.NET From India

Helping the Small Blogs...

There are by some estimates more than a million weblogs. But most of them get no visibility in search engines. Only a few “A-List” blogs get into the top search engine results for a given topic, while the majority of blogs just don’t get noticed. The reason is that the smaller blogs don’t have enough links pointing to them. But this posting could solve that. Let’s help the smaller blogs get more visibility!

This posting is GoMeme 4.0. It is part of an experiment to see if we can create a blog posting that helps 1000’s of blogs get higher rankings in Google. So far we have tried 3 earlier variations. Our first test, GoMeme 1.0, spread to nearly 740 blogs in 2.5 days. This new version 4.0 is shorter, simpler, and fits more easily into your blog.

Why are we doing this? We want to help thousands of blogs get more visibility in Google and other search engines. How does it work? Just follow the instructions below to re-post this meme in your blog and add your URL to the end of the Path List below. As the meme spreads onwards from your blog, so will your URL. Later, when your blog is indexed by search engines, they will see the links pointing to your blog from all the downstream blogs that got this via you, which will cause them to rank your blog higher in search results. Everyone in the Path List below benefits in a similar way as this meme spreads. Try it!

Instructions: Just copy this entire post and paste it into your blog. Then add your URL to the end of the path list below, and pass it on! (Make sure you add your URLs as live links or HTML code to the Path List below.)

Path List

1. Minding the Planet
2. Luke Hutteman’s public virtual MemoryStream
3. Mohammad.Abdulfatah, Chronicles Of
4. Anand M, DotNet From India
5. (your URL goes here! But first, please copy this line and move it down to the next line for the next person).

(NOTE: Be sure you paste live links for the Path List or use HTML code.)

What will be the Longhorn Story now?

Well now that the news is out that WinFS will not be part of LH and also that Indigo and Avalon are going to also run on XP and Win 2K3, the question that comes to mind is, what will become of LH now.

Of the three pillars of LH, two will work with downlevel OS and one is not gonna ship, so why buy LH at all? And that is the exact question that Sriram asked me in the IM too.

Well my guess would be that some of the advanced Avalon features may not work on XP or maybe too slow to be really usable. This I would expect will be due to the way GDI works in XP and the new GDI planned for LH, which can take full advantage of the graphics adapter.

There was always talk of Indigo working on downlevel OSes and so that is not a suprise at all.

Robert, any views?? ;-)

Avalon and Indigo will run on XP

Somasegar has posted a blog entry which says that Avalon and Indigo will be avbl on the XP platform.

And looks like WinFS has been delayed...

Thanks to Sriram for the info.

vshost.exe Explained

I had earlier blogged about a new *.vshost.exe appearing when you build apps in the VS.NET 2005 Beta, but could find no information on what it is.

Now we have a post on what it is for, VSHOST -- the Hosting Process

CNUG Meeting this weekend

It has been a very hectic week both in office and out of it. There are a few activities happening this week end in Chennai .NET User Group for which I have been spending quite a lot of time this week.

We are starting off a Infrastructure Chapter for IT Professionals called CNUG IT. The inaugaral meet of this chapter will happen on the 28th at the Chennai MS Office.

We are also having a session at the CNUG Developer Group, in the afternoon at the Tidel Auditorium.

Shu Fen Cally Ko, Regional Director, APACGC, Unmanaged Communities, Microsoft, will be our special guest for the evening. She will be talking to us on Microsoft's communities intiatives and how that will help CNUG grow.

E&C - VB.NET and C#

Edit and Continue appearing in VB but not in C# created a huge dicussion on why the C# team did not go for it etc. And also on why E&C was good or bad. But E&C for C# is Rank 1 request in the Product Feedback Center.

I have been attending quite a few conferences and seminars in the past few weeks and also have been talking to a few people, looking at reactions to E&C.

I personally think, E&C in C# will have an higher "wow" factor than in VB. For the simple reason, VB programmers have been used to it and missed it sorely when .NET came out. So now it is just a feature that we got back. While most C# programmers are from either Java or C/C++ backgroud. So this looks very cool for them.

I find that VB programmers just look at the demos for E&C and then just move on, while the C# programmers usually come and ask, whether it is avbl in C# and when it will make it. Some of them remarked it was a very good feature and they would love to have it in C#.

This post does not mean that I do not appreciate the VB teams efforts to get E&C in [I rarely find fault with the VB team..:-)], but rather the C# team should have done it and they could have got a lot more milage out of the feature..

ASP.NET 2.0 Menu control

I am playing around with the new ASP.NET 2.0 Menu control. A few problems I faced. Would like to know general feedback on these.

1. When used in the Horizontal aligment and autoformatted with one of the default styles, you get a very disturbing effect when you hover or select an item. This is basically because the hover style bolds and item, which in turn pushes the next item a little bit when this item expands. Is very disturbing when used.

2. When you have a 2nd level sub menu (File->Level1->Level2), then when you go to level 2, the level 1 item does not take the selected Format. This is unlike the default menu behaviour.

Mobile Features move out of ASP.NET 2.0

Looks like quite a few of the mobile features have moved out of ASP.NET and the older mobile controls will not be deprecated as talked about before.

Here is a post from a team member on what is going on in thier minds.

Thanks to Deepak for the link.

Off to TechEd India

TechEd India 2004 starts today at Chennai. TechEd in India has always been unique in that we have it happening in multiple cities inside India. This time it is happening in four major cities. Chennai is the second one.

I am handling two sessions this time.

SQL Server 2005 T-SQL: Being more efficient

Plunging in ADO.NET 2.0 (Level: 300)

MSN Web Messenger

MSN's new Web Messenger is now out. A web based interface to your MSN Messanger. Cool!!

I have been using this behind a firewall today and works fine.. No problems... And they have the same interface, popups and sounds. :-)

http://webmessenger.msn.com

Thanks to Fellow MVP Anando for the link..

What is it to be an MVP?

Tameem AKA Teucer, an MVP from India, is on Channel 9 talking about what is so great about being an MVP...

Tammem is now back in Chennai and I am gonna have dinner with him tonight.

Generics Article

My article on Generics has been published in DotnetD2D.

Introduction to Generics