.NET From India

The new MSDN pricing

The new MSDN pricing that has been announced with Team system, seems to have touched a raw nerve for quite a few people.

This Techtarget article tries to give you all the information in a clear manner.

Personally, I think MS should have a consultant or independent developer MSDN edition with all team system packages, but with a clear note on not for production use or something like that..

Electronic Passports

Looks like US is looking at embedding chips into passports from mid this year. This chip will contain basic passport data and also biometric data.

More Information

Microsoft Antispyware

Spent some of my free time over the weekend, cleaning up my home machine. Machine is mucked up with installs and uninstalls of all kind of beta stuff. Did not have enough time to do a format and reinstall. So just installed XP SP2 and then got a copy of the new Anti-spyware.

I had previously used Ad-aware, but after the problems some friends had with the newer version, thought I would give this a try.

Quite a nice interface and also has an active scanning service, which can catch spyware like activities in the system.

Whidbey Ship Dates and Prices

Microsoft announced the pricing for VS 2005 and MSDN subscriptions yesterday.

The important point that was hidden in that release was that VS 2005 is going to be available in the second half of the year.

in preparation for Visual Studio 2005, expected in the second half of calendar year 2005

So you are basically looking at an after August timeframe for the RTM..

Creating Media Center TV Guide

Reading about the recent announcments on India becoming a supported country for Windows XP Media Center, I remembered a fellow MVP sometime ago asking about the non-availabilty of support for Indian channels for the electronic programming guide.

I guessed that they used somekind of a web service to go and retrieve the programming guide information from some kind of server that they are hosting. Having an hour or so free, I was just reading thru the Media Center developer documentation and it does not seem to talk anything about program listing. Only about writing Add in and HTML apps that run on the media centre.

A google search did not turn up with enough clear cut information on this.

Anyone has more information on how this really works.. Just curiosity, but still I thought with all that hype of web services, this would have been well documented..:-)

Microsoft Software for Vaccine Research

Well not exactly, but looks like some of the algos that MS Research uses for anti-spam also work well for vaccine research.

An interveiw with Nebojsa Jojic of MSR in Beta News.

Winform Controls

I am looking at developing some winform applications and am out looking for controls to use for my UI. I am looking for free controls that also has code. As I am using .NET 2.0 for my developments, I need to source so that I can modify when I come across a problem.

I am currently looking at winxpcc and code project. Are they any other good ones available??

Genesis of Languages

Two interesting blog posts on origins and evolution of human languages, looking at two different theories on the same. One that argues that only humans have the ability to create language, while the other that argues that the basic needs to create an language is available in most animals.

Building Gab: Part One
Building Gab: Part Two