.NET From India

Photos from Beijing Trip

The photos from my trip to TechEd, Beijing is available at Beijing Trip

Anniversary Celebrations of CNUG

My user group Chennai .NET User Group became 2 years old this July. We are conducting a full day technical event to celebrate this occasion on the 25th of September 2004. More information on this event is available at the CNUG homepage.

If you are in Chennai, this is an wonderful occasion to get to know some of the new and upcoming .NET technologies. We also plan to have a stall to showcase some of the new Microsoft Devices, like Tablet PC and Pocket PCs.

Hope to meet you there.

Back in Chennai

Just landed up in Chennai today morning after a long delayed flight(Supposed to reach here at 10pm, but reached here at 4:30am). Just got up after catching up with some sleep.

Had a wonderful time in Beijing with some of the other MVPs(Colt, Sanguan, Brandon) who had come in from different Asian countries.

Photos and more information will be up in the site, later in the day.

Off to Beijing

I am travelling tonight to Beijing to be a part of TechEd China and represent the India MVPs there. Will be back home on the 20th. I would be spending quite a lot of time at the MVP Stall there. If you going to come to TechEd Beijing, do look me up.

Stork has visited us

A new member joined our family on Saturday. We were blessed with a wonderful and cute looking baby girl early Saturday morning. :-D

Book Review: .NET Security and Cryptography

Security is the new buzz word in the industry nowadays. This book .NET Security and Crytography is co-authored by an Indian MVP Arun Ganesh, who was good enough to give me a copy of this book, when he was here last time.

Well, I was quite suprised that he choose to write on a subject that, though it includes the buzz word of "security", is still considered niche by most application developers. And the authors make no pretence of this being a normal run of the mill book. They are very specific it is a practical guide to writing secure code and cryptography.

Well the book is quite exhaustive and covers all you can think of in the subject area. They cover everything that you will need to know if you are working with encryption of any kind in .NET.

My recommendations - If you are new to .NET or learning .NET, dont even go near this book. It may frighten you. But if you are comfortable with .NET and are working on apps where you need to securely store data, then this book may be the best bit of advice you can get.

Book Review - Best Kept Secrets of .NET

I have been reading an advanced review copy of the book called "Best Kept Secrets of .NET" by Deborah Kurata. Quite an interesting attempt, as this in not one of the normal run of the mill technology books. This book attempts to give you all the small tips that would make you more productive and also increase the quality of your output.

The book consists of 5 major chapters, that cover, VS.NET, Winforms, ADO.NET, Coding Tricks and Error handling and recovery.

The book does not attempt to be a guide to help you learn .NET, though Deborah has tried to do introduction to technical stuff wherever possible. So I would say, if you dont know .NET, this book may not be a good starting point. If you already work with .NET, then this book may help you a lot.

I was suprised to learn that there are 12 different ways to do a search in VS.NET. Seems to be way too much to do a simple search.. :-)

Can this book be one that you can read end to end? Well I doubt it. Though it is not very difficult to read, it can be too much for a continous read. Most probably this will not be the most productive use of the book as you would have forgotten half of what you read by the end. So I would really recommend that you have this near you when you code and slowly start using tip by tip so that you start taking advantage of a lot of those shortcuts and best practices this book is filled with.

This book is Published by apress

Why Projects Fail?

Well that was always a million dollar question. Almost like analyzing why a particular film failed. An new report on this, seems to point to a few common reasons for failure:

Changing Priorities
Management commitment and
the no. 1 issue Project Management

But the piece that really made me happy was:

Perhaps ironic is that among companies typically adopting technologies early, there is a lower project failure rate than among companies that take a more cautious approach by waiting until after the majority has adopted such technologies.

I have always been a proponent of early adoption of technology. Yep, it can be hard and also pose technical difficulties, but will result in better utilization of new technologies to reap business benefits.

More information can be found in the SD Times article, Study Reveals Why Most Projects Fail

Deepak on Indic Languages

My co-author(he has two posts till now...:-)) on this blog Deepak has done a Channel 9 session on Indic Language support. He was always a languages freak and reads and writes Tamil faster that I can. And of course type Tamil on the keyboards, which I can't..

Upgrade to SQL Server 7.0 from Yukon!!

I was installing Great Plains 8.0 and since I already had Yukon and the readme said GP needed SQL 2000, I though it should go thru without a problem.

The install got thru fine and then the database setup utility and it did find the ODBC I had setup and then I get this wonderfully funny error message:

I really don't plan on Upgrading to SQL Server 7.0 from Yukon. Thank you.