone who has used it can leave comments.

Any effort to get legal professional software into students hand is very good, especially from an Indian context. This allows them to enter the job market with skills and knowledge of tools that are widely used in the industry and that is good both for them and for companies that hire them.

Good Show Microsoft.

Hyper-V in Win 2008

A review of Hyper-V that is available in Win 2008 is available at ZDNet.(this will not ship out of the box with the March release of 2008, but will be release later as it is still in Beta now. But basically it is part of Win 2008 license and so is a part of the OS).

I am not a virtualization expert, but as with every techology person, VMs are a part of life nowadays. Most of my customer demos are packaged as VMs... Technical POCs and tests are VMs... Virtual PC is one of the tools on my "I cannot do without" list.

But my experience on the server site, with Virtual Server has not always been great. Performance is a big problem when going for a virtualized server. So from what I can see, anything that can improve performance on a virtualized server is a good thing..:)

I can see Hyper-V being something (if it is sucessful) that would push a lot of the bigger enterprises to upgrade to Win 2008.