.NET From India

Security Exams Go Live

The two security exams 70-330 and 70-340 have gone live according to MCP magazine. These exams focus on secure application development using VB.NET or C#.

VS 2005 Beta is out

VS 2005 Beta is avbl for download from MSDN.

Microsoft has also announced a set of Express products for the hobbyist.

VB Blogger List

Bill has also posted a OPML files of all VB.NET bloggers out there..

Beauty of VB

Bill talks about why he finds VB.NET the best programming language...;-)

Power of Google

I had gone to an Architect day session on Friday was surprised by Google power.

The key note was done by a Senior Architect called Suriya Narayanan, who works for Polaris(But in a different group, we had met once or twice before) and he was discussing challenges faced by architects etc.

And in the last slide he had a screen shot. I was quite surprised, as it was a post I had written a long time back (almost a year back) and I did not know he was reading my blog.

After the talk I went up to him and asked him about it and then realized that he did not know that it was my blog. He had googled for info on architects and found my post. He was impressed by it and so added it to the slide deck. I little humbling, but then made me realize Google power.

Biztalk Competition

The Biztalk team is conducting a developer competition. First Prize of $15K and end on Aug 31st.

The purpose of the BizTalk Server 2004 developer competition is to highlight and reward programming excellence using BizTalk Server 2004 and Visual Studio .NET. This is a skill based competition but also includes special prize categories for developers new to BizTalk Server 2004 and Visual Studio .NET.

More info at BizTalk Server 2004 Developer Competition

Your Windows SuperComputer

Looks like MS is jumping into the High Performance Arena with the announcement of Windows Server 2003 High Performance Computing (HPC) Edition, to make its debut later this year according to Microsoft watch.

eweek article : Microsoft Joining Supercomputing Game

VB 2005 Sneek Preview

A Sneak Preview of Visual Basic 2005
, by Ken Getz is up at MSDN.

Good One...

Hotmail - The Email Wars

Looks like Microsoft has been forced to do something about Hotmail, due to Gmail, Yahoo and most other email providers competing to provide more and more storage space.

MS has announced that it will boost Hotmail storage space to 250MB for free members and 2GB for paid members.

Still 250MB seems to be too little compared to the 1GB that Gmail and Rediff promises...

Reflection 2.0

Joel Pobar writes on what is new in Reflection for Whidbey/.NET Framework 2.0.

Ebay comes to India

Looks like Ebay is about to step into India. It has announced the purchase of Baazee, India's biggest e-auction company for around $50 million.

Gmailto

More and more tools are appearing for Gmail...

Vasanth points to a GMailto tool, that will allow you to set gmail as the default mail client.

Written in VB...:-)

Spiderman in Dhothi

Sanjay, IMed me with a new avatar of Spiderman that is going to make an appearance in India.

Best VB.NET Bloggers

Paul Vick asked his readers to nominate the best VB.NET blogger they read and the results are out.

And I am on the list too...:-)

Autosize Columns in Datagrid

Scott Hanselmann searched and found a way to autosize columns in a datagrid.

Now the question is, why is such an useful function like ColAutoResize defined as a private?

via Jan Haugland

Smart Client Architecture and Design Guide

I seemed to have missed this one somehow. Patterns and Practices has come out with another architecture and design guide, this time for Smart client applications.

Smart Client Architecture and Design Guide

(via theServerside.net)

Evocative Presentations

Found an interesting post on Evocative Presentations in the Beyond Bullets blog.

Very interesting..

CNUG Students is Number 1

The students chapter of Chennai .NET User Group, called CNUG student was awarded the "Best Student User Group", at the recently held Microsoft Student Advocates Meet.

Read Sriram's announce here.

Assembly binding in Orcas

.NET undocumented talks about the new assembly versioning and binding that will be a part of LH and Orcas.

Platform vs Library Versioning in Longhorn/Orcas

Threading Made Easy

Fellow MVP Tameem AKA Teucer sent a mail point to EasyThread, a free VS.NET addin that allow you to write multi-threaded WinForms apps. This makes it easy to do things in a background thread and move back to the foreground thread when needed. Takes care of all that complex marshalling and delegating that you have to play around with.

Free VB.NET Controls

Seven new VB.NET Controls with source avbl for free in the Visual Basic Power Pack

(via Jan Haugland)

Serverside.net Links to my article

Ted from theserverside.net, linked to my article on Extending My namespace.

Sriram digs into History

Sriram has dug into a few websites and archieved mails etc and unearthed a secret...:-)

A bit of Googling lead us to this page (http://grumbeer.dyndns.org/ftp/mail/v5/digest363) which has an email that Raymond Chen has typed out back in 1993. The first thing that strikes you is his Microsoft id. I was taken aback - a Microsoft employee contributing to Linux code? That too kernel level stuff - not some fringe OSS project? Seems like things were a lot different back then.

.NET Community vs. Java Community

There has been a lot of debate on how the two communities work. This has generated as much heat as the Open vs closed source discussion.

Ted Neward adds an interesting new dimension to how things work. And being an old time VB developer I do agree a lot with him.

Via Totzkeeeeee's Blog

What will stop a Beta?

Well everyone can guess, but Raymond gives out one of the Top secret reasons, why Windows XP SP2 Beta slipped.

During the run-up to Windows XP Service Pack 2 Beta in December of last year, there was a list of five bugs that the release management team decided were so critical that they were going to slip the beta until those bugs got fixed.
The third bug on the list: Deer Hunter 4 won't run.

