.NET From India

TechEd Chennai

A search for TechEd Chennai in google gives the following result.

Well the first hit is this blog and the third is the CNUG site...:-)

And Raj has caught the place inbetween.....

Another Event

I am off to Mumbai today to attend the MS Executive Partner Summit there. So I may not be blogging tommorrow. Flying off today afternoon...

Will be back on Wednesday.

Glimpses from TechEd India, Chennai - Day 1

A few photos from Deepak's Camera taken at the Communities Stall we had put up there. Most of the Chennai MVPs are there as well as a few volunteers who worked in the stalls.

I am the guy with the beard....:-)

Office 2003

In the same training that I mentioned in the last post, there was also a bit on the XML support in Office 2003 and the different SDKs out there.(Smart Tag, Customizing Panes etc.)

That really got me excited. So many things you could do with the XML integration out there and so much easier now to generate Word reports on the server. But I do have a rant here. There is no WordML DOM to make it easier to generate those WordML docs. You need to do a lot of string concat(Yuck!!!) or use the XML DOM to generate this.

I am not sure if there is any plans to do a WordML DOM?? Anyone from the office team has the answer?? Else maybe I would spend some of that free time that I seem to get once in a while to start off an opensource implementations!!!!

InfoPath

Yesterday I attended a MVP only training on InfoPath. Quite interesting app, but I still am not very clear on the big advantage it provides. Yes creating forms are a lot faster(if the forms are simple), but then there seems to quite a few rough edges.

1. Custom code is in VBScript, not .NET languages
2. Form Security. Still is a big question? What is I want my form to be filled only by authenticated people??

Well maybe I will like it if I work on it more...

Avalon

Daniel in the TechEd Keynote did mention about Avalon and how MS looks at Avalon being the single UI layer in the long term future.

Wesner Moise has a post of all information he could get about Avalon in the PDC site here.

TechEd Day 1

Well day before yesterday was day 1 of TechEd. Well I did not have too much time to get to all the Sessions as this time we had a seperate stall at TechEd for the Community and for CNUG. We ran a quiz there and gave out a few books and CNUG caps.

It has been different TechEd this time for me as instead of running from session to session, I was at the stall and getting to talk to people on the different community intiatives here. This includes the MVP program and the Community Star programs and also pitch in with information about CNUG.

It rains virus here

Chennai has had its rare spells of rains in the last two or three days and it has also been raining virus in my mailbox...:-(

Two days I have been away at TechEd without access to my mail box and I comeback and find it choke full of spam and virus.

I had 895 mails from spammers or thanks to the SWEN virus/worm floating around. This seems to be the worst thing that has hit me till now. (I somehow escaped the previous attacks with a few mails per day. Nothing like this, which is a few mails every 10 minutes...)

I think we need to start giving out the death sentences for virus writes....

Oh.. My hands ache so much with all that deleting I have had to do today......;-(

Smart Phones

Russell Beattie is usually very anti MS. But in the past few weeks he seems to have taken a liking for Smartphones and the .NET Compact Framework. Here is his most recent post

The most important thing to remember is that the Windows Mobile OS does *not suck*

Unicode Expands

Just saw this in one of the newsletters that I receive:

Unicode also is central to new internationalized domain names, which make it possible for people throughout the world to have domain names in their own languages, rather than just in the Latin character set on which English and most European languages are based. The biggest advance in Unicode 4.0 is a more than doubling of the set of Chinese characters, some of which also are used in Japanese, as well as in Korean and Vietnamese literature, Whistler said.

Mathematicians and scientists will benefit from more than 900 new symbols that have been added. Whistler said Unicode Inc., the vendor consortium that oversees the specification, worked with the Scientific
and Technical Information Exchange (STIX) to nail down the new symbols and how to render them. STIX includes members from the American national societies for physics, chemistry, electrical engineering and
mathematics.

Not only will scientists and mathematicians be able to publish more kinds of machine-readable documents, but so will their colleagues in the ancient humanities."We added Ugaritic. It's one of the Semitic languages," Whistler said. "The ones used by the Babylonians and Sumerians is kind of big and complicated; we're still working on that. We'll be doing old Persian, which is another old cuneiform script. There's not much business interest, but it's certainly of interest to scholars."

Ugaritic??? Well they must be running out of languages...:-) Maybe looking at all those hidden languages in Africa and Asia would help...