.NET From India

My first VB 2005 Bug

A Generics bug I found when using VB 2005 Express now into Product Feedback Center.

Linux not Secure enough

Inadequate Security Poses National Security Threat

This article talks about the US Defence departments move toward using more and more of Linux based systems and argues that Linux security is not good enough for defence use.

Whidbey Classes Browser

.NET Browser for .NET Framework 2.0 Beta 1 allows you to look at the entire Framework hierarchy of .NET 2.0. It is an online reference guide and you don't have to have the framework installed to use this.

Professional Gaming??

kuro5hin has a post on the future of professional gaming.

Being a gaming hobbyist I am usually quite not sure if I am to believe it when people talk about professional gaming. But this really surprised me:

So far, Korea is the only nation where the concept of E-Sports is fully realized, with China coming in a distant second. Blizzard's Starcraft has an immensely huge cult following in Korea, to a point where there are TV stations that air games during leagues and tournaments that are held on a regular basis. Being one a professional gamer in Starcraft earns you thousands a month, even if you are not the top of the crop, a reason professional Starcraft players from all over the world migrate to Korea and live there permanently.

Want a free XBOX??

Well you will have to write a component review to win that.

Mike talks about a contest they are running at xtras, where you get a chance to win an XBox for writing reviews for a particular set of components.

Earn your Halo 2 Contest

Star Wars Episode III

Looks like Star Wars Episode III will be called Revenge of the Sith

Lucas Arts releases official title for the third Episode, called Revenge of the Sith.

The new movie is set for release in May 2005, will show the link of the prequels with the original "Star Wars" trilogy by telling the story how Luke Skywalker's father, Anakin, went from a nice guy to the super villain Darth Vader. The Sith is the evil sect that corrupts Anakin (played by Hayden Christensen).

Halo 2

A trailer video of Halo 2

via Jason

Root Namespace in VB.NET

Bill posts an hack with VS.NET that will allow you to specify a default namespace for your VB.NET projects.

2GB Email space for msn.com

Looks like MS is offering 2 GB storage space for new @msn.com email ids. There is no info on whether this will affect older hotmail accounts.

My hotmail account still has a 2MB limit though.

Things VB can do that C# can't

Rockford Lhotka talks about Things VB can do that C# can't....

New version of SharpReader

A new version of SharpReader, 0.9.5.0, is available for download.

Luke blogs about the changes in this version.

First Pocket PC Virus

The First Pocket PC virus makes an appearance...

It does seem to be a very gentlemanly virus. It asks for your permission before infecting and is not destructive.

Duts is a 1520 bytes long program, hand written in assembly for the ARM processor. When an infected file is executed the virus asks for permission to infect:

WinCE4.Dust by Ratter/29A
Dear User, am I allowed to spread?

When granted the permission, Duts attempts to infect all EXE files in the current directory. Duts only infects files that are bigger than 4096 bytes and have not been infected yet. As an infection marker the virus writes the string 'atar' to the Windows Version field of the EXE header.

Sessions, Session and More Sessions

The next three to four weeks promise to be quite stressfull, with a series of sessions that I am handling.

Starts with the MSDN session on 22nd, on What,s new in VS 2005

Then comes TechEd India at Chennai. I am handling two sessions there.

With all the sessions being on new and upcoming technologies, this means that I have a lot of reading to do.

Command Line based Web Site

Got this link from Vivek. A experiment in command line based blog...

Interesting, but I personally find it too much of an hassle to try to read a few posts...

Matrix Quotes

Found this interesting site, which contains some of the famous matrix quotes and the entire transcript of the Architect scene...

.NET Moving Ahead Fast

Another article on how higher productivity is slowly increasing .NET usage in the industry.

Is .Net Stealing Java's Thunder?

Thanks to Teucer for the link

Updated Article on My Namespace

An updated version of my article on the My namespace has been published in the .NETD2D website, this week.

The previous version will still be available here.

More Benchmarks..

Microsoft replies to a Sun benchmark, stating Java Web services are faster that .NET ones.

Microsoft Responds to Sun’s Web Service Benchmarks

.NET Surpases Java in the Enterprise?

A new study result seems to point to this.
Serverside.NET has the full story.

Based on numbers quoted by John Montgomery, Program Manager at Microsoft, more than 60 of the Fortune 100 use .NET for internal development. A Forrester report also states that 56% of enterprises in North America are choosing .NET as opposed to only 46% choosing J2EE.
An interesting note, of the ~6 Million developers currently targeting the Windows platform, over 4 Million of those are Visual Basic developers.

Language Wars Again

Carl posted a rebuttal on C# being better than VB.

The comment thread shows the war never ended, it was only a truce that can be easily broken.

Wonderful Flash Demo

A nice Flash with information on MS. Dont miss the bit which talks about MS Research

Your Potential

ADO.NET 2.0 Feature Matrix

An MSDN article on whats new in ADO.NET

ADO.NET 2.0 Feature Matrix

ADO.NET 2.0 includes a new base-class provider model, features for all providers, and changes to System.Data.SqlClient. Get an overview of these new features, examples of their use, and a chart of which features are provider-neutral and SqlClient-specific

MCSD Atlast

I have been very near MCSD.NET for more than an year now. I had to take an elective, but kept postponing it.

I took the security exam beta in April and did not get any info about the whether I was thru even after the exam went live.

So called the certification helpline and they took a week to trace my results. Today I got a call to confirm that I had indeed passed and that my profile has been updated....:-)

TracePoint

A new feature in VS 2005 that is gonna make your debugging life easier.. Way easier...

via E&A

Direct Express Products Install

E&A blogs on where to find the files to install the new Express Products without going thru the Download and install routine everytime.

.NET Framework 1.0 SP3 and 1.1 SP1 Tech Preview

The Tech Previews for the SPs are now available for download.

.NET Framework 1.0 Service Pack 3 Tech Preview
.NET Framework 1.1 Service Pack 1 Tech Preview
.NET Framework 1.1 Service Pack 1 Tech Preview for Windows Server 2003

Microsoft had made technology preview versions of the .NET Framework 1.0 SP3 and .NET Framework 1.1 SP1 available for developers to download so they can test their .NET Framework-based applications with these service packs applied. Though these are unsupported technology previews, we would like to ask your help in ensuring the quality of the service packs by downloading them, testing your existing applications on them, and giving us feedback.
These two service packs address issues with the .NET Framework 1.0 and 1.1 including:
· All customer issues addressed with hotfixes
· Improved importing of WSDL
· Data Execution prevention
· Buffer overrun protection

What the heck is .vshost.exe

Playing around with the new VB Express version. When creating a new winform application I find that the bin directory contains two exes. One is the exe of my app, and the other is called .vhost.exe. When run, this gives an NullPointer Exception. What the hell is this exe for??

Visual Studio 8??

Was installing the VB 2005 Express Beta and was suprised to see that it installation directory was by default named Visual Studio 8!!

Juggling the version numbers

John Topley posts on the confusion created by the odd version numbering logic used by Marketeers, like Java 5 and Oracle 10g.

Generics in VB 2005

A new MSDN article on Generics and VB 2005 is now available.

Via PaulV

Hilarious

A wonderfully hilarious post on bursting bouncing ball. Whether the author is valid in blaming Taiwan or not, it is still hilarious...

HiByte/LoByte in .NET

Logu posts about how to get the hi and low bytes from a WORD.

C# Express

Luke has a list of feature that the new C# Express has and what is missing.

via Shaykat

Mono 1.0

Mono 1.0 is out. So now you can go and start checking whether you .NET programs will run on Linux. :-)

And they also have a new web site now.