Venus Transit on the Web

You can watch the Venus transit on the web here.

Solar Eclipse of a different kind

Sun gets eclipsed by Venus tomorrow!

"During the transit, the orbits of Venus and the earth, which tilt at different angles, around the sun will line up exactly. It occurs four times in every 243 years. There are two December transits, eight years apart, and then 121.5 years later there are two June transits, also eight years apart. After another 105.5 years the cycle begins again."

Weather permitting, the phenomenon should be visible from your city (at least here in India!). Venus will appear as a thick black on the face of Sun. The same precautions that you exercise for observing a "regular" eclipse should be exercised here as well!

Happy Viewing!

Deploying MSDE as part of your setup

Here is an interesting article that I stumbled upon at MSDN:

The MSDE Deployment Toolkit in Action

The MSDE 2000 Deployment Toolkit itself can be downloaded from here

And if you tinker with Setup and Deployment, you'll find Rob's blog indispensible.

Throw out your monitor

This sounds a lot like the sci-fi movies, but there seem to be systems out there that can beam a image directly into your retina, thus by passing the need for a monitor.

In the Eye of the Beholder

Toxic Dust

Not only does working on your computer affecting your eyes, it may even be poisoning you.

Is the dust on your computer toxic?

Rise Of Nations Expansion

I just bought the new expansion for Rise of Nations called the Thrones and Patriots. It adds a new nation, Indian to RON and I just played that first..:-)

The main city, the capital was named Delhi and that was nothing great. The next city, I expected would be named Mumbai or one of the metros and imagine my suprise when it was named Vadodara. And I was amazed when the third city I built was named Coimbatore. Coimbatore is an average sized south Indian city famouse for its textile Mills and also happens to be my home town.

I am really curious to know how the RON team got all the names for the cities for different nations.

Article on Extending My Namespace

I have written an article on Extending the My namespace. This puts together all the differents ways you can extend the My namespace using the March Technical Preview release of Visual Studio 2005.

Extending My Namespace

Another cool thing about Gmail

I am not sure if it was there all along (and I missed it) or they added it now, when you log into gmail they have this check box, which says "Dont ask for my password for the next 2 weeks". Instead of the normal remember password button, this seems to make more sense and also make sure that I dont forget my password...:-)

Late Binding Indepth

A really in-depth look into Late Binding and how it is handled by the VB.NET compiler at The Anatomy of a Late Bound Expression

via PaulV

Soma, Welcome to Blogosphere

Somasegar now has a blog. Soma is a MS long-timer and is currently in charge of the developer division at MS.

We met up with him during the MVP summit at a special breakfast for Indian MVPs that was arranged by the Indian MVP team out there. A wonderful person and he patiently listened to all of us as we gave our feedback.

Media Player 10 - Tech Beta

Microsoft seems to be giving the public access to more and more betas nowadays. The latest one is of Windows Media Player 10.

Note: It is currently avbl only for Windows XP and will not even allow you to download it if XP is not your OS.

(via Avery)

The bar rises again

Well after the Gmail 1 GB hysteria, an email provider now giving 2GB of space (heard that it is free for use, but then check well before signing up). Maybe I will wait a few weeks to get my 1TB space email account...:-)

Looks like they are now down due to the large number of hits..

(via Tejas)

Indian MVP Bloggers

During my talk on Blogging during the Advocates Day, I got a list of blogs that the indian MVPs maintain. So here is a list of Indian MVP Blogs.

Blogs maintained by Indian MVPs

Secure Strings

Shawn posts about a new secure version of the string class that is avbl in Whidbey. This is called SecureStrings and can be used to store sensitive information like passwords etc.

SecureStrings are held in encrypted memory by the CLR (using DPAPI), and are only unencrypted when they are accessed. This limits the amount of time that your string is in plaintext for an attacker to see.

Pop Ur Gmail?

I think it was Sriram who sent me a mail saying that he would not be able to use Gmail full-time till they provide POP access. Vasanth points to an app that may help.

And PGTG is written in .NET..:-)

Unified Search from MS

From a mail I received:

Microsoft technology to search Web, PCs, e-mail SEATTLE -- Microsoft Corp. will soon release technology that takes search functions far beyond the Internet, allowing users to pour through e-mails, personal computers and even big databases to find the information they want, a top executive said Wednesday. Mehdi said Microsoft plans to release an early version of the technology soon, as part of the software giant's push to compete with Internet search leader Google Inc. A final version is expected in the next 12 months, he said. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/aplocal_story.asp?category=6420&slug=WA%20Microsoft%20Search

Linux is Hilarious??

Well here is a picture from a good friend.

Proves that Other people too seems to think the same thing about Linux as me..;-)

Blogging And Privacy

I also did a session on Blogging (Terminologie, how to get started etc) at the India Advocates Day on Sunday. One of my fellow MVPs raised the question of privacy of the information that is in the blog. His point was that people usually do not think about the millions of people who can access your blog and so get to know a lot about you. His cited the example of one of his friends who went for an job interview and after the interview the interviewer asked, "So how did your wife like the perfume you bought for her??".

I really think it is a very good point. Most new bloggers forget about google power and the wide spread of the web. My take on this is, I always keep in mind that whatever I blog is out there for millions to read. Once you start thinking of that, you automatically kind of find what is OK and what is too personal to go into your blog. In the end it is a very personal decision each person has to make. How much of himself is going into his blog??