.NET From India

Mac Malware

A new Apple Mac Malware, dubbeb Opener is doing the rounds. It does not yet have viral capabilities, but this does show that as as OS becomes more widespread, hackers will start turning thier attention to it.

ZDNET Story - Mac users face rare threat

Weblogs and Books

An interesting post on the impact of weblogs on publishing.

I would say I think it makes a lot of sense that you get so much information for free that you may not think of every buying a book. But in weblogs the information is spread out and you need to collate and create a logical structure out of that information. The editor and the author of the book do it for you. So if you want free information, you still need to work for it.

Microsoft Partner Pack for Win XP

Some cool .NET based apps available for free as the Microsoft Partner Pack for Windows XP.

Microsoft released Microsoft Partner Pack for Windows XP, a collection of applications created by Microsoft partners on Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework on Oct 20. The Partner Pack includes applications from Google, PayPal (an eBay company), Sandlot Games, 3M, Homestead, Computer Associates, Onfolio, Advantrics and Corbis. The applications are optimized for Windows XP and Windows Media Center 2005 and enhance the end user experience by allowing them to easily search the internet, request online payments, play games, share photos, or just stay organized.

The Microsoft Partner Pack for Windows XP provides another great example of the value Microsoft’s partners are deriving from building applications on .NET. In addition to being able to integrate with and optimize their products for Windows XP, partners also cite faster downloads and a more productive development environment as some of the benefits of building their applications on Visuals Studio .NET and the .NET Framework.

MS Official Position on Mono

SearchVB got an answer to Microsoft's official position regarding Mono from Amanda Morgan, Group Product Manager, Microsoft Global Positioning.

No, Microsoft does not support the Mono product, nor has it licensed anything to Novell/Ximian. Mono is an attempt by Novell to reverse engineer parts of Microsoft's .NET Framework. It is not an extension of the .NET Framework and it should not be considered as such.

Frankly, Mono is just one example of the level of excitement within the developer community around .NET. At this point there are millions of developers building .NET connected applications, and more than 80 million distributions of the .NET Framework. Microsoft has also worked with partners to standardize parts of the .NET Framework in ISO.

-- Amanda Morgan, Group Product Manager, Microsoft Global Positioning

Book Review: Peer-to-Peer with VB.NET

A few months back I had a long talk with Sriram, on doing P2P for one of the .NET applications we were thinking about. We took a look at the MS P2P kit, but were disappointed as it was pure COM/C only, with no managed interface.

I got this book that talks about P2P with VB.NET. A nice and clear approach, the book starts introducing P2P and takes you through the different approaches you can take to create a P2P application. It also covers some of the most common P2P technologies available out there and also how you can do it from scratch with .NET.

I would have liked it better if the author had spent some more time with the Windows P2P kit.

If you are into P2P development and .NET, this book is of course a must read. It may even be a good read if you are working on networked applications, as there is a lot of information on networking and remoting with .NET in this book.

In Geek Heaven

This week is proving to be one in Geek Heaven for me..

What does a geek want more than anything? The latest and coolest devices of course ;-)

Well. I have just bought a Pocket PC Phone Edition. Not one of those top of the line XDA things, but still a good model from a taiwan company called AnexTek. This particular model is called SP230. Does not have Wi-fi/blutooth etc, but does have all the basic features and comes with a pouch and extra stylus (the most important part of your PDA if you plan to use handwriting recognition). A decent review of this model is available here. Maybe I will write a review too after a few weeks of usage.

The second geeky toy I got was this. A Fossil Wrist Net SPOT watch. Since India does not yet have the MSN direct service(Will it ever, I doubt it though), I can't take full advantage of this one. I am forced to use it as a normal watch with a cool, UI changing feature. ;-)

Atleast now I can say, I am almost fully .NET enabled. What with .NET running on my PDA/Phone and on my watch.

All I need now is .NET enabled clothing and pen..;-)

Off to SAF

I am off to attend the Software Architects Forum at Bangalore tomm. Will be there for two days.

If you are coming over, do look out for me at the community booth there.

Google's Passport??

I just happend to visit the Google Accounts page and it struck me that this looks like googles version of passport. Yes this currently only works with other google offerings and there is nothing about google allowing third parties to use Google Accounts. But google currently offers Mail, Goups, Social Networking, Localized content, most of the things that a normal web citizen would want.

In the future, I am sure google will also offer a Google Accounts SDK similar to the Passport SDK and that is when we are going to see some fight for market share happening..:-)

Mridulaa

Last Friday we named my daughter Mridulaa.

Here are a few snaps

ASP.NET Security Hole

If you are running an ASP.NET web site and use Forms authentication, you better read this MS security bulletin on a hole in the way ASP.NET handles cannonical URL representations.

There is KB article on how to protect your site against such attacks called Programmatically check for canonicalization issues with ASP.NET

CNUG 2nd Anniversary Celebrations

As I had mentioned before on this blog we celebrated the second anniversary of the Chennai .NET User Group with a full day event on the 23rd of September 2004.

This was the first time that we had a lot of local speakers volunteering to do sessions and in the end we were able to do all the 6 sessions from local MVPs or other local speakers. This I think is a very significant achievement as it shows the growth of the local community and the self sustaining capabilities of the user group. One year back, most of the user group sessions were done exclusively by me, with a session or two per year by other speaker or MS people. Now I did not do even 1 technical session for the event (I only did the Key Note as the President of CNUG), but we were able to do a full day event with local speakers. This makes me tremendously happy.

The other major change this year was the high participation of the student community. Maybe due to the the big hype by Sriram or due to increasing realization among students about learning .NET, we had almost 50% of the crowd being students.

Well the whole event went of wonderfully well, with over 320 people turning up. (We were expecting 250 odd and in the end had to rush to order extra lunches)

And it was when preparing the Keynote that I found that CNUG (including all the chapters) reached around 5000 members. That is one huge number for a group that started with 20 members..:-)

A lot of good feedback during the event and a lot of technical discussions. We also had a device stall where we were demoing a new Acer Tabler PC so that people can see and play around with it. And for people who are into serious playing/gaming (sounds oxymoronic) we had a XBOX. The XBOX proved to be the most sought after stall, with a lot of crowding around to get a chance to play around. Both of this we got via a MS India program called the MVP Hardware Pool.

We had a book stall that was selling .NET books at a huge 20% discount. And ofcourse to end the day we had a very interesting quiz by Sriram.

And all of this would not have been possible without the support of all of our sponsors : Verizon Data Services, HCL, Polaris and Pentasoft. A Big Thanks to all of them.

Here are a few snaps: